Literary Fiction – Page 26 – Trigger Warning Database

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

In this sensational, hard-hitting and passionate tale of marital cruelty, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall sees a mysterious tenant, Helen Graham, unmasked not as a ‘wicked woman’ as the local gossips would have it, but as the estranged wife of a brutal alcoholic bully, desperate to protect her son. Using her own experiences with her brother Branwell to depict the cruelty and debauchery from which Helen flees, Anne Bronte wrote her masterpiece to reflect the fragile position of women in society and her belief in universal redemption but scandalized readers of the time.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Domestic abuse
Alcohol consumption & abuse
Spouse with alcoholism
Animal abuse

Into the River by Mark Brandi

Into the River by Mark Brandi

Also known as Wimmera.

Growing up in a small country town, Ben and Fab spend their days playing cricket, wanting a pair of Nike Air Maxes and not talking about how Fab’s dad hits him, or how the sudden death of Ben’s next-door neighbour unsettled him. Almost teenagers, they already know some things are better left unsaid.

Then a newcomer arrived. Fab reckoned he was a secret agent and he and Ben staked him out. He looked strong. Maybe even stronger than Fab’s dad. Neither… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Racism & racial slurs
Paedophilia, child sexual abuse & grooming
Domestic violence
Suicide
Graphic dismemberment
Murder
Animal death

The Paris Dressmaker by Kristy Cambron

The Paris Dressmaker by Kristy Cambron

Paris, 1939. Maison Chanel has closed, thrusting haute couture dressmaker Lila de Laurent out of the world of high fashion as Nazi soldiers invade the streets and the City of Lights slips into darkness. Lila’s life is now a series of rations, brutal restrictions, and carefully controlled propaganda while Paris is cut off from the rest of the world. Yet in hidden corners of the city, the faithful pledge to resist. Lila is drawn to La Resistance and is soon using her skills as a dressmaker to infiltrate the Nazi elite. She takes their measurements and designs masterpieces, all while collecting secrets in the glamorous Hôtel Ritz—the heart of the Nazis’ Parisian..… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Antisemitism
Murder
World War Two

The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle by Matt Cain

The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle by Matt Cain

Albert Entwistle was a postman. It was one of the few things everyone knew about him. And it was one of the few things he was comfortable with people knowing.

64-year-old Albert Entwistle has been a postie in a quiet town in Northern England for all his life, living alone since the death of his mam 18 years ago. He keeps himself to himself. He always has. But he’s just learned he’ll be forced to retire at his next birthday. With no friends and nothing to look forward to, the lonely future he faces terrifies him. He realises it’s… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Homomisia
Racism

The World Cannot Give byTara Isabella Burton

The World Cannot Give by Tara Isabella Burton

When shy, sensitive Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan’s Academy in Maine, she dreams that life there will echo her favorite novel, All Before Them, the sole surviving piece of writing by Byronic “prep school prophet” (and St. Dunstan’s alum) Sebastian Webster, who died at nineteen, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She soon finds the intensity she is looking for among the insular, Webster-worshipping members of the school’s chapel choir, which is presided over by the charismatic, neurotic, overachiever Virginia Strauss. Virginia is as fanatical about her newfound… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Lesbomisia
Revenge pornography
Sexual assault
Suicide

Social Creature byTara Isabella Burton

Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton

They go through both bottles of champagne right there on the High Line, with nothing but the stars over them… They drink and Lavinia tells Louise about all the places they will go together when they finish their stories when they are both great writers-to Paris and to Rome and to Trieste… Lavinia will never go. She is going to die soon.

Louise has nothing. Lavinia has everything. After a chance encounter, the two spiral into an intimate, intense, and possibly toxic friendship.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Slut-shaming
Sexual assault
Suicide
Self-harm
Alcohol consumption
Drug abuse
Murder

Shiner by Amy Jo Burns

Shiner by Amy Jo Burns

An hour from the closest West Virginia mining town, fifteen-year-old Wren Bird lives in a cloistered mountain cabin with her parents. They have no car, no mailbox, and no visitors-except for her mother’s lifelong best friend. Every Sunday, Wren’s father delivers winding sermons in an abandoned gas station, where he takes up serpents and praises the Lord for his blighted white eye, proof of his divinity and key to the hold he has over the community, over Wren and her mother… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Rape
Incest

Razorblade Tears by SA Cosby

Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid. The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah’s white husband, Derek. Ike had never fully accepted his son but is devastated by his loss. Derek’s father Buddy Lee was almost as ashamed his father his father was a criminal. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though, and he wants to know who killed his boy… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Racism
Homomisia
Transmisia
Deadnaming
Body horror
Grief & loss depiction
Death of a child
Torture
Gun violence

Blacktop Wasteland by SA Cosby

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

Beauregard “Bug” Montage: husband, father, honest car mechanic. But he was once known – from North Carolina to the beaches of Florida – as the best getaway driver on the East Coast. Just like his father, who disappeared many years ago. After a series of financial calamities, Bug reluctantly takes part in a daring diamond heist to solve his money troubles – and to go straight once and for all. However, when it goes horrifically wrong, he’s sucked into a grimy underworld which threatens everything, and everyone, he holds dear . . .

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Human trafficking
Misogyny
Racism
Fatmisia
Homomisia & homomisic slurs
Hate crime
Emotional & physical child abuse
Alcoholism
Substance addiction
Drug use & abuse
Emesis
Torture
Gun violence
Kidnapping
Car accident

The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin

The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin

It begins in a big yellow house, with a funeral, an iron poker, and a brief variation forever known as the Pause: a free and feral summer in a middle-class Connecticut town. Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that stretches before them, the Skinner siblings—fierce Renee, sensitive Caroline, golden-boy Joe and watchful Fiona—emerge from the Pause staunchly loyal and deeply connected. Two decades later, the siblings find themselves once again confronted with a family crisis that tests the strength of these bonds and forces them to question the life choices they’ve made and to ask what, exactly, they are willing to do for love.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

Substance addiction
Drug use & abuse
Grief & loss depiction
Death of a parent