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The Lake the River and the Other Lake

Steve Amick · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Vacationers

Emma Straub · 372 pages

Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.

Summer VibesEnsemble CastCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Cutting Teeth

Julia Fierro · 329 pages

"One of the most anticipated debut novels of 2014, Cutting Teeth takes place one late-summer weekend as a group of thirty-something couples gather at a shabby beach house on Long Island, their young children in tow. Nicole, the hostess, struggles to keep her OCD behaviors unnoticed. Stay-at-home dad Rip grapples with the reality that his careerist wife will likely deny him a second child, forcing

Summer VibesEnsemble CastLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Rumor

Elin Hilderbrand · 374 pages

Madeline King and Grace Pancik are best friends and the envy of Nantucket for their perfect marriages, their beautiful kids, their Sunday night double dates with their devoted husbands. But this summer, something's changed, and if there's anything Nantucket likes better than cocktails on the beach at sunset, it's a good rumor. And rumor has it... that Madeline, a novelist, is battling writer's blo

Summer VibesEnsemble CastCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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The World Without You

Joshua Henkin · 321 pages

July 4, 2005. The Frankel family is descending upon their beloved summer home in the Berkshires. The family has gathered to memorialize Leo, the youngest of the four siblings, an intrepid journalist and adventurer who was killed on that day in 2004, while on assignment in Iraq.

Summer VibesEnsemble CastContemporary FictionLiterary Fiction
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Empire Falls

Richard Russo · 483 pages

"Dexter County, Maine, and specifically the town of Empire Falls, has seen better days, and for decades, in fact, only a succession from bad to worse. One by one, its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan (presided over by the last scion's widow) now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. The working classes, meanwhile, continue to eke o

Ensemble CastSmall TownLiterary FictionContemporary Fiction
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Driftless

David Rhodes · 429 pages

The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties th

Ensemble CastSmall TownLiterary FictionMultiple POV
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Summerlong

Dean Bakopoulos · 354 pages

The tensions beneath the surface of Claire and Don Lowry's seemingly contented marriage explode in the bedrooms and backyards of a small Midwestern town over the course of a long, hot summer, as they discover that married life is not what they had predicted.

Summer VibesSmall TownLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Heat & Light

Jennifer Haigh · 535 pages

Bestselling author Jennifer Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town and the conflicting forces at its heart - hope and desperation, greed and power, big business and small-town families. Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of

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Life After Life

Jill McCorkle · 418 pages

The residents, staff, and neighbors of the Pine Haven retirement center (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie) share some of life's most profound discoveries. What they eventually learn about themselves and one another will transform them all.

Ensemble CastSmall TownLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Mink River

Brian Doyle · 319 pages

" ... Brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people"--Publisher description.

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Plainsong

Kent Haruf · 301 pages

Ensemble CastSmall TownLiterary FictionContemporary Fiction
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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

Ensemble CastSmall TownLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Beartown

Fredrik Backman · 432 pages

Ensemble CastSmall TownCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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In the Unlikely Event

Judy Blume · 512 pages

In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and

Ensemble CastSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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South of Broad

Pat Conroy · 646 pages

The publishing event of the season: The one and only Pat Conroy returns, with a big, sprawling novel that is at once a love letter to Charleston and to lifelong friendship.Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local

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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

Ensemble CastSmall TownContemporary FictionMultiple POV
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Nineteen Minutes

Jodi Picoult · 586 pages

The startling and poignant story of the aftermath of a tragic high school shooting, from the bestselling author of My Sister's Keeper and The Pact.'Picoult makes us ponder the ambiguous relationships between love and lying, legality and morality; the strange ways repressed memories leak into the present.' Los Angeles TimesIntricately textured and rich with psychological and social insight, Jodi Pi

Small TownEnsemble CastCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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40 Love

Madeleine Wickham · 276 pages

A weekend tennis party becomes study of modern marriage for four very different couples of varying economic, social, and interest levels as together they encounter two days of anger, shock, revelations, and romance.

Summer VibesEnsemble CastCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
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The Leftovers

Tom Perrotta · 355 pages

What if—whoosh, right now, with no explanation—a number of us simply vanished? Would some of us collapse? Would others of us go on, one foot in front of the other, as we did before the world turned upside down? That’s what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, who lost many of their neighbors, friends and lovers in the event known as the Sudden Departure, have to figure out. Because nothing has

Ensemble CastSmall TownContemporary FictionMultiple POV
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One Two Three

Laurie Frankel · 408 pages

Small TownCharacter-DrivenContemporary FictionMultiple POV
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The Ladies Auxiliary

Tova Mirvis · 328 pages

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Nights of Rain and Stars

Maeve Binchy · 352 pages

In a small Greek island village, a group of travelers from around the world and the local residents they encounter are brought together when tragedy strikes.

Summer VibesEnsemble CastCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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Cannery Row

John Steinbeck · 183 pages

Cannery Row is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, published in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California, on a street lined with sardine canneries that is known as Cannery Row. The story revolves around the people living there. Steinbeck revisited these characters and this milieu nine years later in his novel Sweet Thursday.

Ensemble CastSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction

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