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Adult Onset

Ann-Marie MacDonald · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout · 200 pages

"Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her and a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all--the one between mother and daughter"--

Toxic Family DynamicsChildhood TraumaMother and DaughterCharacter-Driven
❤️

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Rebecca Wells · 383 pages

The antics of a group of women in a small town where they were expected to raise babies, not Cain. The story is recounted by a mother to a daughter, the daughter thinking she is so much better because she got out of that town and is now a theater producer. The moral: mothers too were once rebels.

Mother and DaughterToxic Family DynamicsChildhood TraumaCharacter-Driven
❤️

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Childhood TraumaToxic Family DynamicsWriter ProtagonistMother and Daughter
❤️

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Karen Joy Fowler · 336 pages

Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister. . . . Until Fern's expulsion . . . she was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. . . . I loved her as a sister."

Childhood TraumaToxic Family DynamicsMother and DaughterCharacter-Driven
❤️

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender · 345 pages

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t

Mother and DaughterToxic Family DynamicsChildhood TraumaCharacter-Driven
❤️

To the Moon and Back

Eliana Ramage · 448 pages

Mother and DaughterLGBTQ+ ProtagonistToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-Driven
❤️

White Oleander

Janet Fitch · 390 pages

Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes-each its own universe, with its own laws, its own dangers, its own hard lessons to be learned-becomes a redeeming and surprising journey of self-discovery.

Mother and DaughterChildhood TraumaCharacter-DrivenToxic Family Dynamics
❤️

Commonwealth

Ann Patchett · 322 pages

"One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six

Toxic Family DynamicsWriter ProtagonistChildhood TraumaCharacter-Driven
❤️

Sharp Objects

Gillian Flynn · 297 pages

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker's troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille's first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her legSince she left town eight years a

Mother and DaughterWriter ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenChildhood Trauma
❤️

Burnt Sugar

Avni Doshi · 240 pages

Childhood TraumaMother and DaughterCharacter-DrivenToxic Family Dynamics
❤️

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson · 240 pages

Memories of the author about her difficult childhood as the adopted daughter of an English mother with strong religious convictions, and her subsequent search for her biological mother.

Mother and DaughterChildhood TraumaLGBTQ+ ProtagonistToxic Family Dynamics
❤️

Bastard Out of Carolina

Dorothy Allison · 309 pages

Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.

Mother and DaughterCharacter-DrivenToxic Family DynamicsChildhood Trauma
❤️

Nothing Holds Back the Night

Delphine de Vigan · 346 pages

Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile's occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic and in control of the Paris me

Mother and DaughterToxic Family DynamicsWriter ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
🙂

Lit

Mary Karr

Mother and DaughterChildhood TraumaToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-Driven
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Bee Sting

Paul Murray · 645 pages

Mother and DaughterToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Five Quarters of the Orange

Joanne Harris · 307 pages

When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy during the German occupation years ago. But the past and present are inextricably entwined, particularly in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise has inherited from her mother. And soon Framboise will reali

Childhood TraumaToxic Family DynamicsMother and DaughterCharacter-Driven
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The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

Toxic Family DynamicsMother and DaughterLGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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The Book of Ruth

Jane Hamilton · 328 pages

"I learned slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it - to figure out whether, in fact, she's to blame for the mess." Pegged the loser in a small-town family that doesn't have much going for it in the first place. Ruth grows up in the shadow of her

Mother and DaughterToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls · 296 pages

A story about the early life of Jeannette Walls. The memoir is an exposing work about her early life and growing up on the run and often homeless. It presents a different perspective of life from all over the United States and the struggle a girl had to find normalcy as she grew into an adult.

Mother and DaughterWriter ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenChildhood Trauma
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenWriter ProtagonistMother and Daughter
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The Blackwater Lightship

Colm Toibin · 288 pages

Mother and DaughterToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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We Are Water

Wally Lamb · 564 pages

Anna Oh, a middle-age wife, mother and artist, divorces her husband after 27 years of marriage to marry Vivica, the Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success.

Childhood TraumaLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionMother and Daughter
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Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

Beth Hoffman · 313 pages

When Camille Sugarbaker Honeycutt, the pretty but crazy 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen dies, her twelve-year-old daughter CeeCee has barely a hope in the world. To her rescue arrives Great Aunt Tootie in the most magnificent car CeeCee has ever seen, and she is whisked away to the city of Savannah. Among the sweet scent of magnolias and the loving warmth of Tootie and her colourful collection of friends

Mother and DaughterChildhood TraumaCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Winter Garden

Kristin Hannah · 448 pages

Can a woman ever really know herself if she doesn’t know her mother? From the author of the smash-hit bestseller Firefly Lane and True Colors comes a powerful, heartbreaking novel that illuminates the intricate mother-daughter bond and explores the enduring links between the present and the past. Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her chil

Childhood TraumaMother and DaughterToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-Driven

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