Literary Fiction – Page 21 – Trigger Warning Database

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting…Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Fatmisia & body-shaming
Body dysmorphia
Eating disorder & disordered food thoughts
Emesis

Blush by Jamie Brenner

Blush by Jamie Brenner

For decades, the lush vineyards and majestic manor house of the Hollander Estates winery made it the North Fork of Long Island’s premier destination for lavish parties and romantic day trips. Now the Hollander family fortunes have suffered, and as matriarch Vivian Hollander prepares for the arrival of her daughter and granddaughter for their annual summer reunion, she fears it might be their last. Worse, selling the family legacy to strangers might expose the dark secret she’s harboured for thirty-five years… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Sexual harassment

Last Dance on the Starlight Pier by Sarah Bird

Last Dance on the Starlight Pier by Sarah Bird

July 3. 1932. Shivering and in shock, Evie Grace Devlin watches the Starlite Palace burn into the sea and wonders how she became a person who would cause a man to kill himself. She’d come to Galveston to escape a dark past in vaudeville and become a good person, a nurse. When that dream is cruelly thwarted, Evie is swept into the alien world of dance marathons. All that she has been denied—a family, a purpose, even love—waits for her there in the place she dreads most: the spotlight… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Child abuse recounted
Death of a father recounted

Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen by Sarah Bird

Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen by Sarah Bird

Though born into bondage on a “miserable tobacco farm” in Little Dixie, Missouri, Cathy Williams was never allowed to consider herself a slave. According to her mother, she was a captive, bound by her noble warrior blood to escape the enemy. Her means of deliverance is Union general Phillip Henry “Smash ‘em Up” Sheridan, the outcast of West Point who takes the rawboned, prideful young woman into service. At war’s end, having tasted freedom, Cathy refuses to return to servitude and makes the monumental decision to disguise herself as a man and join the Army’s legendary Buffalo Soldiers… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Slavery recounted

The Homewreckers by Mary Kay Andrews

The Homewreckers by Mary Kay Andrews

Hattie Kavanaugh went to work helping clean up restored homes for Kavanaugh & Son Restorations at 18; married the boss’s son at 20; and was only 25 when her husband, Hank, was killed in a motorcycle accident. Broken-hearted, but determined to continue the business of their dreams, she takes the life insurance money, buys a small house in a gentrifying neighbourhood, flips it, and then puts the money into her next project… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Statutory rape
Abandonment
Cheating
Murder
Incarcerated parent
Motorcycle accident

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi

Feyi Adekola wants to learn how to be alive again. It’s been five years since the accident that killed the love of her life and she’s almost a new person now—an artist with her own studio, and sharing a brownstone apartment with her ride-or-die best friend, Joy, who insists it’s time for Feyi to ease back into the dating scene. Feyi isn’t ready for anything serious, but a steamy encounter at a rooftop party cascades into a whirlwind summer she could have never imagined: a luxury trip to a tropical island, decadent meals in the glamorous home of a celebrity chef, and… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Homomisia
Racism
Slut-shaming
Nightmares
Suicidal ideation recounted
Alcohol consumption
Drug use
Grief & loss depiction
Death of a child from cancer mentioned (leukemia)
Death of a wife from drowning mentioned
Death of a husband in a car accident recounted, on-page (theme)

What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon

What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon

Anne Gallagher grew up enchanted by her grandfather’s stories of Ireland. Heartbroken at his death, she travels to his childhood home to spread his ashes. There, overcome with memories of the man she adored and consumed by a history she never knew, she is pulled into another time.

The Ireland of 1921, teetering on the edge of war, is a dangerous place in which to awaken. But there Anne finds herself, hurt, disoriented, and under…. Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Grief & loss depiction
Death of a grandfather
Murder
Gun violence
Fire
War themes

Pretending to Dance by Diane Chamberlain

Pretending to Dance by Diane Chamberlain

Molly Arnette is very good at keeping secrets. She lives in San Diego with a husband she adores, and they are trying to adopt a baby because they can’t have a child on their own. But the process of adoption brings to light many questions about Molly’s past and her family—the family she left behind in North Carolina twenty years before. The mother she says is dead but who is very much alive. The father she adored and whose death sent her running from the small community of Morrison’s Ridge. Her own birth mother whose mysterious presence in her family raised so many… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Assisted suicide
Infertility

The Last House on the Street by Diane Chamberlain

The Last House on the Street by Diane Chamberlain

When Kayla Carter’s husband dies in an accident while building their dream house, she knows she has to stay strong for their four-year-old daughter. But the trophy home in Shadow Ridge Estates, a new development in sleepy Round Hill, North Carolina, will always hold tragic memories. But when she is confronted by an odd, older woman telling her not to move in, she almost agrees. It’s clear this woman has some kind of connection to the area…and a connection to Kayla herself. Kayla’s elderly new neighbour, Ellie Hockley, is more welcoming, but it’s clear she, too… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Racism

The Dream Daughter by Diane Chamberlain

The Dream Daughter by Diane Chamberlain

When Caroline Sears receives the news that her unborn baby girl has a heart defect, she is devastated. It is 1970 and there seems to be little that can be done. But her brother-in-law, a physicist, tells her that perhaps there is. Hunter appeared in their lives just a few years before—and his appearance was as mysterious as his past. With no family, no friends, and a background shrouded in secrets, Hunter embraced the Sears family and never looked back… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Pregnancy
Terminal heart condition*
Death of a husband during deployment in the Vietnam War

*Context : The unborn child is known to have a life-threatening heart condition.