What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 258 pages
The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Hannah Green, Joanne Greenberg · 252 pages
Signs for Lost Children
Sarah Moss · 368 pages
Only weeks into their marriage a young couple embark[s] on a six-month period of separation. Tom Cavendish goes to Japan to build lighthouses and his wife Ally, a doctor, takes work at the Truro asylum where she must struggle against the terrible conditions imposed on the patients, the mores of late Victorian society and her own demons.
K-Pax
Gene Brewer · 248 pages
When a new patient is brought to a mental ward claiming to be an inhabitant of a planet called K-PAX, the hospital seems to be just the place for him. But virtually everyone who meets this gentle and empathetic character is changed for the better.
Pilgrim
Timothy Findley · 496 pages
On April 15, 1912--ironically the very date on which more than a thousand people lost their lives as the Titanic sank--a figure known only as Pilgrim tries to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree. When he is found five hours later, his heart miraculously begins beating again. This isn't his first attempt to end his life, and it is decided that steps must be taken to prevent Pilgrim from d
Blindness
Jose Saramago · 327 pages
A city is struck by an epidemic of "white blindness." The first man to succumb sits in his car, waiting for the light to change. He is taken to an eye doctor, who does not know what to make of the phenomenon - and soon goes blind himself. The blindness spreads, sparing no one. Authorities confine the blind to a vacant mental hospital secured by armed guards under instructions to shoot anyone tryi
Cut
Patricia McCormick · 160 pages
While confined to a mental hospital, thirteen-year-old Callie slowly comes to understand some of the reasons behind her self-mutilation, and gradually starts to get better.
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 349 pages
A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 189 pages
Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R
Freud's Sister
Gotse Smilevski, Goce Smilevski · 266 pages
Imagines the life of Sigmund Freud's favorite sister, Aldolfina, who was taken to a concentration camp after her brother was granted an exit visa to London but didn't take any family with him.
It's Kind of a Funny Story
Ned Vizzini · 444 pages
A humorous account of a New York City teenager's battle with depression and his time spent in a psychiatric hospital.
The Quickening Maze
Adam Foulds · 258 pages
Based on real events in Epping Forest on the edge of London around 1840, The Quickening Maze centres on the first incarceration of the great nature poet John Clare. After years struggling with alcohol, critical neglect and depression, Clare finds himself in High Beach Private Asylum - an institution run on reformist principles which would later become known as occupational therapy. At the same tim
Hallucinating Foucault
Patricia Duncker · 176 pages
An English student is so impressed by a book of philosophy that he travels to France to meet its author, now in an insane asylum. In describing the relationship which grows up between the two men, the novel looks at the bonds that are created between reader and writer, even though they never meet. A first novel.
Umbrella
Will Self · 422 pages
It is 1971, and Zachary Busner is a maverick psychiatrist who has just begun working at a mental hospital in suburban north London. As he tours the hospital's wards, Busner notes that some of the patients are exhibiting a very peculiar type of physical tic: rapid, precise movements that they repeat over and over. These patients do not react to outside stimuli and are trapped inside an internal wor
The World Before Us
Aislinn Hunter · 386 pages
"Deep in the woods of northern England, somewhere between a dilapidated estate and an abandoned Victorian asylum, fifteen-year-old Jane Standen lived through a nightmare. She was babysitting a sweet young girl named Lily, and in one fleeting moment, lost her. The little girl was never found, leaving her family and Jane devastated. Twenty years later, Jane is an archivist at a small London museum t
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey · 311 pages
An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into
Wonders of a Godless World
Andrew McGahan · 327 pages
Coming Through Slaughter
Michael Ondaatje · 156 pages
Buddy Bolden, a New Orleans barber, cornet player, and full-time editor of a gossip sheet, disappears for two years, and when he returns, he goes berserk and spends his final years in the East Louisiana state hospital.
The Golden Age
Joan London · 231 pages
Escaping the perils of World War II Hungary for Australia, Frank is diagnosed with polio and sent to a children's hospital where he falls in love with a fellow patient while their families struggle to adjust to life in a new culture.
The Secret Scripture
Sebastian Barry · 300 pages
Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges
The Devil in Silver
Victor LaValle
Pepper is a rambunctious big man, and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He's not mentally ill, but that doesn't seem to matter. On his first night, he's visited by a terrifying creature who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It's no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways w
Endless Love
Scott Spencer · 417 pages
"One of the most celebrated novels of its time, Endless Love remains perhaps the most powerful book ever written about young love. Riveting, compulsively readable, and ferociously sexual, Endless Love tells the story of David Axelrod and his overwhelming love for Jade Butterfield. David and Jade are consumed with each other: their rapport, their desire, their sexuality, take them further than they