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Save Yourself

Kelly Braffet · 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
❤️

Dark Places

Gillian Flynn · 349 pages

Libby Day tinha apenas sete anos quando testemunhou o brutal assassinato da mãe e das duas irmãs na fazenda da família. O acusado do crime foi seu irmão mais velho, que acabou condenado à prisão perpétua. Desde aquele dia, Libby passou a viver sem rumo. Uma vida paralisada no tempo, sem amigos, família ou trabalho. Mas, vinte e quatro anos depois, quando é procurada por um grupo de pessoas conv

BrothersBleakWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance Abuse
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Joe

Larry Brown · 348 pages

BleakWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseDark
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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

BrothersBleakSubstance AbuseDark
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Let the Right One In

John Ajvide Lindqvist · 480 pages

Twelve-year-old Oskar is obsessed by the murder that's taken place in his neighborhood. Then he meets the new girl from next door. She's a bit weird, though. And she only comes out at night--Publisher's description.

BleakSubstance AbuseBullyingDark
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The Casual Vacancy

J.K. Rowling · 512 pages

When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is no

BullyingBleakSubstance AbuseDark
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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

BullyingWorking-Class ProtagonistBleakSubstance Abuse
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We Were the Mulvaneys

Joyce Carol Oates · 464 pages

BrothersBleakBullyingMultiple POV
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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"--

BleakWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseDark
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Hunger

Michael Grant

It's been three months since everyone under the age of fifteen became trapped in the bubble known as the FAYZ.Three months since all the adults disappeared.Gone. Food ran out weeks ago. Everyone is starving, but no one wants to figure out a solution. And each day, more and more kids are evolving, developing supernatural abilities that set them apart from the kids without powers.Tension rises and

BullyingBleakBrothersDark
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Closer

Dennis Cooper · 144 pages

Physically beautiful and strangely passive, George Miles becomes the object of his friends' passions, and, one after another, they ransack him for love or anything else they can trust in the mindlessness of middle America.

BleakSubstance AbuseDarkMultiple POV
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Angels

Denis Johnson · 217 pages

Angels puts Jamie Mays--a runaway wife toting along two kids--and Bill Houston--ex-Navy man, ex-husband, ex-con--on a Greyhound bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakSubstance AbuseDark
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On the Savage Side

Tiffany McDaniel · 464 pages

BleakWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseDark
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Clockers

Richard Price · 624 pages

BrothersWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseMultiple POV
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Trainspotting

Irvine Welsh · 352 pages

Scottish writer Irvine Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting, is a collection of short-stories revolving around a group of friends, their drug use, and struggles in the city of Edinburgh.

BleakWorking-Class ProtagonistDarkSubstance Abuse
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Thirteen Reasons Why

Jay Asher · 288 pages

Clay Jenkins returns home from school to find a mysterious box with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers 13 cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker—his classmate and crush—who committed suicide two weeks earlier.On tape, Hannah explains that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he'll find out how he made the list.Through

BleakSubstance AbuseBullyingDark
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Delicious Foods

James Hannaham · 371 pages

"Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace. Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promi

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakSubstance AbuseDark
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakDarkViolent
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Almanac of the Dead

Leslie Marmon Silko · 768 pages

BleakSubstance AbuseDarkMultiple POV
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The Rules of Attraction

Bret Easton Ellis · 283 pages

First Sentence: “And it’s a story that might bore you, but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, and Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin

BleakDarkSubstance AbuseLiterary Fiction
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Rumble Fish

Marcus Romer, S.E. Hinton · 123 pages

A junior high school boy idolizes his older brother, the coolest, toughest guy in the neighborhood, and wants to be just like him.

Working-Class ProtagonistBrothersBleakSubstance Abuse
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Roadside Picnic

Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky · 160 pages

[Comment by Hari Kunru in The Guardian][1]: > Soviet-era Russian science fiction deserves a wider audience in English. The Strugatsky brothers collaborated on numerous novels and stories, the best known of which is this, partly because it was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, in 1977. The novel takes place 10 years after a mysterious alien visitation, which seems to have no rational explan

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakSubstance AbuseDark
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakSubstance AbuseDark
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Brutal Youth

Anthony Breznican · 422 pages

"Three freshmen must join forces to survive at a troubled, working-class Catholic high school with a student body full of bullies and zealots, and a faculty that's even worse in Anthony Breznican's Brutal Youth. With a plunging reputation and enrollment rate, Saint Michael's has become a crumbling dumping ground for expelled delinquents and a haven for the stridently religious when incoming freshm

Working-Class ProtagonistBullyingDarkMultiple POV
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The Invention of Sound

Chuck Palahniuk · 240 pages

BleakSubstance AbuseDarkMultiple POV

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