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🧲 Books like this

The Stranger's Child

Alan Hollinghurst · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Nix

Nathan Hill · 640 pages

"An epic novel about a son, the mother who left him as a child, and how his search to uncover the secrets of her life leads him to reclaim his own"--

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeFamily SecretsCharacter-Driven
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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...

Dual TimelineFamily SecretsWriter ProtagonistDense Prose
❤️

The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Nonlinear NarrativeWriter ProtagonistDense ProseLGBTQ+ Protagonist
❤️

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

Writer ProtagonistFamily SecretsNonlinear NarrativeDual Timeline
❤️

Last Night in Twisted River

John Irving

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County--to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto--pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger,

Nonlinear NarrativeWriter ProtagonistFamily SecretsCharacter-Driven
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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

Writer ProtagonistFamily SecretsNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-Driven
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The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Taylor Jenkins Reid · 400 pages

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of w

Dual TimelineWriter ProtagonistFamily SecretsCharacter-Driven
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Possession

A.S. Byatt · 555 pages

Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, *Possession* is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist

Dense ProseWriter ProtagonistDual TimelineCharacter-Driven
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The God of the Woods

Liz Moore · 496 pages

When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disa

Dual TimelineNonlinear NarrativeFamily SecretsCharacter-Driven
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The Fraud

Zadie Smith · 520 pages

Truth and justice tested by a 19th-century author and his cousin, and a fraudulent pretender and his manumitted witness.

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseCharacter-Driven
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The Dream of Scipio

Iain Pears · 398 pages

In national bestseller *The Dream of Scipio*, acclaimed author Iain Pears intertwines three intellectual mysteries, three love stories, and three of the darkest moments in human history. United by a classical text called "The Dream of Scipio," three men struggle to find refuge for their hearts and minds from the madness that surrounds them in the final days of the Roman Empire, in the grim years o

Nonlinear NarrativeDual TimelineDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Historian

Elizabeth Kostova · 690 pages

To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history....Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of-a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconcei

Dual TimelineNonlinear NarrativeFamily SecretsDense Prose
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The Weight of Ink

Rachel Kadish · 576 pages

Dense ProseWriter ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDual Timeline
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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 NarrativeFamily SecretsCharacter-DrivenDense Prose
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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

Dual TimelineNonlinear NarrativeFamily SecretsCharacter-Driven
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz · 352 pages

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us

Writer ProtagonistFamily SecretsNonlinear NarrativeDense Prose
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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.

Family SecretsDual TimelineNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-Driven
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The Lake House

Kate Morton · 495 pages

Living on her family's gorgeous lakeside estate in Cornwall, England, Alice Edevane is a bright, clever, inquisitive, innocent, and precociously talented fourteen-year-old who loves to write stories. One midsummer's eve, after a beautiful party drawing hundreds of guests to the estate has ended, the Edevanes discover that their youngest son, Theo, has vanished without a trace. What follows is a tr

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeFamily SecretsDual Timeline
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The Tiger's Wife

Tea Obreht · 360 pages

Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the ti

Dual TimelineFamily SecretsNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-Driven
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Great House

Nicole Krauss · 289 pages

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenFamily Secrets
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Soldiers of Salamis

Javier Cercas · 224 pages

"In the final moments of the Spanish Civil War, as the remnants of the Republican army retreat north into exile, fifty prominent Nationalist prisoners are taken out to be shot. Among them is Rafael Sanchez Mazas - writer, fascist and founder of the Spanish Falange." "As the machine guns begin to fire, Sanchez Mazas takes advantage of the commotion and escapes into the forest. When his hiding plac

Nonlinear NarrativeWriter ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDense 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

Dual TimelineNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Family Album

Penelope Lively · 260 pages

Nonlinear NarrativeFamily SecretsCharacter-DrivenWriter Protagonist
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Fault Lines

Nancy Huston · 307 pages

Family SecretsNonlinear NarrativeDual TimelineCharacter-Driven

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