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Back When We Were Grownups

Anne Tyler · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryCharmingCharacter-Driven
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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

Widowed ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilySelf-DiscoveryCharacter-Driven
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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

Widowed ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryMultigenerational FamilyCharacter-Driven
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The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Rebecca Miller · 239 pages

Pippa seems to have everything in life. But suddenly she finds her world beginning to unravel. Amid the buzzing lawnmowers and suburban coffee mornings, she starts to wonder how she came to be in this place. The answer is a story of wild youth, unexpected encounters, affairs and betrayals, and the dangerous security of marriage. It brilliantly reveals the challenges of modern life - and all the po

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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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.

Multigenerational FamilyMidlife CrisisContemporary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The List of Things That Will Not Change

Rebecca Stead · 240 pages

EIGHT STARRED REVIEWS! The reassuring book kids and families need right now."An absolute original . . . a story that kids will love." --R. J. Palacio, bestselling author of WonderAt a time when everything is changing for Bea and her family, the important things will always stay the same. A soon-to-be classic by the Newbery Award-winning author of When You Reach Me.After her parents' divorce, Bea's

Blended FamilyCharacter-DrivenSelf-DiscoveryCharming
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The Little Paris Bookshop

Nina George · 392 pages

“There are books that are suitable for a million people, others for only a hundred. There are even remedies—I mean books—that were written for one person only…A book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that’s how I sell books.” Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floa

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenCharming
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Becoming Ted

Matt Cain · 432 pages

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryCharmingCharacter-Driven
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The Lonely Polygamist

Brady Udall · 608 pages

Golden Richards, husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children, is having the mother of all mid-life crises. His construction business is failing, his family has grown into an overpopulated mini-dukedom beset with insurrection and rivalry, and he is done in with grief: due to the accidental death of a daughter and the stillbirth of a son, he has come to doubt the capacity of his own heart

Midlife CrisisMultigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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The Mermaid Chair

Sue Monk Kidd · 335 pages

It's about a woman named Jessie Sullivan who has to return to her former home Egret island to take care of her mother. Within a monastery resides a chair carved with mermaids that supposedly was dedicated to a mermaid.Jessie meet a monk and falls for him although she is already married.....

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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Pigs in Heaven

Barbara Kingsolver · 363 pages

A phenomenal bestseller and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, Pigs in Heaven continues the story of Taylor and Turtle, first introduced in The Bean Trees.

Multigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenCharmingContemporary Fiction
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Distant Shores

Kristin Hannah · 412 pages

In her remarkable New York Times bestseller, Summer Island, Kristin Hannah struck a chord in readers and critics alike with her portrayal of the bittersweet reunion between an errant mother and her unforgiving daughter. Now Hannah once again reveals the fragile ties that bind a family in transition, as two people choose to escape the limits of their ordinary lives and reach for the extraordinary p

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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Remarkably Bright Creatures

Shelby Van Pelt · 368 pages

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night cleaner shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Ever since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat over thirty years ago keeping busy has helped her cope. One night she meets Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium who sees everything, but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his hum

Widowed ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenCharmingContemporary Fiction
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About a Boy

Nick Hornby · 288 pages

Nick Hornby's second bestselling novel is about sex, manliness and fatherhood. Will is thirty-six, comfortable and child-free. And he's discovered a brilliant new way of meeting women - through single-parent groups. Marcus is twelve and a little bitnerdish: he's got the kind of mother who made him listen to Joni Mitchell rather than Nirvana. Perhaps they can help each other out a little bit, and b

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenCharming
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The Widower's Tale

Julia Glass · 402 pages

Enjoying an active but lonely rural life, seventy-year-old Percy allows a progressive preschool to move into his barn and transform his quiet home into a lively, youthful community that compels him to reexamine the choices he made after his wife's death.

Widowed ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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Wreck

Catherine Newman · 224 pages

Midlife CrisisMultigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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The Zahir

Paulo Coelho · 320 pages

Set in Paris and in the enchanting landscape of central Asia, this new novel by the author of the international bestsellers The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes follows the journey of a man obsessed with finding the wife who left him without an explanation.The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges that money and celebrity bring. His wife of te

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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The Summer Before the Dark

Doris Lessing · 248 pages

With her children grown and her husband away in America for several months, Kate Brown finds herself alone for the first time in twenty years.

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Forty Rules of Love

Elif Shafak, lyf shfq · 354 pages

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Ellen in Pieces

Caroline Adderson · 315 pages

When middle-aged, single mother, Ellen McGinty sells the house she raised her daughters in and sets out in search of a new life, she runs directly into the path of a man twenty years younger. Told from multiple points of view, the story explores concepts of love, the nature of regret and the hope of recovery.

Midlife CrisisCharacter-DrivenSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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Love Comes Softly

Janette Oke · 192 pages

WHEN MARTY CLARIDGE'S HUSBAND IS KILLED IN A HORSE ACCIDENT, SHE MARRIES CLARK DAVIS, WHO IS IN NEED OF A MOTHER FOR HIS DAUGHTER, MISSIE. AS TIME PROGRESSES MARTY BEGINS TO ATTACH TO LITTLE MISSIE AND CLARK. WHEN THE WAGON TRAIN RETURNS IN THE SPRING WILL SHE GO HOME, OR STAY WITH CLARK AND MISSIE?

Blended FamilyWidowed ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenCharming
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Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

Beth Hoffman · 313 pages

When Camille Sugarbaker Honeycutt, the pretty but crazy 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen dies, her twelve-year-old daughter CeeCee has barely a hope in the world. To her rescue arrives Great Aunt Tootie in the most magnificent car CeeCee has ever seen, and she is whisked away to the city of Savannah. Among the sweet scent of magnolias and the loving warmth of Tootie and her colourful collection of friends

Self-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenCharmingContemporary Fiction
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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Helen Simonson · 394 pages

You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson's wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major P

Widowed ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenContemporary FictionCharming
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The Break

Marian Keyes · 536 pages

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryMultigenerational FamilyContemporary Fiction
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