Category Archives: Genres

Mossflower by Brian Jacques

Mossflower by Brian Jacques

The clever and greedy wildcat Tsarmina becomes ruler of all Mossflower Woods and is determined to govern the peaceful woodlanders with an iron paw. The brave mouse Martin and quick-talking mouse thief Gonff meet in the depths of Kotir Castle’s dungeon. The two escape and resolve to end Tsarmina’s tyrannical rule. Joined by Kinny the mole, Martin and Gonff set off on a dangerous quest for Salamandastron, where they are convinced that their only hope, Boar the Fighter, still lives

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a sibling
  • Animal death

Redwall by Brian Jacques

Redwall by Brian Jacques

A quest to recover a legendary lost weapon by bumbling young apprentice monk, mouse Matthias.

Redwall Abbey, tranquil home to a community of peace-loving mice, is threatened by Cluny the Scourge savage bilge rat warlord and his battle-hardened horde. But the Redwall mice and their loyal woodland friends combine their courage and strength.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Antiziganism
  • Animal death
  • Blood depiction

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

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell

Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done.

Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released.

Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris’s questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family’s history?

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Familial abandonment
  • Cheating
  • Incest (step-siblings)
  • Rape
  • Pregnancy from rape
  • Forced adoption
  • Death of a baby
  • Murder by suffocation

I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell

A childhood illness she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. A terrifying encounter on a remote path. A mismanaged labour in an understaffed hospital.

This is a memoir with a difference: seventeen encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal to us a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. It is a book to make you question yourself: what would you do if your life was in danger? How would you react? And what would you stand to lose? I AM, I AM, I AM is a book you will finish newly conscious of your own vulnerability, and determined to make every heartbeat count.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Miscarriage

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & antiziganism
  • Misogyny
  • Child abuse
  • Alcoholism
  • Graphic childbirth
  • Death of a child

Caliban’s War by James Corey

Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey

On Ganymede, breadbasket of the outer planets, a Martian marine watches as her platoon is slaughtered by a monstrous supersoldier. On Earth, a high-level politician struggles to prevent interplanetary war from reigniting. And on Venus, an alien protomolecule has overrun the planet, wreaking massive, mysterious changes and threatening to spread out into the solar system.

In the vast wilderness of space, James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante have been keeping the peace for the Outer Planets Alliance. When they agree to help a scientist search war-torn Ganymede for a missing child, the future of humanity rests on whether a single ship can prevent an alien invasion that may have already begun . . .

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Rape of children mentioned
  • Kidnapping

Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult 

Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult

Diana O’Toole is perfectly on track. She will be married by thirty, done having kids by thirty-five, and move out to the New York City suburbs, all while climbing the professional ladder in the cutthroat art auction world. She’s not engaged just yet, but she knows her boyfriend, Finn, a surgical resident, is about to propose on their romantic getaway to the Galápagos—days before her thirtieth birthday. Right on time.

But then a virus that felt worlds away has appeared in the city, and on the eve of their departure, Finn breaks the news: It’s all hands on deck at the hospital. He has to stay behind. You should still go, he assures her, since it would be a shame for all of their nonrefundable trip to go to waste. And so, reluctantly, she goes… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Dementia
  • Self-harm
  • Suicidal ideation
  • COVD-19
  • Hospitalisation

Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult 

Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult

Paige has only a few vivid memories of her mother, who left when she was five. Now, having left her father behind in Chicago for dreams of art school and marriage to an ambitious young doctor, she finds herself with a child of her own. But her mother’s absence, and shameful memories of her past, makes her doubt both her maternal ability and her sense of self-worth.

Out of Paige’s struggle to find wholeness by searching for her mother and facing her own insecurities, Jodi Picoult crafts an absorbing novel peopled with richly drawn characters. Any mother or child cannot help but relate to the issues and emotions explored within this powerful and moving book.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Parental abandonment
  • Pregnancy