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🧲 Books like this

Winter Garden

Kristin Hannah · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

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

Estranged FamilyMother and DaughterDual TimelineSecret Past
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The Shell Seekers

Rosamunde Pilcher · 582 pages

The Shell Seekers is a novel of connection: of one family, and of the passions and heartbreak that have held them together for three generations. The Shell Seekers is filled with real people--mothers and daughters, husband and lovers--inspired with real values. The Shell Seekers centers on Penelope Keeling--a woman you'll always remember in world you'll never forget. The Shell Seekers is a magical

Multiple TimelinesDual TimelineSecret PastEstranged Family
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The Things We Cannot Say

Kelly Rimmer · 448 pages

Dual TimelineWorld War IITearjerkerCaregiving for a Parent
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The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · 332 pages

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve

Mother and DaughterEstranged FamilyTrauma RecoveryFamily Secrets
❤️

Losing Hope

Colleen Hoover · 380 pages

"In Hopeless, Sky left no secret unearthed, no feeling unshared and no memory forgotten, but Holder's past remains a mystery. He is haunted by the little girl he let walk away from him and he has spent his entire life searching for her. He had hoped that he would finally gain closure and be able to rid himself of his guilt the moment they were reconnected. But he could not have anticipated that th

TearjerkerSecret PastTrauma RecoveryToxic Family Dynamics
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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

TearjerkerDual TimelineSecret PastFamily Secrets
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The House Girl

Tara Conklin · 372 pages

A novel of love, family, and justice follows Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in a Manhattan law firm, as she searches for the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.

Dual TimelineFamily SecretsMultiple TimelinesSecret Past
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Where We Belong

Emily Giffin · 384 pages

Her carefully constructed life thrown into turmoil by the appearance of an eighteen-year-old girl with ties to her past, New York television producer Marian Caldwell is swept up in a maelstrom of personal discovery that changes both of their perceptions about family.

Mother and DaughterEstranged FamilyWomen's FictionSecret Past
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The Language of Flowers

Vanessa Diffenbaugh · 322 pages

Victoria Jones spent her childhood moving from foster home to foster home. She believes she is damaged beyond hope and trusts nobody, connecting with the world through message-laden bouquets. Her messages are never understood until one day a man in a flower stall responds in kind.

Dual TimelineMother and DaughterEstranged FamilyTrauma Recovery
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The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards · 408 pages

Kim Edwards's stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives fo

TearjerkerSecret PastEstranged FamilyFamily Secrets
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A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley · 377 pages

This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s *King Lear* centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, *A Thousand Acres* takes on t

Estranged FamilySistersChildhood TraumaToxic Family Dynamics
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Secrets of a Charmed Life

Susan Meissner · 480 pages

"When Oxford student Kendra Van Zant interviews 93-year-old artist Isabel MacFarland about her experience as a survivor of the London Blitz, Isabel is ready to share secrets she has kept for decades--beginning with who she really is"--

Dual TimelineWorld War IISistersSecret Past
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Secret Daughter

Shilpi Somaya Gowda · 352 pages

On the eve of the monsoons, in a remote Indian village, Kavita gives birth to a baby girl. But in a culture that favors sons, the only way for Kavita to save her newborn daughter's life is to give her away. It is a decision that will haunt her and her husband for the rest of their lives, even after the arrival of their cherished son.Halfway around the globe, Somer, an American doctor, decides to a

Mother and DaughterTearjerkerEstranged FamilyMultigenerational Family
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The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

Trauma RecoveryMother and DaughterChildhood TraumaFamily Secrets
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Dreams of Joy

Lisa See · 354 pages

A continuation of "Shanghai Girls" finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation's intolerant Communist culture.

Mother and DaughterEstranged FamilySistersMultigenerational Family
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My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout · 200 pages

"Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her and a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all--the one between mother and daughter"--

Estranged FamilyMother and DaughterChildhood TraumaToxic Family Dynamics
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Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Rebecca Wells · 383 pages

The antics of a group of women in a small town where they were expected to raise babies, not Cain. The story is recounted by a mother to a daughter, the daughter thinking she is so much better because she got out of that town and is now a theater producer. The moral: mothers too were once rebels.

Mother and DaughterWomen's FictionToxic Family DynamicsChildhood Trauma
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The Seven Sisters

Lucinda Riley · 461 pages

"Maia D'Aplièse and her five sisters gather together at their childhood home, 'Atlantis'--a fabulous, secluded castle situated on the shores of Lake Geneva--having been told that their beloved father, who adopted them all as babies, has died. Each of them is handed a tantalizing clue to her true heritage--a clue which takes Maia across the world to a crumbling mansion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. On

Dual TimelineMultiple TimelinesSistersFamily Secrets
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Lone Wolf

Jodi Picoult · 438 pages

Estranged FamilyCaregiving for a ParentTearjerkerTerminal Illness
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Black Cake

Charmaine Wilkerson · 385 pages

Estranged FamilySecret PastDual TimelineFamily Secrets
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And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini · 446 pages

Presents a story inspired by human love, how people take care of one another, and how choices resonate through subsequent generations. Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pari, as beaut

Estranged FamilyCaregiving for a ParentMultiple TimelinesMultigenerational Family
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We Were the Mulvaneys

Joyce Carol Oates · 464 pages

Estranged FamilyTrauma RecoveryMultigenerational FamilyToxic Family Dynamics
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Orphan Train

Christina Baker Kline · 400 pages

Close to aging out of the foster care system, Molly Ayer takes a position helping an elderly woman named Vivian and discovers that they are more alike than different as she helps Vivian solve a mystery from her past. When 17-year-old Molly Ayer is sent to perform community service at elderly Vivian Daly's home in order to avoid juvenile hall, she discovers the two are very much alike, despite the

Dual TimelineSecret PastChildhood TraumaTearjerker
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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Secret PastChildhood TraumaFamily SecretsToxic Family Dynamics
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