Category Archives: Literary Fiction

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle-class peers. After a messy break-up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.

As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Child abuse
  • Domestic abuse
  • Workplace harassment
  • Depression
  • Anxiety & panic attacks
  • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Overstory by Richard Powers

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

These four, and five other strangers – each summoned in different ways by trees – are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Cheating
  • Suicide
  • Police brutality
  • Torture
  • Asphyxiation
  • Eco-terrorism

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexual assault
  • Estrangement
  • Grey-area cheating
  • Childbirth
  • Dead bodies & body parts
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Physical injuries & wounds
  • Body horror
  • Cannibalism (theme)
  • Dismemberment
  • Involuntary pregnancy
  • Infertility themes
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a parent
  • Imprisonment
  • Torture
  • Animal cruelty & abuse

Neighbors by Danielle Steel

Neighbors by Danielle Steel

Meredith White was one of Hollywood’s most recognizable faces. But a personal tragedy cut her acting career short and alienated her from her family. For the last fifteen years, Meredith has been living alone in San Francisco with two trusted caretakers. Then, on a muggy late summer day, a massive earthquake strikes Northern California, plunging the Bay Area into chaos. Without a moment’s hesitation, Meredith invites her stunned and shaken neighbours into her mostly undamaged home as the recovery begins.

These people did not even realize that movie star Meredith White was living on their street. Now, they are sharing her mansion, as well as their most closely kept secrets. Without the walls and privacy of their own homes… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic violence
  • Rape

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Problem: You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years now engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes–it would all be too awkward–and you can’t say no–it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations you’ve received from around the world.

Question: How do you arrange to skip town? Answer: You accept them all. If you are Arthur Less.

Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Cheating
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Drug use
  • Terminal illness
  • Stroke

Islands of Mercy by Rose Tremain

Islands of Mercy by Rose Tremain

In the city of Bath, in the year 1865, an extraordinary young woman renowned for her nursing skills is convinced that some other destiny will one day show itself to her. But when she finds herself torn between a dangerous affair with a female lover and the promise of a conventional marriage to an apparently respectable doctor, her desires begin to lead her towards a future she had never imagined.

Meanwhile, on the wild island of Borneo, an eccentric British ‘rajah’, Sir Ralph Savage, overflowing with philanthropy but compromised by his passions, sees his schemes relentlessly undermined by his own fragility, by man’s innate greed and by the invasive power of the forest itself.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Domestic violence
  • Suicide
  • Miscarriage
  • Graphic surgery
  • Blood & gore depiction

How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang 

How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C. Pam Zhang

Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the spectres of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexism
  • Racism
  • Sexual assault
  • Animal death
  • Animal cruelty

Red Clocks by Brian Jacques

Red Clocks by Brian Jacques

Abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers.

Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro’s best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling homeopath, or “mender,” who brings all their fates together when she’s arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Pregnancy & teen pregnancy
  • Abortion

After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell

After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell

A distraught young woman boards a train at King’s Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight of something so terrible in a mirror at Waverley Station that she gets on the next train back to London.

AFTER YOU’D GONE follows Alice’s mental journey through her own past, after a traffic accident has left her in a coma. A love story that is also a story of absence, and of how our choices can reverberate through the generations, it slowly draws us closer to a dark secret at a family’s heart.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Abusive relationship
  • Rape
  • Suicide
  • Coma

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell

Gretta Riordan wakes on a stultifying July morning to find that her husband of forty years has gone to get the paper and vanished, cleaning out his bank account along the way. Gretta’s three grown children converge on their parents’ home for the first time in years: Michael Francis, a history teacher whose marriage is failing; Monica, with two stepdaughters who despise her and a blighted past that has driven away the younger sister she once adored; and Aoife, the youngest, now living in Manhattan, a smart, immensely resourceful young woman who has arranged her entire life to conceal a devastating secret.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Disappearance of a spouse & father