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Incendiary

Chris Cleave · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Wave

Sonali Deraniyagala · 227 pages

On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles throu

Death of a ChildDeath of a SpouseTearjerkerEmotional
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A Virtuous Woman

Kaye Gibbons · 176 pages

Death of a SpouseWorking-Class ProtagonistTearjerkerEmotional
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The Reading List

Sara Nisha Adams · 368 pages

Death of a SpouseTearjerkerLondonWorking-Class Protagonist
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You Will Not Have My Hate

Antoine Leiris · 129 pages

On November 13, 2015, Antoine Leiris’s wife, Hélène Muyal-Leiris, was killed by terrorists while attending a rock concert at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, in the deadliest attack on France since World War II. Three days later, Leiris wrote an open letter addressed directly to his wife’s killers, which he posted on Facebook. He refused to be cowed or to let his seventeen-month-old son’s life be de

Death of a SpouseTerrorismTearjerkerEmotional
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Sam's Letters to Jennifer

James Patterson · 264 pages

Have you ever gotten a letter that changed your life completely? Sam's Letters to Jennifer is a novel about that kind of drama. In it, a woman is summoned back to the town where she grew up. And in the house where she spent her most magical years she finds a series of letters addressed to her. Each of those letters is a piece of a story that will upend completely the world she thought she knew - a

Death of a SpouseEpistolary FormatTearjerkerEmotional
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The Rescue

Nicholas Sparks · 446 pages

One of America's bestselling authors returns with a tale about the greatest commitment of all: loving someone forever. When a near-fatal car crash brings Taylor McAden together with Denise Holden, a new resident of Edenton, North Carolina, he must look into his past to see if it's not too late to take a chance on the future.

Death of a SpouseTearjerkerEmotionalDeath of a Child
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Change of Heart

Jodi Picoult · 464 pages

A spellbinding tale of a mother's tragic loss and a criminal's last chance at finding salvation from the bestselling author of Nineteen Minutes.One day June Nealon was happily anticipating a lifetime of laughter and adventure with her family, and the next, she was staring into a future that was as empty as her heart. Now her life is a waiting game. Waiting for time to heal her wounds, waiting for

Death of a ChildDeath of a SpouseTearjerkerEmotional
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Leaving the World

Douglas Kennedy · 548 pages

The compelling new novel from the bestselling author of The Woman in the Fifth and The Pursuit of Happiness Aged thirteen, Jane makes a vow to herself and to her feuding parents - she will never marry, have children and lead the resentful life they chose. Years later, now a Harvard professor and living with Theo, a filmmaker, Jane falls unexpectedly pregnant. She begins to warm to the idea of mot

Death of a ChildTearjerkerEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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Hamnet

Maggie O'Farrell · 365 pages

England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on. A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and

Death of a ChildTearjerkerEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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Shark Heart

Emily Habeck · 416 pages

Death of a SpouseTearjerkerEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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The Last Letter

Rebecca Yarros · 432 pages

Epistolary FormatDeath of a ChildTearjerkerEmotional
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The Sword of Kaigen

M.L. Wang · 651 pages

Death of a ChildTearjerkerEmotionalLiterary 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.

Death of a ChildTearjerkerWorking-Class ProtagonistEmotional
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The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

Rachel Joyce · 394 pages

"When Queenie Hennessy is told she has days to live she sends a letter on pink paper in which she bids goodbye to Harold Fry. It is a letter that inspires an unlikely walk, a cast of well-wishers and the examination of many lives unlived. But there is a second letter, a longer, quieter more complicated letter which she will never send. It is this letter, the one we did not know about in The Unlike

Epistolary FormatTearjerkerEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel · 653 pages

In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power England is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him.

Death of a SpouseWorking-Class ProtagonistDeath of a ChildLondon
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Broken Country

Clare Leslie Hall · 307 pages

*“The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”* Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel W

Death of a ChildTearjerkerEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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A Journal for Jordan

Dana Canedy · 288 pages

In 2005, First Sergeant Charles Monroe King began to write what would become a two-hundred-page journal for his son in case he did not make it home from the war in Iraq. Charles King, forty-eight, was killed on October 14, 2006, when an improvised explosive device detonated under his Humvee on an isolated road near Baghdad. His son, Jordan, was seven months old.A Journal for Jordan is a mother's l

Death of a SpouseTearjerkerEpistolary FormatEmotional
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The Letters

Luanne Rice, Joseph Monninger · 199 pages

Is there any mystery greater than those we love the most? In this remarkable collaboration, New York Times bestselling author Luanne Rice and Joseph Monninger combine their unique talents to create a powerfully moving novel of an estranged husband and wife through a series of searching, intimate letters. By way of a correspondence so achingly real you'll forget it's fiction, they trace the history

Epistolary FormatDeath of a ChildEmotionalDeath of a Spouse
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Sarah's Key

Tatiana de Rosnay · 342 pages

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking th

Death of a ChildTearjerkerEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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In Every Moment We Are Still Alive

Tom Malmquist · 288 pages

Tom's heavily pregnant girlfriend Karin is rushed to hospital with severe flu. While the doctors are able to save the baby, they are helpless in the face of what transpires to be acute Leukemia, and in a moment as fleeting as it is cruel Tom gains a daughter but loses his soul-mate. In Every Moment is the story of a year that changes everything, as Tom must reconcile the fury of bereavement with t

Death of a SpouseTearjerkerEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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Let's Roll!: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage

Lisa Beamer, Ken Abraham · 346 pages

Lisa Beamer was thrust into the national spotlight after her husband, Todd, led a counterattack against terrorists on United Flight 93. He -- and all the other passenger heroes -- lost their lives in a Pennsylvania field. But that plane was the only one of the four hijacked planes on 9-11 that didn't hit its target- most likely the white House or the Capitol. Todd's last known words, "Let's rol

TerrorismDeath of a SpouseEmotionalFemale Lead
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The Attack

Yasmina Khadra · 264 pages

Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Arab-Israeli citizen, is a surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. Dedicated to his work, respected and admired by his colleagues and community, he represents integration at its most successful. He has learned to live with the violence and chaos that plague his city, and on the night of a deadly bombing in a local restaurant, he works tirelessly to help the shocked and shattered pa

TerrorismDeath of a SpouseEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy · 457 pages

An intimate portrait of a woman, one of literature's most admirable and tragic heroines...Tess Durbeyfield knows what it is to work hard and expect little. But her life is about to veer from the path trod by her mother and grandmother. When her ne'er-do-well father learns that his family is the last of a long noble line, the d'Urbervilles, he sends Tess on a journey to meet her supposed kin—a jour

TearjerkerWorking-Class ProtagonistEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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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 ProtagonistDeath of a SpouseEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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