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The Heart's Invisible Furies

John Boyne · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Bee Sting

Paul Murray · 645 pages

IrelandDark ComedySexual OrientationCharacter-Driven
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In One Person

John Irving · 448 pages

A New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect," a phrase first used by John Ir

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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The Chaperone

Laura Moriarty · 419 pages

"A novel about the friendship between an adolescent, pre-movie-star Louise Brooks, and the 36-year-old woman who chaperones her to New York City for a summer, in 1922, and how it changes both their lives"--

AdoptionSexual OrientationCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · 736 pages

AdoptionSexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Tin Man

Sarah Winman · 224 pages

"This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that. Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more. But then we f

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistBittersweetEmotional
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Tender

Belinda McKeon · 424 pages

When they meet in Dublin in the late nineties, Catherine was a sheltered college student; James an adventurous, charismatic young artist. In a city brimming with possibilities, he spurs her to take life on with gusto. But as Catherine opens herself to new experiences, James's life becomes a prison; as changed as the new Ireland may be, it is still not a place in which he feels able to truly be him

IrelandSexual OrientationCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin · 224 pages

Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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Flesh and Blood

Michael Cunningham · 465 pages

The story of Constantine Stassos, a Greek immigrant. He marries an Italian girl, they have three children and he becomes a rich construction boss. After which it's downhill all the way: drugs, sex and the generation gap. The parents divorce, a son becomes a homosexual, the daughter has an illegitimate black baby. By the author of A Home at the End of the World.

Sexual OrientationSprawling EpicLGBTQ+ ProtagonistEmotional
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Corelli's Mandolin

Louis de Bernieres · 437 pages

The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical, heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an i

BittersweetSprawling EpicDark ComedyEmotional
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The Blackwater Lightship

Colm Toibin · 288 pages

IrelandBittersweetCharacter-DrivenEmotional
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The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Gabrielle Zevin · 279 pages

A.J. Fikry's life is not what he expected it to be. His wife has died, his bookstore is failing, and his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. He is isolating himself from all the people of Alice Island and from Amelia, the Knightley Press sales rep who refuses to be deterred by A.J.'s bad attitude. And then a mysterious package appears at the bookstore that gives A.J

AdoptionBittersweetCharacter-DrivenEmotional
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Anybody Out There?

Marian Keyes · 592 pages

Life is perfect for Anna Walsh. She has the "Best Job in the World" as a PR exec for a top-selling urban beauty brand, a lovely apartment in New York, and a perfect husband - the love of her life, Aidan Maddox. Until the morning she wakes up in her mammy's living room in Dublin with stitches in her face, a dislocated knee, and completely smashed-up hands - and no memory of how she got there. While

IrelandBittersweetDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Taylor Jenkins Reid · 400 pages

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of w

Sexual OrientationBittersweetLGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Jeanette Winterson · 176 pages

This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts. At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves.

AdoptionSexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistDark Comedy
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Almost Life

Kiran Millwood Hargrave · 384 pages

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Winger

Andrew Smith

Two years younger than his classmates at a prestigious boarding school, fourteen-year-old Ryan Dean West grapples with living in the dorm for troublemakers, falling for his female best friend who thinks of him as just a kid, and playing wing on the Varsity rugby team with some of his frightening new dorm-mates.

Sexual OrientationDark ComedyBittersweetLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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We Are the Ants

Shaun David Hutchinson · 464 pages

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistBittersweetDark Comedy
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon · 639 pages

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar

Sprawling EpicSexual OrientationBittersweetEmotional
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Normal People

Sally Rooney · 288 pages

At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal. A year later, they’re b

IrelandBittersweetEmotionalCharacter-Driven
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Rubyfruit Jungle

Rita Mae Brown · 246 pages

Born a bastard, Molly Bolt is adopted by a dirt-poor Southern couple who want something better for their daughter. Molly plays doctor with the boys, beats up Leroy the tub and loses her virginity to her girlfriend in sixth grade. As she grows to realize she's different, Molly decides not to apologize for that. In no time she mesmerizes the head cheerleader of Ft. Lauderdale High and captivates a g

AdoptionSexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistDark Comedy
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Call Me by Your Name

Andre Aciman · 256 pages

It's the summer of 1983, and precocious 17-year-old Elio Perlman is spending the days with his family at their 17th-century villa in Lombardy, Italy. He soon meets Oliver, a handsome doctoral student who's working as an intern for Elio's father. Amid the sun-drenched splendor of their surroundings, Elio and Oliver discover the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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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

Sexual OrientationAdoptionLGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Learned by Heart

Emma Donoghue · 338 pages

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood · 158 pages

Classic fiction. The best prose writer in English' Gore Vidal Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-Driven

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