Literary Fiction – Page 22 – Trigger Warning Database

Indelible by Adelia Saunders

Indelible by Adelia Saunders

Magdalena has an unsettling gift. She sees writing on the body of everyone she meets – names, dates, details both banal and profound – and her only relief from the onslaught of information is to take off her glasses and let the world recede. Mercifully, her own skin is blank. Magdalena has an unsettling gift. She sees writing on the body of everyone she meets – names, dates, details both banal and profound – and her only relief from the onslaught of information is to take off her glasses and let the world recede. Mercifully, her own… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Suicide & attempted suicide
Sexual harassment

Violeta by Isabel Allende

Violeta by Isabel Allende

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first daughter in a family of five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events. The ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth. Told in the form of a letter to someone Violeta loves above all others, this is the story of a hundred-year life – of devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Misogyny
Racism
Adult-minor relationship
Domestic abuse
Suicide
Murder
War themes

The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr

The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.

Isaiah was Samuel’s and Samuel was Isaiah’s. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man—a fellow slave—seeks to gain favor by preaching the master’s gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel’s love, which was once… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Slavery
Human trafficking
Rape
Death of an infant
Murder
Torture
Lynching

The Education of Ivy Edwards by Hannah Tovey

The Education of Ivy Edwards by Hannah Tovey

Ivy Edwards is thirty-one years old, funny, shameless, and a bit of a romantic. She’s also currently trying not to cry in the office toilet. Partly because she’s just run out of money for fags. A bit because her mum continues to annoy her. Definitely not because she’s just been dumped by her fiancé. With her London life in shambles and her family miles away in the Welsh valleys, Ivy doesn’t actually feel like she belongs anywhere. At least, she has her friends – and a bottle of vodka. Embarking on a journey of singlehood, Ivy is about to discover that sometimes, having your life fall apart can be surprisingly fun.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Alcohol consumption
Recreational drug use
Infertility & IVF

The Turnout by Megan Abbott

The Turnout by Megan Abbott

After the sudden death of their parents, the Durant sisters, Dara and Marie, inherit a ballet school and take over running it with Dara’s husband Charlie. The sisters’ connection is intense, forged by a glamorous but troubled family history. But after they hire Derek, a charismatic, possibly shady contractor to renovate the studio, Marie throws herself into an intense affair with him that threatens their tight bonds and brings forward family secrets until an act of violence overturns everything.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Rape of a child
Domestic violence
Suicide
Self-harm
Murder

Luster by Raven Leilani

Luster by Raven Leilani

Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, is sleeping with all the wrong men, and has failed at the only thing that meant anything to her, painting. No one seems to care that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing with her life beyond looking for her next hook-up. And then she meets Eric, a white middle-aged archivist with a suburban family, including a wife who has sort-of-agreed to an open marriage and an adopted black daughter who doesn’t have a single person in her life who can show her how to do her hair… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Racism
Toxic relationship
Suicide discussed

The Tobacco Wives by Adele Myers

The Tobacco Wives by Adele Myers

Maddie Sykes is a burgeoning seamstress who’s just arrived in Bright Leaf, North Carolina—the tobacco capital of the South—where her aunt has a thriving sewing business. After years of war rations and shortages, Bright Leaf is a prosperous wonderland in full technicolour bloom, and Maddie is dazzled by the bustle of the crisply uniformed female factory workers, the palatial homes, and, most of all, her aunt’s glossiest clientele: the wives of the powerful tobacco executives…Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Homomisia
Sexism
Parental abandonment
Death of a parent on deployment in World War Two
Infertility
Miscarriage

Fan Club by Erin Mayer

Fan Club by Erin Mayer

Day after day our narrator, a gloomy millennial, searches for meaning beyond her vacuous job at a women’s lifestyle website—entering text into a computer system while she watches their beauty editor unwrap box after box of perfectly packaged bits of happiness. Then, one night at a dive bar, she hears a message in the newest single by child-actor-turned-international-pop star Adriana Argento, and she is struck. Soon she loses herself to the online fandom, a community whose members feverishly track Adriana’s every move… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Sexual harassment
Recreational drug use
Abortion mentioned

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