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The Second Mrs. Hockaday

Susan Rivers · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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March

Geraldine Brooks · 304 pages

Epistolary FormatAmerican SouthSlavery DepictedEmotional
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The Husband's Secret

Liane Moriarty · 432 pages

**At the heart of The Husband’s Secret is a letter that’s not meant to be read** **My darling Cecilia, if you’re reading this, then I’ve died...** Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret—something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as

InfidelityEpistolary FormatNonlinear NarrativeEmotional
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Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys · 189 pages

Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R

Slavery DepictedNonlinear NarrativeInfidelityFamily Secrets
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The Kitchen House

Kathleen Grissom · 368 pages

"In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds

American SouthSlavery DepictedFamily SecretsHistorical Fiction
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America's First Daughter

Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie · 590 pages

As Thomas Jefferson's oldest daughter, Patsy becomes his helpmate, protector, and constant companion in the wake of her mother's death. She travels with him when he becomes American minister to France. It is in Paris that Patsy learns about her fathers liaison with Sally Hemings, a slave girl her own age. Meanwhile, Patsy has fallen in love with her father's protégé William Short, a staunch abolit

Slavery DepictedFamily SecretsEpistolary FormatHistorical Fiction
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The Wedding Gift

Marlen Suyapa Bodden · 336 pages

When wealthy plantation owner Cornelius Allen marries off his daughter Clarissa, he presents her with a wedding gift: a young slave woman called Sarah. It just so happens that Sarah is Allen's daughter as well, the product of a long-term sexual relationship with his slave Emmeline. When Clarissa's husband rejects her newborn son as illegitimate and sends Clarissa and Sarah back to the Allens, thei

American SouthFamily SecretsSlavery DepictedEmotional
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The Known World

Edward P. Jones · 400 pages

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for *Paradise Lost* and an unusual mentor -- William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to

Nonlinear NarrativeAmerican SouthSlavery DepictedEmotional
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Scarlett

Alexandra Ripley · 832 pages

Slavery DepictedAmerican SouthFamily SecretsHistorical Fiction
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The Seven Daughters of Dupree

Nikesha Elise Williams · 336 pages

Slavery DepictedAmerican SouthFamily SecretsEmotional
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The House Girl

Tara Conklin · 372 pages

A novel of love, family, and justice follows Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in a Manhattan law firm, as she searches for the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.

American SouthFamily SecretsSlavery DepictedHistorical Fiction
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The Prince of Tides

Pat Conroy · 668 pages

PAT CONROY has created a huge, brash thunderstorm of a novel, stinging with honesty and resounding with drama. Spanning forty years, this is the story of turbulent Tom Wingo, his gifted and troubled twin sister Savannah, and their struggle to triumph over the dark and tragic legacy of the extraordinary family into which they were born. Filled with the vanishing beauty of the South Carolina low

Nonlinear NarrativeAmerican SouthInfidelityFamily Secrets
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Letters from a Slave Girl: The Story of Harriet Jacobs

Mary E. Lyons · 175 pages

A fictionalized version of the life of Harriet Jacobs, told in the form of letters that she might have written during her slavery in North Carolina and as she prepared for escape to the North in 1842.

Epistolary FormatAmerican SouthSlavery DepictedHistorical Fiction
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Cane River

Lalita Tademy · 418 pages

The "New York Times" bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick--the unique and deeply moving epic of four generations of African-American women based on one family's ancestral past.

Slavery DepictedAmerican SouthEmotionalFamily Secrets
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Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J

Epistolary FormatNonlinear NarrativeFamily SecretsEmotional
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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.

American SouthNonlinear NarrativeFamily SecretsEmotional
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Kindred

Octavia E. Butler · 287 pages

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduou

American SouthSlavery DepictedEmotionalHistorical Fiction
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The Fiery Cross

Diana Gabaldon · 985 pages

New York Times bestselling author Diana Gabaldon mesmerized readers with her award-winning Outlander novels, four dazzling tales featuring eighteenth-century Scotsman James Fraser and his twentieth-century time-traveling wife, Claire Randall. Now, in this eagerly awaited fifth volume, Diana Gabaldon continues their extraordinary saga, a masterpiece of pure storytelling that is her most astonishing

Slavery DepictedAmerican SouthFamily SecretsEmotional
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Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison · 338 pages

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s ori

Nonlinear NarrativeAmerican SouthFamily SecretsEmotional
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Absalom, Absalom!

William Faulkner · 378 pages

The story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."

American SouthNonlinear NarrativeSlavery DepictedFamily Secrets
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The One & Only

Emily Giffin · 582 pages

Centering her life on the successful Walker family, into which she plans to marry, Shea struggles to end her affair with a less-than-stellar boyfriend only to have her entire existence placed in question by the death of the family's mother.

InfidelityAmerican SouthFamily SecretsEmotional
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The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende · 433 pages

"The unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world's most gifted and imaginative storytellers. The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a

Family SecretsEpistolary FormatNonlinear NarrativeEmotional
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Property

Valerie Martin · 208 pages

Valerie Martin’s **Property** delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and

American SouthInfidelitySlavery DepictedHistorical Fiction
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The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich · 344 pages

Before Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich begins a summer job at a law firm in Louisiana, working to help defend men accused of murder, she thinks her position is clear. The child of two lawyers, she is staunchly anti-death penalty. But the moment convicted murderer Ricky Langley's face flashes on the screen as she reviews old tapes--the moment she hears him speak of his crimes--she is overcome with the

Nonlinear NarrativeAmerican SouthFamily SecretsEmotional
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Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi · 320 pages

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the

Slavery DepictedAmerican SouthFamily SecretsHistorical Fiction

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