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🧲 Books like this

My Real Children

Jo Walton · 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
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The Kingdoms

Natasha Pulley · 448 pages

Alternate HistoryMultiple TimelinesBittersweetEmotional
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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.

Multiple TimelinesDementiaCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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The Versions of Us

Laura Barnett · 402 pages

In one moment, two lives will be changed forever ... and forever ... and forever. The one thing that's certain is that they met on a Cambridge street by chance and felt a connection that would last a lifetime. But as for what happened next ... They fell wildly in love or went their separate ways. They kissed or they thought better of it. They married soon after or were together for a few weeks bef

Multiple TimelinesParallel UniverseBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Elizabeth Is Missing

Emma Healey · 274 pages

"Elizabeth is missing", reads the note in Maud's pocket in her own handwriting. Lately, Maud's been getting forgetful. She keeps buying peach slices when she has a cupboard full, forgets to drink the cups of tea she's made and writes notes to remind herself of things. But Maud is determined to discover what has happened to her friend, Elizabeth, and what it has to do with the unsolved disappearanc

DementiaElderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetMultiple TimelinesCharacter-Driven
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The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Walter Mosley · 277 pages

Ptolemy Grey is a 91-year-old man, suffering from dementia and living as a recluse in his Los Angeles apartment. Then Robyn Small, a 17-year-old family friend, appears and helps clean up his apartment and straighten out his life. A reinvigorated Ptolemy volunteers for an experimental medical program that restores his mind, and he uses his last days--shortened now by the medical experiment--to del

DementiaElderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Parallel UniverseMultiple TimelinesIdentity FormationBittersweet
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Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fannie Flagg · 403 pages

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Ala

Multiple TimelinesElderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Still Alice

Lisa Genova · 320 pages

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease.

DementiaElderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Mitch Albom · 196 pages

The Five People You Meet In Heaven is a 2003 novel by Mitch Albom. It follows the life and death of a ride mechanic named Eddie who is killed in an amusement park accident and sent to heaven, where he encounters five people who had a significant impact on him while he was alive. It was published by Hyperion and remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 95 weeks.

Multiple TimelinesElderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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The Post-Birthday World

Lionel Shriver · 517 pages

In this eagerly awaited new novel, Lionel Shriver, the Orange Prize-winning author of the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, delivers an imaginative and entertaining look at the implications, large and small, of whom we choose to love. Using a playful parallel-universe structure, The Post-Birthday World follows one woman's future as it unfolds under the influence of two drastica

Multiple TimelinesParallel UniverseBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Aquamarine

Carol Anshaw · 208 pages

As she turns forty, Jesse Austin reflects on how her life might have turned out if she had made different choices at three crucial turning points in her past.

Multiple TimelinesParallel UniverseCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Multiple TimelinesBittersweetEmotionalCharacter-Driven
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This Is How You Lose the Time War

Amal El-Mohtar · 209 pages

Multiple TimelinesBittersweetAlternate HistoryEmotional
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Tinkers

Paul Harding · 192 pages

Multiple TimelinesElderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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The Midnight Library

Matt Haig · 304 pages

Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?” A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived, from the int

Multiple TimelinesParallel UniverseEmotionalBittersweet
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The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

Elderly ProtagonistMultiple TimelinesBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood · 638 pages

More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...

Multiple TimelinesElderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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We Are Not Ourselves

Matthew Thomas · 620 pages

"Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed. Eileen can't help but dream of a calmer life, in a better neighborhood. When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men s

DementiaCharacter-DrivenBittersweetEmotional
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The Leisure Seeker

Michael Zadoorian

DementiaElderly ProtagonistBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Wrinkles

Paco Roca · 100 pages

"Admitted to a home for the elderly because he suffers from Alzheimer's disease, for Ernest community life feels like an ordeal. But soon he accepts his new environment and decides to fight to escape from giving in to his awful destiny. For the author, the human community is like a library where books are piled up in mountains populated by yellowing paper of dreams and fantasies. Where a life is c

DementiaElderly ProtagonistBittersweetEmotional
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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 TimelinesElderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri · 304 pages

"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, c

Multiple TimelinesIdentity FormationBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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The Book That Held Her Heart

Mark Lawrence · 384 pages

Multiple TimelinesParallel UniverseBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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