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🧲 Books like this

Year of Wonders

Geraldine Brooks · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

The Plague

Albert Camus · 278 pages

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

PlagueFaith CrisisDeath of a ChildGrief and Mourning
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The Tiger's Wife

Tea Obreht · 360 pages

Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the ti

HealerTragicGrief and MourningReligious Identity
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The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

Faith CrisisDeath of a ChildSurvival StoryTragic
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Out of the Dust

Karen Hesse · 235 pages

"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ." A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands. To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. Wh

Grief and MourningTragicSurvival StoryFaith Crisis
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The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

Faith CrisisTragicReligious IdentityFirst Person Narrator
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Corrag

Susan Fletcher · 366 pages

The Massacre of Glencoe happened at 5am on 13th February 1692 when 37 members of the Macdonald clan were killed by government troops who had enjoyed the clan's hospitality for the previous ten days. Many more died from exposure in the mountains.

HealerTragicFaith CrisisCharacter-Driven
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The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck · 553 pages

Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression is as vivid now as ever. The story focuses on a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, farmers who work another man’s land for a share of the crops. Driven from their home by drought and poverty they take to the road in a battered old truck and make their way to California to look for work. When they arrive they find hundreds of others like them being f

Death of a ChildFaith CrisisCharacter-DrivenTragic
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The Red Tent

Anita Diamant · 321 pages

Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood--the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers--Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--the f

HealerTragicGrief and MourningFirst Person Narrator
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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pages

Small TownFaith CrisisTragicAtmospheric
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Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy · 440 pages

Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv

Death of a ChildFaith CrisisTragicReligious Identity
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Middlemarch

George Eliot · 795 pages

Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.

Widowed ProtagonistSmall TownTragicFaith Crisis
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Revival

Stephen King · 480 pages

In a small New England town over half a century ago, a boy is playing with his new toy soldiers in the dirt when he looks up to see a striking man, the new minister, Jamie learns later he is a man who with his beautiful wife will transform the church and the town. The men and boys are a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls, with the Reverend Jacobs -- including Jamie's sisters and mot

Faith CrisisGrief and MourningDeath of a ChildReligious Identity
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Loving Frank

Nancy Horan · 380 pages

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction

Death of a ChildTragicGrief and MourningCharacter-Driven
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Midwives

Chris Bohjalian · 312 pages

Sibyl is a respected midwife, accused of murder after she performs a caesarian on a mother whom she believes to have died of a stroke during a long and difficult labour. A trial ensues to decide whether Sibyl has committed murder. The story is told from Sibyl's daughter's viewpoint.

HealerWidowed ProtagonistSmall TownDeath of a Child
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World Without End

Ken Follett · 1,056 pages

En 1327, quatre enfants sont les témoins d'une poursuite meurtrière dans les bois : un chevalier tue deux soldats au service de la reine, avant d'enfouir dans le sol une lettre mystérieuse, dont le secret pourrait bien mettre en danger la couronne d'Angleterre. Depuis ce jour, le destin des enfants se trouve lié à jamais.

PlagueHealerFaith CrisisHistorical 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

HealerTragicGrief and MourningDeath of a Child
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The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · 342 pages

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c

Death of a ChildSurvival StoryTragicEmotional
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Ordinary Grace

William Kent Krueger · 320 pages

Looking back at a tragic event that occurred during his thirteenth year, Frank Drum explores how a complicated web of secrets, adultery, and betrayal shattered his Methodist family and their small 1961 Minnesota community.

Death of a ChildGrief and MourningFaith CrisisReligious Identity
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Pope Joan

Donna Woolfolk Cross · 448 pages

HealerPlagueTragicReligious Identity
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The Birth of Venus

Sarah Dunant · 430 pages

PlagueFaith CrisisTragicReligious Identity
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Those Who Save Us

Jenna Blum · 496 pages

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald. Driven by

TragicSurvival StoryGrief and MourningCharacter-Driven
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The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri · 406 pages

Brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue vastly different lives--Udayan in rebellion-torn Calcutta, Subhash in a quiet corner of America--until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds.

Grief and MourningTragicWidowed ProtagonistAtmospheric
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Menewood

Nicola Griffith · 720 pages

Grief and MourningAtmosphericReligious IdentityCharacter-Driven
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The Dead Don't Dance

Charles Martin · 317 pages

Faith CrisisDeath of a ChildGrief and MourningCharacter-Driven

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