Literary Fiction – Page 22 – Trigger Warning Database

Chemistry by Weike Wang

Chemistry by Weike Wang

At first glance, the quirky, overworked narrator of this novel seems to be on the cusp of a perfect life: she is studying for a prestigious PhD in chemistry that will make her Chinese parents proud (or at least satisfied), and her successful, supportive boyfriend has just proposed to her. But instead of feeling hopeful, she is wracked with ambivalence. The long demanding hours at the lab have created an exquisite pressure cooker, and she doesn’t know how to answer the marriage question. When it all becomes too much and her life plan veers off course, she finds herself on a new path of discoveries about everything she thought she knew.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Child abuse
Cheating

Flamingo by Rachel Elliott

Flamingo by Rachel Elliott

In the garden, there were three flamingos. Not real flamingos, but real emblems, real gateways to a time when life was impossibly good. They were mascots, symbols of hope. Something for a boy to confide in. First, there were the flamingos. And then there were two families. Sherry and Leslie and their daughters, Rae and Pauline – and Eve and her son Daniel. Sherry loves her husband, Leslie. She also loves Eve. It couldn’t have been a happier summer. But then Eve left and everything went grey. Now Daniel is all grown-up and broken. And when he turns up at Sherry’s… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Ableism
Suicidal ideation

Almost Home by Joan Bauer

Almost Home by Joan Bauer

When twelve-year-old Sugar’s grandfather dies and her gambling father takes off yet again, Sugar and her mother lose their home in Missouri. They head to Chicago for a fresh start, only to discover that fresh starts aren’t so easy to come by for the homeless. Nevertheless, Sugar’s mother has taught her to be grateful no matter what, so Sugar does her best. With the help of a rescue dog, Shush; a foster family; a supportive teacher; a love of poetry; and her own grace and good humor, Sugar comes to understand that while she can’t control the hand life deals her, she can control how she responds.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Parental abandonment
Parent with alcoholism
Hospitalisation
Death of a grandfather
Animal abuse mentioned

Careless by Kirsty Capes

Careless by Kirsty Capes

At 3.04pm on a hot, sticky day in June, Bess finds out she’s pregnant. She could tell her social worker Henry, but he’s useless. She should tell her foster mother, Lisa, but she won’t understand. She really ought to tell Boy, but she hasn’t spoken to him in weeks. Bess knows more than anyone that love doesn’t come without conditions. But this isn’t a love story…

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Forced marriage discussed
Rape
Foster care system
Postpartum depression
Teen pregnancy
Attempted home abortion
Attempted drowning

Soy Sauce for Beginners by Kirstin Chen

Soy Sauce for Beginners by Kirstin Chen

Gretchen Lin, adrift at the age of thirty, leaves her floundering marriage in San Francisco to move back to her childhood home in Singapore and immediately finds herself face-to-face with the twin headaches she’s avoided her entire adult life: her mother’s drinking problem and the machinations of her father’s artisanal soy sauce business. Surrounded by family, Gretchen struggles with the tension between personal ambition and filial duty, but still finds time to explore a new romance with the son of a client, an attractive man of few words… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Cheating*

Context : The heroine’s husband cheated on her.

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