The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.

For with the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the ‘clerk class’, the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. And as passions mount and frustration gathers, no one can foresee just how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.

.GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Queermisia
  • Abortion
  • Miscarriage

Force of Nature by Jane Harper 

Force of Nature by Jane Harper

The hike through the rugged Giralang Ranges is meant to take the office colleagues out of their air-conditioned comfort zone and encourage teamwork and resilience. At least, that’s what the corporate retreat website advertises.

Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk has a keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing hiker, Alice Russell. Because Alice knew secrets, about the company she worked for and the people she worked with.

The four returning women tell Falk a tale of fear, violence and fractured trust during their days in the remote Australian bushland. And as Falk delves into the disappearance of Alice, he begins to suspect some dangers ran far deeper than anyone knew.

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Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Fatmisia & body shaming
  • Cheating, on-page
  • Revenge pornography of a minor discussed
  • Alcohol consumption, on-page
  • Alcoholism & substance addiction discussed
  • Drug use & abuse recounted
  • Graphic smoking, on-page
  • Eating disorder and disordered food & weight thoughts, on-page
  • Abortion & miscarriage mentioned
  • Blood & injury depiction, including a fractured wrist, head wounds, burn scars, and hospitalisation for an infected snakebite
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a father recounted
  • Murder
  • Animal attack (snake)
  • Bullying

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay

In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of colour (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through the culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings

  • Queermisia
  • Ableism & ableist slurs
  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Classism
  • Misogyny & sexism discussed (theme)
  • Hate crimes
  • Rape culture discussed
  • Abortion mentioned
  • Eating disorders mentioned
  • Murder mentioned
  • Terrorism mentioned
  • Police brutality mentioned

Call It What You Want by Brigid Kemmerer

Call It What You Want by Brigid Kemmerer

When his dad is caught embezzling funds from half the town, Rob goes from popular lacrosse player to social pariah. Even worse, his father’s failed suicide attempt leaves Rob and his mother responsible for his care.

Everyone thinks of Maegan as a typical overachiever, but she has a secret of her own after the pressure got to her last year. And when her sister comes home from college pregnant, keeping it from her parents might be more than she can handle.

When Rob and Maegan are paired together for a calculus project, they’re both reluctant to let anyone through the walls they’ve built. But when Maegan learns of Rob’s plan to fix the damage caused by his father, it could ruin more than their fragile new friendship…

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism & ableist language
  • Classism (theme)
  • Queermisia & homomisia mentioned
  • Conversion therapy recounted
  • Cheating
  • Physical & emotional child abuse
  • Teacher-student relationship
  • Disownment recounted
  • Panic attacks
  • Suicide discussed
  • Graphic attempted suicide of a parent recounted
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Pregnancy
  • Abortion discussed
  • Emesis (multiple scenes)
  • Blood & graphic physical injuries depiction
  • Stroke mentioned
  • Attempted murder by strangulation, off-page
  • Physical assault, on-page
  • Gun violence recounted
  • Imprisonment of a parent
  • Bullying
  • Poverty (theme)

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Addiction
  • Alcoholism
  • Abortion
  • Cancer
  • Death of a parent
  • Depiction of grief

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.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Pregnancy & teen pregnancy
  • Abortion

Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult 

Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult

When Willow is born with severe osteogenesis imperfecta, her parents are devastated–she will suffer hundreds of broken bones as she grows, a lifetime of pain. Every expectant parent will tell you that they don’t want a perfect baby, just a healthy one. Charlotte and Sean O’Keefe would have asked for a healthy baby, too, if they’d been given the choice. Instead, their lives are made up of sleepless nights, mounting bills, the pitying stares of “luckier” parents, and maybe worst of all, the what-ifs. What if their child had been born healthy? But it’s all worth it because Willow is, funny as it seems, perfect. She’s smart as a whip, on her way to being as pretty as her mother, kind, brave, and for a five-year-old an unexpectedly deep source of wisdom. Willow is Willow, in sickness and in health.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Infidelity
  • Eating disorder
  • Self-harm
  • Abortion

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?

GoodreadsThe 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

Himmler’s Cook by Franz-Olivier Giesbert

Himmler’s Cook by Franz-Olivier Giesbert

“History is a bitch. She has taken everything from me. My children. My parents. My great, true love. My cats. I don’t understand the stupid veneration that the human race feels for her.”

Aged 105, Rose has endured more than her fair share of hardships: the Armenian genocide, the Nazi regime, and the delirium of Maoism. Yet somehow, despite all the suffering, Rose never loses her joie de vivre. As she looks back over her long life—one of survival and, sometimes, one of retribution—she recalls those unique experiences that added such spice to her life, whether it was being a confidante to Hitler, a friend to Simone de Beauvoir or cooking for Heinrich Himmler.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Antisemitism
  • Child sexual slavery
  • Rape
  • Child sexual abuse
  • Cheating
  • Attempted abortion
  • Pregnancy from rape
  • Death of a husband
  • Death of a child
  • Murder
  • Genocide
  • World War Two & the Holocaust
  • Animal death

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.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Rape
  • Gang rape
  • Sex work
  • Abortion
  • Death of a father
  • Torture