AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

Ironweed

William Kennedy · 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
❤️

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt · 817 pages

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra

Survivor's GuiltAddictionSubstance AbuseBittersweet
❤️

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.

AddictionDeath of a ChildBleakSubstance Abuse
❤️

Human Acts

Han Kang · 221 pages

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend who meets his own fateful end to an editor struggling against censorship; to a pri

Survivor's GuiltDeath of a ChildBleakLyrical Prose
❤️

Beloved

Toni Morrison · 288 pages

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in

Survivor's GuiltDeath of a ChildBleakLiterary Fiction
❤️

The River Is Waiting

Wally Lamb · 451 pages

Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that's before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness

Survivor's GuiltDeath of a ChildAddictionSubstance Abuse
❤️

On the Savage Side

Tiffany McDaniel · 464 pages

AddictionSubstance AbuseBleakWorking-Class Protagonist
❤️

Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

Raymond Carver · 411 pages

By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story, a writer who had not only found his own voice but imprinted it in the imaginations of thousands of readers. Where I’m Calling From, his last collection, encompasses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier Carve

AddictionBleakSubstance AbuseWorking-Class Protagonist
❤️

Blame

Michelle Huneven · 291 pages

Patsy MacLemoore, a history professor in her late twenties with a brand-new Ph.D. from Berkeley and a wild streak, wakes up in jail--yet again--after another epic alcoholic blackout. However, this time two people are dead, and Patsy had been driving with a revoked license. She will spend the rest of her life in prison, getting sober, finding a new community and husband, and trying to atone for thi

Survivor's GuiltAddictionDeath of a ChildSubstance Abuse
❤️

Enon

Paul Harding · 256 pages

A grieving Charlie Crosby, grandson of Tinkers protagonist George Washington Crosby, attempts to come to terms with the death of his daughter Kate and the subsequent dissolution of his marriage.

Death of a ChildBleakAddictionSubstance Abuse
❤️

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"--

BleakSubstance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistAddiction
❤️

Gather

Kenneth M. Cadow · 325 pages

Publisher Annotation: A resourceful teenager in rural Vermont struggles to hold on to the family home while his mom recovers from addiction in this striking debut novel.

AddictionWorking-Class ProtagonistBittersweetSubstance Abuse
❤️

The Man With the Golden Arm

Nelson Algren · 364 pages

"A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm has been called "Algren's most satisfying work." It describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into water-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems.". "In this first critical edition of an Algren work, Algren's novel is joi

AddictionBleakSubstance AbuseWorking-Class Protagonist
❤️

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

AddictionSubstance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistBleak
❤️

The Shawl

Cynthia Ozick · 69 pages

Death of a ChildSurvivor's GuiltBleakLyrical Prose
❤️

The Dollmaker

Harriette Simpson Arnow · 624 pages

Death of a ChildBleakWorking-Class ProtagonistBittersweet
❤️

I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

Steve Earle · 256 pages

It's 1963 and in a rented room, in the red-light district of San Antonio, Doc Ebersole lives with the ghost of Hank Williams. Doc, rumoured to have given Hank the final morphine dose that killed him, supports his own morphine habit. Having lost his licence to practise medicine, he performs abortions and patches up the odd knife or gunshot wound. Then, when he meets Graciela, a young Mexican immigr

AddictionSubstance AbuseBittersweetLiterary Fiction
❤️

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

Death of a ChildWorking-Class ProtagonistBleakSubstance Abuse
❤️

The Temporary Gentleman

Sebastian Barry · 310 pages

"In this highly anticipated new novel, Irishman Jack McNulty is a "temporary gentleman"--An Irishman whose commission in the British army in World War II was never permanent. Sitting in his lodgings in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, he's writing the story of his life with desperate urgency. He cannot take one step further without examining all the extraordinary events that he has seen. A lifetime of war a

AddictionSubstance AbuseLyrical ProseBittersweet
❤️

Fat City

Leonard Gardner · 208 pages

Stockton, California, is the setting: the Lido Gym, the Hotel Coma, Main Street lunchrooms and dingy bars, days like long twilights in houses obscured by untrimmed shrubs and black walnut trees. When two men meet in the ring the retired boxer Billy Tully and the newcomer Ernie Munger their brief bout sets into motion their hidden fates, initiating young Munger into the company of men and luring Tu

BleakAddictionSubstance AbuseWorking-Class Protagonist
🙂

Tristessa

Jack Kerouac · 112 pages

Tristessa is a novella by Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac set in Mexico City. It is based on his relationship with a Mexican prostitute (the title character). The woman's real name was Esperanza ("hope" in Spanish); Kerouac changed her name to Tristessa ("tristeza" means sadness in Spanish and Portuguese).

AddictionSubstance AbuseBleakLyrical Prose
🙂

Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 349 pages

A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.

AddictionSubstance AbuseBittersweetLyrical Prose
🙂

Even the Dogs

Jon McGregor · 195 pages

They break down the door at the end of December and carry his body away. On a still and frozen day between Christmas and New Year, a man's body is found lying in his ruined flat. Found, and then taken away, examined, investigated and cremated.

AddictionBleakSubstance AbuseLyrical Prose
🙂

The Yellow Birds

Kevin Powers · 240 pages

In this haunting fictional account, an Iraq war veteran contemplates the lives, including his own, devasated by the random violence of war.

Survivor's GuiltBittersweetLyrical ProseBleak
🙂

Dubliners

James Joyce · 226 pages

James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakSubstance AbuseLyrical Prose

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.