rachel @ typed truths

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Life moves at a leisurely pace in the tiny town of Wall—named after the imposing stone barrier which separates the town from a grassy meadow. Here, young Tristran Thorn has lost his heart to the beautiful Victoria Forester and for the coveted prize of her hand, Tristran vows to retrieve a fallen star and deliver it to his beloved. It is an oath that sends him over the ancient wall and into a world that is dangerous and strange beyond imagining…

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Rape mentioned
Alcohol consumption
Smoking mentioned
Blood & gore depiction
Kidnapping
Animal death

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier.

Thirteen-year-old Leni, a girl coming of age in a tumultuous time, caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship, dares to hope that a new land will lead to a better future for her family. She is desperate for a place to belong. Her mother, Cora, will do anything and go anywhere for the man she loves, even if it means following him into the unknown… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Domestic abuse (theme)
Child abuse
Alcoholism
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Cancer
Death of a parent
Murder
Vietnam War

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Under the streets of London there’s a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.

Richard Mayhew, a young businessman, is going to find out more than enough about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and utterly bizarre. And a strange destiny awaits him down here, beneath his native city: Neverwhere.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Body horror
Animal abuse

The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

Picking up the tale of Kvothe Kingkiller once again, we follow him into exile, into political intrigue, courtship, adventure, love and magic . . . and further along the path that has turned Kvothe, the mightiest magician of his age, a legend in his own time, into Kote, the unassuming pub landlord.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Rape mentioned
Physical abuse
Knife & sword violence
Poisoning
Explosion
Fire

World War Z by Max Brooks

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Misogyny
Rape
Suicide
Blood & gore depiction
Cannibalism
Pandemic
Death of a child

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.

On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.

Instead, Malala’s miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Misogyny
Death of children
Torture
War themes
Animal death

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Parental abuse
Cheating
Suicide
Attempted murder
Animal death

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

England, 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country’s most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him; the mysterious disappearance of his parents, in Old Shanghai, when he was a small boy. Now, as the world lurches towards total war, Banks realises the time has come for him to return to the city of his childhood and at last solve the mystery – that only by his doing so will civilisation be saved from the approaching catastrophe.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Racism
Attempted suicide
Drug abuse

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

You’ve long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it’s time now to think on it anew. There’s a journey we must go on, and no more delay…

The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Cheating
Memory loss
War themes

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.

Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Medical experimentation
Bullying