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🧲 Books like this

Mysterious Skin

Scott Heim · 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 Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · 736 pages

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentChildhood TraumaLGBTQ+ Protagonist
❤️

Try

Dennis Cooper · 199 pages

**From Goodreads:** Ziggy is the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers, from whose obsessive attentions he flees into the weird world of his uncle, an amoral man who makes violent pornography. As scenes of fierce sex and sadistic oppression take place around him, Ziggy falls improbably in love -- with his best friend, a junkie. Dennis Cooper, author of the gay horror classic Fris

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaSexual Assault ContentLGBTQ+ Protagonist
❤️

The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison · 181 pages

Each night Pecola prayed for blue eyes. In her eleven years, no one had ever noticed Pecola. But with blue eyes, she thought, everything would be different. She would be so pretty that her parents would stop fighting. Her father would stop drinking. Her brother would stop running away. If only she could be beautiful. If only people would look at her. When someone finally did, it was her fath

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaSexual Assault ContentDark
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The Kid

Sapphire · 378 pages

Fifteen years after the publication of Push, Sapphire gives voice to Abdul Jones, the son of her unforgettable heroine, Precious. The Kid is an electrifying story of body and spirit, rooted in the hungers of flesh and of the soul, bringing us deep into the interior life of Abdul. We meet him at age nine, on the day of his mother's funeral. Left alone to navigate in a world where love and hate some

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaSexual Assault ContentDark
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Nicholas Dane

Melvin Burgess · 408 pages

When Nick's mother dies unexpectedly, the 14 year old is sent straight into a boy's home. There he learns that violence and intimidation keep order. The deputy head Mr Creal grooms Nick with sweets and solace until he can take no more and escapes into a life of crime with a modern Fagin and cheeful boy named Rasta.

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaSexual Assault ContentDark
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Never Mind

Edward St. Aubyn · 154 pages

Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner Never Mind, the first installment in Edward St. Aubyn's wonderful, wry, and profound Patrick Melrose Cycle, follows five-year-old Patrick through a single day, as the Melrose family awaits the arrival of guests. Bright and imaginative, young Patrick struggles daily to contend with the searing cruel

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaSexual Assault ContentLiterary Fiction
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My Absolute Darling

Gabriel Tallent · 464 pages

A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul.Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one i

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaSexual Assault ContentLiterary Fiction
🙂

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.

Childhood TraumaChild AbuseSexual Assault ContentDark
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Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Mary Gaitskill · 304 pages

Reissued to coincide with the paperback publication of "Because They Wanted To" this captivating novel shimmers with dark intensity and wicked wit. In a stunning synthesis of eroticism, rage, pathos, and humor, Gaitskill's "fine storyteller's pace and brilliant metaphors" ("The New York Times Book Review") create a haunting and unforgettable journey into the dark side of contemporary life and the

Childhood TraumaChild AbuseSexual Assault ContentLiterary Fiction
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Bared to You

Sylvia Day · 352 pages

Gideon Cross came into my life like lightning in the darkness... He was beautiful and brilliant, jagged and white-hot. I was drawn to him as I'd never been to anything or anyone in my life. I craved his touch like a drug, even knowing it would weaken me. I was flawed and damaged, and he opened those cracks in me so easily... Gideon knew. He had demons of his own. And we would become the mirr

Childhood TraumaChild AbuseSexual Assault ContentMultiple POV
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Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

Contains: - Смех в темноте - [Lolita](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL627084W)

Child AbuseSexual Assault ContentChildhood TraumaDark
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The House with the Blind Glass Windows

Herbjorg Wassmo · 227 pages

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaSexual Assault ContentLiterary Fiction
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Room

Emma Donoghue · 322 pages

To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world.... Told in the inventive, funny, and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience—and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At n

Childhood TraumaChild AbuseSexual Assault ContentDark
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Mystic River

Dennis Lehane · 487 pages

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaSexual Assault ContentLiterary Fiction
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Happy Baby

Stephen Elliott · 208 pages

Childhood TraumaChild AbuseSexual Assault ContentDark
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Edinburgh

Alexander Chee · 224 pages

"Fee, a Korean-American child growing up in Maine, inhabits a fantasy world of spirits and heroes. Gifted with a beautiful soprano voice, Fee sings in a professional boys' choir. When the choir director acts out his pedophilic urges on the boys in the choir, Fee is unable to save himself, his first love, Peter, or his friends - complicit within a silence both inexplicable and growing as each boy s

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaSexual Assault ContentLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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Tricks

Ellen Hopkins · 627 pages

Five teenagers find themselves stuck in a horrifying wold of sexual slavery

Childhood TraumaChild AbuseSexual Assault ContentDark
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Sexual Assault ContentChildhood TraumaChild AbuseLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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Dream Boy

Jim Grimsley · 195 pages

First love is never easy. But when the new boy in a small town is being secretly abused by his father, first love might be the only thing that can save him. With his mother busy in the kitchen and his drunken father reading scripture in the living room, Nathan can watch his schoolmate Roy from his upstairs bedroom window and dream about a life free from his father's night-time prowling. Nathan

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaLGBTQ+ ProtagonistDark
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What Lies Between Us

Nayomi Munaweera · 315 pages

"In the idyllic hill country of Sri Lanka, a young girl grows up with her loving family; but even in the midst of this paradise, terror lurks in the shadows. When tragedy strikes, she and her mother must seek safety by immigrating to America. There the girl reinvents herself as an American teenager to survive, with the help of her cousin; but even as she assimilates and thrives, the secrets and sc

Childhood TraumaChild AbuseSexual Assault ContentLiterary Fiction
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Fifth Born

Zelda Lockhart · 210 pages

**Fifth Born** When Odessa Blackburn is three years old, she sees her grandmother for the last time, and so begins her story as the fifth born of eight children in a troubled family. Molested by her father, Odessa is also the sole witness to a murder he commits. Her mother guards both secrets and joins her husband in ostracizing their fifth born from the rest of her siblings. As Odessa grows,

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaSexual Assault ContentLiterary Fiction
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Sleeping on Jupiter

Anuradha Roy · 256 pages

Seeking the truth about what happened to her and her family, Nomi finds herself chasing shadows in a town that has reinvented itself. But when she returns to the ashram that haunts her dreams, she discovers some scars cannot be washed away. -- Publisher.

Childhood TraumaChild AbuseSexual Assault ContentLiterary Fiction
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Mummy Knew

Lisa James · 311 pages

Four-year-old Lisa's world turned upside down when her step-father moved in. Most of the time he was just violent but then he started making her do things to him she knew were wrong. Soon he was visiting her at night. Lisa begged her mother for help but she just shrugged, telling Lisa he would have his way. It was the greatest betrayal of all.At first Lisa's step-father would just make her stroke

Child AbuseChildhood TraumaSexual Assault ContentDark
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Strange Sally Diamond

Liz Nugent · 384 pages

Childhood TraumaChild AbuseSexual Assault ContentDark
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