Category Archives: Romance

Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult

For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts. As Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s journals, the story… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Alcoholism
  • Animal death & injury (elephant)

Larger Than Life by Jodi Picoult

Larger Than Life by Jodi Picoult

A researcher studying memory in elephants, Alice is fascinated by the bonds between mother and calf—the mother’s powerful protective instincts and her newborn’s unwavering loyalty. Living on a game reserve in Botswana, Alice is able to view the animals in their natural habitat—while following an important rule: She must only observe and never interfere. Then she finds an orphaned young elephant in the bush and cannot bear to leave the helpless baby behind. Thinking back on her own childhood, and on her shifting relationship with her mother, Alice risks her career to… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Animal death & injury (elephant)

The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She’s on a plane when the flight attendant makes an announcement: prepare for a crash landing. She braces herself as thoughts flash through her mind. The shocking thing is, the thoughts are not of her husband, but a man she last saw fifteen years ago: Wyatt Armstrong. Dawn, miraculously, survives the crash, but so do all the doubts that have suddenly been raised. She has led a good life. Back in Boston, there is her husband, Brian, her beloved daughter, and her work as a death doula, where she helps ease… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Fatmisia
  • Infidelity
  • Plane crash

The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult

The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult

Sage Singer is a baker. She works through the night, preparing the day’s breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother’s death. When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage’s grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Despite their differences, they see in each other the hidden scars that others can’t, and they become companions. Everything changes on the day that Josef confesses a long-buried and shameful secret—one that nobody else in town would ever… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Nazism
  • Infidelity
  • Facial scar
  • Death of grandparents in a concentration camp during the Holocaust

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists. 

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Misogyny
  • Child abuse & neglect
  • Domestic violence
  • Blood depiction
  • Murder

Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

At the dawn of the new millennium, Colombia is a country devastated by half a century of violence. Elena and Mauro are teenagers when they meet, their blooming love an antidote to the mounting brutality of life in Bogotá. Once their first daughter is born, and facing grim economic prospects, they set their sights on the United States. They travel to Houston and send wages back to Elena’s mother, all the while weighing whether to risk overstaying their tourist visas or to return to Bogotá. As their family expands, and they move again and again, their decision to ignore their exit dates plunges the young family into the… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Racism
  • Rape

All That Remains by Sue Black

All That Remains by Sue Black

Sue Black confronts death every day. As Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, she focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment, and when investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident or natural disaster. In All That Remains she reveals the many faces of death she has come to know, using key cases to explore how forensic science has developed, and what her work has taught her. Do we expect a book about death to be sad? Macabre? Sue’s book is neither. There is tragedy, but there is also humour… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Graphic dead bodies
  • Murder & genocide
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a parent
  • Natural disasters

Heroes Are My Weakness by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Heroes Are My Weakness by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The dead of winter. An isolated island off the coast of Maine. A man. A woman. A sinister house looming over the sea. He’s a reclusive writer whose macabre imagination creates chilling horror novels. She’s a down-on-her-luck actress reduced to staging kids’ puppet shows. He knows a dozen ways to kill with his bare hands. She knows a dozen ways to kill with laughs. But she’s not laughing now. When she was a teenager, he terrified her. Now they’re trapped together on a snowy island off the coast of Maine… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Domestic violence
  • Murder
  • Gun violence
  • Fire

Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez

Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez

In the 1950s, ex-boxer Norman Alonso is a determined and humble Jamaican who has immigrated to Britain with his wife and children to secure a brighter future. Blighted with unexpected illness and racism, Norman and his family are resilient, but are all too aware that their family will need more than just hope to survive in their new country. At the turn of the millennium, Jesse seeks a fresh start in London, escaping a broken immediate family, a repressive religious community and his depressed hometown in the industrial Black Country. But once he arrives he finds… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Rape
  • Sex work
  • Drug use

Blaine for the Win by Robbie Couch

Blaine for the Win by Robbie Couch

High school junior Blaine Bowers has it all—the perfect boyfriend, a pretty sweet gig as a muralist for local Windy City businesses, a loving family, and awesome, talented friends. And he is absolutely, 100% positive that aforementioned perfect boyfriend—​senior student council president and Mr. Popular of Wicker West High School, Joey—is going to invite Blaine to spend spring break with his family in beautiful, sunny Cabo San Lucas. Except Joey breaks up with him instead. In public. On their one-year anniversary…. Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Anxiety
  • Depressive episode
  • Death of a parent from cancer, off-page (sc)