Literary Fiction – Page 18 – Trigger Warning Database

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Bergensdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Northern town of Vardø must fend for themselves. Three years later, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband’s authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Period-typical misogyny
Anti-indigenous racism
Colonialism
Religious bigotry and persecution for witchcraft (theme) including the on-page depiction of witch trials and burning women at the stake
Graphic martial rape and sexual assault
Infidelity*
Forced marriage
Pregnancy and pregnancy from rape discussed including childbirth
Miscarriage
Alcohol consumption
Blood & gore depiction including dead bodies
Death of a friend, on-page
Death of a father, husband and brother mentioned
Mass death by boating accident
Murder, on-page
Torture, implied
Imprisonment mentioned
Near-drowning incident
Animal death

*Context : The protagonist falls in love with a woman but is in a forced arranged marriage with a man.

What’s Mine and Yours by Naima Coster

What’s Mine and Yours by Naima Coster

A community in the Piedmont of North Carolina rises in outrage as a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into predominantly white high schools on the west. For two students, Gee and Noelle, the integration sets off a chain of events that will tie their two families together in unexpected ways over the span of the next twenty years. On one side of the integration, debate is Jade, Gee’s steely, ambitious mother. In the aftermath of a harrowing loss, she is determined to give her son the tools he’ll need to survive in America as a sensitive, anxious… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Racism
Infidelity
Alcohol abuse
Abortion
Miscarriage
Death of a parent
Murder
Gun violence
Animal abuse

Like a House on Fire by Lauren McBrayer

Like a House on Fire by Lauren McBrayer

After twelve years of marriage and two kids, Merit has begun to feel like a stranger in her own life. She loves her husband and sons, but she desperately needs something more than sippy cups and monthly sex. So, she returns to her career at Jager + Brandt, where a brilliant and beautiful Danish architect named Jane decides to overlook the “break” in Merit’s resume and give her a shot. Jane is a supernova—witty and dazzling and unapologetically herself—and as the two work closely together, their relationship becomes a true friendship. In Jane, Merit sees the possibility of what a woman could be. And Jane sees Merit… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Antisemitism mentioned
Cheating
Divorce mentioned
Weight loss
Miscarriage
Unplanned pregnancy
Recreational drug use
Alcohol consumption
Grief & loss depiction
Death of a father from a heart attack
Death of a mother from breast cancer recounted
Death of a brother from AIDS recounted

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she’s accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. When he resurfaces half a globe away, Isma’s worst fears are confirmed. Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to—or defy… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Racism
Misogyny
Islamomisia
Grief & loss depiction
Death of a parent recounted
Death of a sibling
Suicide bombing
Beheading
Drive-by shooting
Terrorism

The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa

The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa

One day Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from Rolando Garro, the editor of a notorious magazine that specializes in salacious exposes. Garro presents Enrique with lewd pictures from an old business trip and demands that he invest in the magazine. Enrique refuses, and the next day the pictures are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique’s wife is in the midst of a passionate and secret affair with the wife of Enrique’s lawyer and best friend. When Garro shows up murdered, the two couples are thrown into a whirlwind of navigating Peru’s unspoken… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Cheating
Murder
Blackmail

Everything My Mother Taught Me by Alice Hoffman

Everything My Mother Taught Me by Alice Hoffman

For fatefully observant Adeline, growing up carries an ominous warning from her adulterous mother: don’t say a word. Adeline vows to never speak again. But that’s not her only secret. After her mother takes a housekeeping job at a lighthouse off the tip of Cape Ann, a local woman vanishes. The key to the mystery lies with Adeline, the silent witness. New York Times bestselling author of The Rules of Magic Alice Hoffman crafts a beautiful, heart-wrenching short story.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Parental infidelity
Death of a father

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones

In Baxter Beach, Barbados, moneyed ex-pats clash with the locals who often end up serving them: braiding their hair, minding their children, and selling them drugs. Lala lives on the beach with her husband, Adan, a petty criminal with endless charisma whose thwarted burglary of one of the Baxter Beach mansions sets off a chain of events with terrible consequences. A gunshot no one was meant to witness. A new mother whose baby is found lifeless on the beach. A woman torn between two worlds and incapacitated by grief. And two men driven by desperation and greed who attempt a crime that will risk their freedom — and their lives.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Rape
Sexual assault
Incest
Domestic abuse

Waiting by Ha Jin

Waiting by Ha Jin

For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young—a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin’s passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer… Read more,

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Rape, on-page

Scorpionfish by Natalie Bakopoulos

Scorpionfish by Natalie Bakopoulos

After the unexpected deaths of her parents, young academic Mira returns to her childhood home in Athens. On her first night back, she encounters a new neighbour, a longtime ship captain who has found himself no longer at sea for the first time in years. As one summer night tumbles into another, Mira and the Captain’s voices drift across the balconies of their apartments, disclosing details and stories: of careers, families, of love. For Mira, love has so often meant Aris, an ex-boyfriend and rising Greek politician who has recently become engaged to a movie star. There is, too, her love for her dear friend Nefeli—a well… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Racism
Cheating
Suicide

The Youngest Doll by Rosario Ferré

The Youngest Doll by Rosario Ferré

A gentle maiden aunt who has been victimized for years unexpectedly retaliates through her talent for making life-sized dolls filled with honey. “The Youngest Doll,” based on a family anecdote, is a stunning literary expression of Rosario Ferré’s feminist and social concerns. It is the premier story in a collection that was originally published in Spanish in 1976 as Papeles de Pandora and is now translated into English by the author. The daughter of a former governor of Puerto Rico, Ferré portrays women loosening the constraints that have bound them to a patriarchal culture. Anger takes creative rather than polemical form… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Misogyny
Slut shaming
Cheating
Car accident