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Benediction

Kent Haruf · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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Gilead

Marilynne Robinson · 256 pages

**WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION** In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civi

Terminal IllnessSlow-PacedBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Tinkers

Paul Harding · 192 pages

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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Before I Die

Jenny Downham · 332 pages

A terminally ill teenaged girl makes and carries out a list of things to do before she dies.

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Slow-PacedSmall TownBittersweetSparse Prose
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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rachel Joyce · 355 pages

Harold Fry has recently retired and now, he doesn't do very much. Even mowing the lawn, like his wife Maureen tells him to do, seems too much work for him. When, one day, he recieves a lettre in a pink envelope, this lazyness changes. In it, his collegue from long time ago, Queenie Hennessy, tells him she is going to die soon from a cancer in a hospice at the other end of England. Harold, at first

Terminal IllnessEstranged FamilyBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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The Last Song

Nicholas Sparks · 390 pages

#1 bestselling author Nicholas Sparks's new novel is at once a compelling family drama and a heartrending tale of young love.Seventeen year old Veronica "Ronnie" Miller's life was turned upside-down when her parents divorced and her father moved from New York City to Wilmington, North Carolina. Three years later, she remains angry and alientated from her parents, especially her father...until her

Terminal IllnessEstranged FamilyBittersweetSmall Town
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Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri · 352 pages

These eight stories by beloved and bestselling author Jhumpa Lahiri take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Here they enter the worlds of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. Rich with the signature gifts that have established Jhumpa Lahiri as one of our most essential writers,

Estranged FamilySparse ProseSlow-PacedBittersweet
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The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

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At Risk

Alice Hoffman · 272 pages

In a novel the Village Voice calls "memorable" and "striking," Alice Hoffman vividly portrays a family shattered by tragedy when eleven-year-old Amanda is diagnosed with AIDS...

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessCharacter-DrivenSmall Town
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And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini · 446 pages

Presents a story inspired by human love, how people take care of one another, and how choices resonate through subsequent generations. Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pari, as beaut

Estranged FamilyBittersweetSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Terminal IllnessBittersweetSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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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

Sparse ProseSlow-PacedBittersweetSmall Town
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Mother of Pearl

Melinda Haynes · 466 pages

Slow-PacedBittersweetCharacter-DrivenSmall Town
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Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng · 300 pages

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl

Estranged FamilySlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood · 158 pages

Classic fiction. The best prose writer in English' Gore Vidal Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life

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Out Stealing Horses

Per Petterson · 264 pages

An early morning adventure out stealing horses leads to the tragic death of one boy and a resulting lifetime of guilt and isolation for his friend, in this moving tale about the painful loss of innocence and of traditional ways of life that are gone forever.

Sparse ProseSlow-PacedEstranged FamilyCharacter-Driven
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The Other Side of the Bridge

Mary Lawson · 296 pages

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The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · 332 pages

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve

Estranged FamilyBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson · 424 pages

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th

Slow-PacedBittersweetSmall TownCharacter-Driven
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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

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The Summer Guest

Justin Cronin · 369 pages

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for his radiant novel in stories, Mary and O'Neil, Justin Cronin has already been hailed as a writer of astonishing gifts. Now Cronin's new novel, The Summer Guest, fulfills that promise--and more. With a rare combination of emotional insight, narrative power, and lyrical grace, Cronin transforms the simple story of a dying man's last wish into a rich tapestry of

Terminal IllnessBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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The Death of Ivan Ilych

Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1828-1910 Gra, Leo Leo Tolstoy · 62 pages

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, considered one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s. "Usually classed among the best examples of the novella", The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of a high-court judge, and his sufferings and death from a terminal illness in 19th-century Russia.

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Moloka'i

Alan Brennert · 389 pages

Seven-year-old Rachel is forcibly removed from her family's 1890s Honolulu home when she contracts leprosy and is placed in a settlement, where she loses a series of new friends before new medical discoveries enable her to reenter the world.

Terminal IllnessEstranged FamilyBittersweetCharacter-Driven

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