What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorOlive 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
The Vacationers
Emma Straub · 372 pages
Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.
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."
The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood · 638 pages
More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...
Washington Square
Henry James · 204 pages
With a new afterword by Michael CunninghamWhat Catherine Sloper lacks in brains and beauty, she makes up for by being "very good." The handsome Morris Townsend would do anything to win her hand-even if it means pretending that he loves the homely ingenue, and cares nothing for her opulent wealth. Throughout time, the women of the world always had limited rights when it came to anything. You c
That Old Cape Magic
Richard Russo · 272 pages
Following Bridge of Sighs--a national best seller hailed by The Boston Globe as "an astounding achievement" and "a masterpiece"--Richard Russo gives us the story of a marriage, and of all the other ties that bind, from parents and in-laws to children and the promises of youth.Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father's ashes in the trunk, but his mother is very much alive a
Purple Hibiscus
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 307 pages
“One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation.” —Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded fro
The Art of Racing in the Rain
Garth Stein · 321 pages
Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television extensively, and by listening very closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver.Through Denny, Enzo has gained tremendous insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing,
Road Ends
Mary Lawson · 311 pages
Edward Cartwright, struggling to escape the legacy of a violent past; Emily, his wife, cloistered in her room with yet another new baby, increasingly unaware of events outside the bedroom door; Tom, their eldest son, twenty-five years old but home again, unable to come to terms with the death of a friend; and capable, formidable Megan, the sole daughter in a household of eight sons, who for years
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
Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff · 400 pages
Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env
Boy, Snow, Bird
Helen Oyeyemi · 308 pages
This novel is a reimagining of the fairy tale Snow White recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity set in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty, the opposite of the life she has left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother
The Taste of Salt
Martha Southgate · 281 pages
"Josie Henderson is most at home in and around water, and as a senior-level black female scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she is practically alone in her field. But in building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family roots back in Cleveland. When Tick, her brother and childhood ally against their alcoholic father, arrives o
Family Album
Penelope Lively · 260 pages
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.
The Casual Vacancy
J.K. Rowling · 512 pages
When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is no
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
To the Moon and Back
Eliana Ramage · 448 pages
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
One True Thing
Anna Quindlen · 320 pages
A New York psychiatrist recounts her mother's death for which she was arrested. At the time, Dr. Ellen Gulden was accused of killing her mother with an overdose of morphine, a charge in part based on a high school essay in which she advocated euthanasia. By the author of Object Lessons.
Ordinary People
Judith Guest; Foreword by Amy Bloom
Girl in Pieces
Kathleen Glasgow · 416 pages
Charlotte Davis is in pieces. At 17 she's already lost more than most people do in a lifetime. But she's learned how to forget. The broken glass washes away the sorrow until there is nothing but calm. You don't have to think about your father and the river. Your best friend, who is gone forever. Or your mother, who has nothing left to give you. Every new scar hardens Charlie's heart just a lit
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.