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The Big Rock Candy Mountain

Wallace Stegner · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Third Life Of Grange Copeland

Alice Walker · 302 pages

"Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third and final cha

Working-Class ProtagonistFather and SonToxic Family DynamicsLiterary Fiction
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Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski · 288 pages

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye of

Father and SonWorking-Class ProtagonistToxic Family DynamicsLiterary Fiction
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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.

Father and SonWorking-Class ProtagonistToxic Family DynamicsLiterary Fiction
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Barn Burning

William Faulkner · 47 pages

Father and SonWorking-Class ProtagonistToxic Family DynamicsLiterary Fiction
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistToxic Family DynamicsBittersweetFather and Son
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East of Eden

John Steinbeck · 602 pages

Steinbeck considered East of Eden to be his masterpiece. In his journal, Journal of a Novel (often read as a companion to the novel) he notes that “this is the book I have always wanted and have worked and prayed to be able to write.” Set primarily in the Salinas Valley in the early twentieth century, the novel traces three generations of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – as they grapp

Father and SonToxic Family DynamicsSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
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Bread Givers: A Novel

Anzia Yezierska · 297 pages

A young Jewish girl from New York's Lower East Side rebels against the tyranny and chauvinism of her immigrant father, determined to assert her freedom and independence.

Toxic Family DynamicsWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionFather and Son
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David Copperfield I

Charles Dickens

Toxic Family DynamicsWorking-Class ProtagonistSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
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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

Father and SonWorking-Class ProtagonistToxic Family DynamicsLiterary Fiction
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Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese · 670 pages

Cutting for Stone (2009) is a novel written by Ethiopian-born Indian-American medical doctor and author Abraham Verghese. It is a saga of twin brothers, orphaned by their mother's death at their births and forsaken by their father. The book includes both a deep description of medical procedures and an exploration of the human side of medical practices. When first published, the novel was on The

Father and SonBittersweetSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
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The Thorn Birds

Colleen McCullough · 573 pages

The Thorn Birds is a 1977 best-selling novel by Australian author Colleen McCullough. Set primarily on Drogheda – a fictional sheep station in the Australian Outback named after Drogheda, Ireland – the story focuses on the Cleary family and spans the years 1915 to 1969.

Sprawling EpicBittersweetToxic Family DynamicsClassics
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Where All Light Tends to Go

David Joy · 289 pages

"Set in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves"--

Father and SonWorking-Class ProtagonistToxic Family DynamicsLiterary Fiction
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A House for Mr Biswas

V.S. Naipaul · 547 pages

Naipaul’s breakthrough novel is a marvellous comic tale of a Trinidadian of Indian descent striving to improve his lot. Continually making big plans for himself he constantly finds himself thwarted by his wife’s family and by his own ineptitude and over-reaching ambition.

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
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The Time of the Doves

Merce Rodoreda · 204 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetLiterary FictionClassics
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Bee Sting

Paul Murray · 645 pages

Father and SonToxic Family DynamicsBittersweetSprawling Epic
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The Dollmaker

Harriette Simpson Arnow · 624 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetLiterary FictionClassics
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Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 560 pages

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
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The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Mitch Albom · 196 pages

The Five People You Meet In Heaven is a 2003 novel by Mitch Albom. It follows the life and death of a ride mechanic named Eddie who is killed in an amusement park accident and sent to heaven, where he encounters five people who had a significant impact on him while he was alive. It was published by Hyperion and remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 95 weeks.

Father and SonWorking-Class ProtagonistBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Falling Leaves [Yaprak Dokumu]

Resat Nuri Guntekin · 152 pages

Father and SonToxic Family DynamicsLiterary FictionClassics
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The Great Santini

Pat Conroy · 475 pages

Father and SonToxic Family DynamicsBittersweetDomestic Abuse
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Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller · 139 pages

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupporta

Toxic Family DynamicsFather and SonWorking-Class ProtagonistClassics
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The Mirror & the Light

Hilary Mantel · 759 pages

Sprawling EpicFather and SonWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetLiterary FictionClassics
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The Other Side of the Bridge

Mary Lawson · 296 pages

Father and SonBittersweetToxic Family DynamicsLiterary Fiction

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