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Wonderful, Wonderful Times

Elfriede Jelinek · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini · 416 pages

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an

BleakDomestic ViolenceToxic Family DynamicsDomestic Abuse
❤️

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 DynamicsDomestic ViolenceDomestic AbuseBleak
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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

Domestic AbuseDomestic ViolenceToxic Family DynamicsLiterary Fiction
❤️

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

Domestic AbuseDomestic ViolenceToxic Family DynamicsBleak
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Me And Emma

Elizabeth Flock · 301 pages

In many ways, Carrie Parker is like any other eight-year-old—playing make-believe, dreading school, dreaming of faraway places.But even her imagination can't shut out the realities of her impoverished North Carolina home or help her protect her younger sister, Emma.As the big sister, Carrie is determined to do anything to keep Emma safe from a life of neglect and abuse at the hands of their drunke

Domestic ViolenceDomestic AbuseToxic Family DynamicsBleak
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Joe

Larry Brown · 348 pages

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Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë · 318 pages

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Mudbound

Hillary Jordan · 335 pages

"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld

BleakDomestic AbuseToxic Family DynamicsDark
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The Death of Sweet Mister

Daniel Woodrell · 208 pages

"Shuggie Akins is a lonely fat boy of thirteen. His mother, Glenda, teases him with her sexual provocations. His father, Red, is a brutal man with a short fuse who mocks and despises his son. Into this mix comes Jimmy Vin Pearce with his shiny green T-bird and his smart city clothes. It isn't long before he and Glenda begin a torrid affair. What follows is violent, shocking, and totally unpredicta

Domestic ViolenceToxic Family DynamicsBleakDark
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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.

Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic ViolenceBleakDark
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A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays

Tennessee Williams · 316 pages

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Once Were Warriors

Alan Duff · 220 pages

A frank portrayal of Maori life in New Zealand. A powerful story in which everyone is a victim and through the strength and vision of one woman transcends brutality and leads the way to a new alternative.

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Burned

Ellen Hopkins · 544 pages

NY Times bestseller, is the story of a young woman, struggling to find her place in the world in the face of abuse by the person she most adores: her father. She questions her family, her faith, and her ability to love and be loved. Suspended from school, she is sent to rural Nevada to live with an aunt whom she barely knows. There she finds love, acceptance and new knowledge about the things t

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The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka · 95 pages

Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella written by Franz Kafka which was first published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (German: ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. "monstrous vermin") and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition.

Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic AbuseBleakDark
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One of the Boys

Daniel Magariel · 172 pages

"A riveting and emotionally harrowing debut about two young brothers and their physically and psychologically abusive father--One of the Boys is 160 perfect, stunning pages by a major new talent. The three of them--a twelve-year-old boy, his older brother, their father--have won the war: the father's term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave their Kansas home and drive through the

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Losing Hope

Colleen Hoover · 380 pages

"In Hopeless, Sky left no secret unearthed, no feeling unshared and no memory forgotten, but Holder's past remains a mystery. He is haunted by the little girl he let walk away from him and he has spent his entire life searching for her. He had hoped that he would finally gain closure and be able to rid himself of his guilt the moment they were reconnected. But he could not have anticipated that th

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The Kitchen God's Wife

Amy Tan · 532 pages

Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past--including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s,

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A Lie of the Mind

Sam Shepard · 142 pages

Also contains The War in Heaven, Angel's Monologue by Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard.

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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

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Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

Flora Rheta Schreiber · 460 pages

This is the amazing story of a woman who lived with 16 different personalities. Here is the unbelievable yet true story of Sybil Dorsett, a survivor of terrible childhood abuse who as an adult was a victim of sudden and mysterious blackouts. What happened during those blackouts has made Sybil's experience one of the most famous psychological cases in the world.

Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic AbuseBleakDark
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Back Roads

Tawni O'Dell · 352 pages

"Harley Altmyer, the heartbreaking and lovable hero of Tawni O'Dell's debut novel, should be in college drinking Rolling Rock and chasing girls. He should be freed from his stifling coal town, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he's marooned in the Pennsylvania backwoods caring for his three beloved but unruly younger sisters. He has, at best, a shaky hold on the vicissitudes o

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The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things

J.T. LeRoy · 251 pages

Circulated copies of LeRoy's handwritten notebook pages brought early attention to the then unpublished author. In print for the first time, these loosely connected autobiographical stories describe the harrowing experiences of a young boy's life on the run. From the heartbreaking "Meteor," where he struggles for the attention of his wandering mother, to the paranoia of "Coal"-'Whenever things fee

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Full Dark, No Stars

Stephen King · 419 pages

Full Dark, No Stars is a collection of four intense short stories with retribution as the central theme. Released in the fall of 2010 in hardcover and audiobook formats, Full Dark, No Stars is a powerful read featuring some of Stephen's most graphic and merciless content to date. ([source][1]) Contains: - [1922][2] - [A Good Marriage][3] - [Big Driver][4] - Fair Execution [1]:

Domestic AbuseDomestic ViolenceBleakDark
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Affliction

Russell Banks · 355 pages

Wade Whitehouse is an unlikely protagonist of a tragedy. Wade looms in one's mind as a bluecollar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition, his tale told by his articulate, equally-scarred younger brother. "Part thriller, part psychological study, part indictment of the American way of violence." Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger

Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic ViolenceBleakLiterary Fiction

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