What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko
Scott Stambach · 336 pages
"The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is comic and staggeringly tragic, often both in a single sentence ... A grittier, Eastern European, more grown-up The Fault in Our Stars."--Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child. Seventeen-year-old Ivan Isaenko is a life-long resident of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus. Born deformed, yet mentally keen with a frighteningly sharp wit, strong
The Fault in Our Stars
John Green · 318 pages
Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.
Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham · 582 pages
Of Human Bondage is a moving exploration of loneliness, obsessive love, and a young man's search for meaning and direction in life. Written in the third person, it tells the story of Philip Carey, a self-conscious orphan with a club-foot who learns medicine. Not only is this a significant work in the Bildungsroman tradition, but its largely autobiographical basis gives it a special interest in vie
Moloka'i
Alan Brennert · 389 pages
Seven-year-old Rachel is forcibly removed from her family's 1890s Honolulu home when she contracts leprosy and is placed in a settlement, where she loses a series of new friends before new medical discoveries enable her to reenter the world.
Before I Die
Jenny Downham · 332 pages
A terminally ill teenaged girl makes and carries out a list of things to do before she dies.
The Pearl Diver
Jeff Talarigo · 248 pages
A nineteen-year-old Japanese pearl diver encounters prejudice and isolation when she is forced to live the remainder of her life at a leprosarium on the island of Nagashima even though medication has put her disease in remission.
The Second Life of Mirielle West
Amanda Skenandore · 384 pages
Miss Jane
Brad Watson · 284 pages
"Astonishing prose brings to life a forgotten woman and a lost world in a strange and bittersweet Southern pastoral. Since his award-winning debut collection of stories, Last Days of the Dog- Men, Brad Watson has been expanding the literary traditions of the South, in work as melancholy, witty, strange, and lovely as any in America. Inspired by the true story of his own great-aunt, he explores the
The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Kim Edwards · 408 pages
Kim Edwards's stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives fo
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers · 334 pages
Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior
Peace Like a River
Leif Enger · 313 pages
"Raised on tales of cowboys and pirates, eleven-year-old Reuben Land has little doubt that miracles happen all around us, and that it's up to us to "make of it what we will." Reuben was born with no air in his lungs, and it was only when his father, Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that his lungs filled. Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma from then on, making him a boy
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jean-Dominique Bauby · 141 pages
The author, former editor of French Elle magazine, describes the rare stroke to the brain stem that left his mind intact in a nearly totally paralyzed body.
The Birds
Tarjei Vesaas · 224 pages
All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr · 544 pages
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are t
The Blind Contessa's New Machine
Carey Wallace
Left Neglected
Lisa Genova · 416 pages
Night Watch
Jayne Anne Phillips · 276 pages
Painter of Silence
Georgina Harding · 312 pages
The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell
Robert Dugoni · 448 pages
Seeing Red
Lina Meruane · 157 pages
"Seeing Red describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke which leaves her blind. It charts her journey through hospitals and an increased dependency on those closest to her to cope. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, science, and human relationships."--Publish
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
James McBride · 614 pages
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared amb
Everything, Everything
Nicola Yoon · 320 pages
The story of a teenage girl who's literally allergic to the outside world. When a new family moves in next door, she begins a complicated romance that challenges everything she's ever known. The narrative unfolds via vignettes, diary entries, texts, charts, lists, illustrations, and more.
Almost Life
Kiran Millwood Hargrave · 384 pages
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith · 443 pages
The beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchant