Literary Fiction – Page 35 – Trigger Warning Database

Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

While on her daily walk with her dog in the nearby woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with stones. Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.

Shaky even on her best days, she is also alone, and new to this area, having moved here from her longtime home after the death of her husband, and now deeply alarmed. Her brooding about the note grows quickly into a full-blown obsession, as she explores multiple theories about who Magda was and how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes in the real world, and the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and menacing shape. But is there either a more innocent explanation for all this, or a much more sinister one – one that strikes closer to home?

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Fatmisia
Antiziganism
Grief & loss depiction
Animal cruelty
Death of a dog

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighbourhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors.

Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Rape of a child
Anxiety
Eating disorder
Parent with alcoholism

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Depression
Eating disorders mentioned
Suicide, off-page
Self harm
Drug use & abuse
Abortion mentioned
Cancer
Grief & loss depiction
Death of a parent
Events of 9/11 recounted

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind–and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa’s orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil–and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expects. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Domestic abuse recounted
Self harm
Alcohol abuse
Miscarriage mentioned
Endometriosis

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years’ experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she’s been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don’t want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders or does she intervene?

Ruth hesitates before performing CPR and, as a result, is charged with a serious crime. Kennedy McQuarrie, a white public defender, takes her case but gives unexpected advice: Kennedy insists that mentioning race in the courtroom is not a winning strategy… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Racism
Pregnancy & childbirth
Death of a newborn

Bitter Eden by Tatamkhulu Afrika

Bitter Eden by Tatamkhulu Afrika

This frank and beautifully written novel draws heavily on the author’s World War II experiences as a captive in North Africa and a prisoner of war in Italy and Germany. Three men who see themselves as “straight” must negotiate the emotions that are brought to the surface by the physical closeness of survival in the male-only camps. The complex rituals of camp life and the strange loyalties and deep bonds between the men are compellingly depicted in this tender, bitter, powerful tale of lives inexorably changed and a war whose ending does not bring peace.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Homomisia
Child sexual abuse, implied

Little Gods by Jenny Ackland

Little Gods by Jenny Ackland

Olive Lovelock has just turned twelve. She is smart, fanciful and brave and on the cusp of something darker than the small world she has known her entire life. When she learns that she once had a baby sister who died — a child unacknowledged by her close but challenging family — Olive becomes convinced it was murder. Her obsession with the mystery and relentless quest to find out what happened have seismic repercussions for the rest of her family and their community. As everything starts to change it is Olive herself who has the most to lose as the secrets she unearths multiply and take on complicated lives of their own.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Suicide
Death of a baby sister
Nonconsensual adoption

Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

As Nahr sits, locked away in solitary confinement, she spends her days reflecting on the dramatic events that landed her in prison in a country she barely knows. Born in Kuwait in the 70s to Palestinian refugees, she dreamed of falling in love with the perfect man, raising children, and possibly opening her own beauty salon. Instead, the man she thinks she loves jilts her after a brief marriage, her family teeters on the brink of poverty, she’s forced to prostitute herself, and the US invasion of Iraq makes her a refugee, as her parents had been. After trekking through another temporary home in Jordan, she lands in Palestine, where she finally makes a home, falls in love, and her destiny unfolds under Israeli occupation.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Rape
Gang rape
Sex work
Abortion
Death of a father
Torture

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

Homophobia
Rape, paedophilia & child sexual abuse
Physical & emotional child abuse
Domestic abuse
Alcoholism
Infidelity
Death of a parent

The Dinner by Herman Koch

The Dinner by Herman Koch

A summer’s evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of politeness – the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every new course, the knives are being sharpened.

Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified – by everyone except their parents.

Goo d reads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Homomisia
Misogyny
Mental illness
Drug use
Miscarriage
Chronic illness
Murder