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When She Was Good

Philip Roth · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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Vinegar Hill

A. Manette Ansay · 240 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleBleakCharacter-Driven
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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

BleakMarriage in TroubleToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-Driven
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Cold Spring Harbor

Richard Yates · 192 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleBleakCharacter-Driven
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Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng · 300 pages

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleBleakLiterary Fiction
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Three Strong Women

Marie NDiaye · 277 pages

Forty-year-old Norah leaves Paris, her family and her career as a lawyer to visit her father in Dakar. It is an uncomfortable reunion - she is asked to use her skills as a lawyer to get her brother out of prison - and ultimately the trip endangers her marriage and her relationship with her own daughter, and drives her to the very edge of madness. Fanta, on the other hand, leaves Dakar to follow he

Toxic Family DynamicsBleakMarriage in TroubleCharacter-Driven
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The Bee Sting

Paul Murray · 645 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenSmall Town
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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

Toxic Family DynamicsBleakCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy · 76 pages

Ivan Ilych, a peaceful public official in the Russian provinces, has his life permanently changed by a serious illness which no doctor can accurately diagnose.

Marriage in TroubleBleakCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Book of Ruth

Jane Hamilton · 328 pages

"I learned slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it - to figure out whether, in fact, she's to blame for the mess." Pegged the loser in a small-town family that doesn't have much going for it in the first place. Ruth grows up in the shadow of her

Toxic Family DynamicsBleakCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Rabbit, Run

John Updike · 307 pages

*Rabbit, Run* is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in

BleakMarriage in TroubleLiterary FictionSmall Town
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Joe

Larry Brown · 348 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsBleakCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Burnt Sugar

Avni Doshi · 240 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleBleakCharacter-Driven
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Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller · 139 pages

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupporta

Toxic Family DynamicsBleakMarriage in TroubleCharacter-Driven
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Affliction

Russell Banks · 355 pages

Wade Whitehouse is an unlikely protagonist of a tragedy. Wade looms in one's mind as a bluecollar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition, his tale told by his articulate, equally-scarred younger brother. "Part thriller, part psychological study, part indictment of the American way of violence." Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger

Toxic Family DynamicsBleakCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Edith's Diary

Patricia Highsmith · 317 pages

BleakMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenSmall Town
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Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe · 192 pages

Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widel

Toxic Family DynamicsBleakCharacter-DrivenSmall Town
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We Were the Mulvaneys

Joyce Carol Oates · 464 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsBleakCharacter-DrivenSmall Town
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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Marriage in TroubleToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Man Who Loved Children

Christina Stead · 527 pages

After ten years of marriage, Sam and Henny Pollit find themselves with too many children, insufficient money, and an abundant loathing for each other.

Marriage in TroubleToxic Family DynamicsBleakCharacter-Driven
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The Taste of Salt

Martha Southgate · 281 pages

"Josie Henderson is most at home in and around water, and as a senior-level black female scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she is practically alone in her field. But in building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family roots back in Cleveland. When Tick, her brother and childhood ally against their alcoholic father, arrives o

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Snow Angels

Stewart O'Nan · 320 pages

Western Pennsylvania, 1974. On a snowy winter afternoon, the winter of his parents' breakup, Arthur Parkinson's high school band practice is interrupted by the sound of gunshots. Too close for deer hunting, it is the sound of the murder of Annie Marchand. Once Arthur's babysitter, and the object of his childhood admiration, Annie is a young woman for whom life didn't turn out quite right, who coul

BleakMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Falling Leaves [Yaprak Dokumu]

Resat Nuri Guntekin · 152 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsBleakCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams · 158 pages

Members of a neurotic Southern family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleBleakCharacter-Driven
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As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner · 250 pages

Written in stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators, the story follows a journey wherein the family of a dead woman try to transport her body to her birthplace in Mississippi in accordance with her wishes. When a ford across a river is flooded they are forced to take a roundabout route and it becomes a desperate race to complete their mission before the body begins to decompose.

Toxic Family DynamicsBleakCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction

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