Tag Archives: Domestic Abuse & Violence

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)

Horns by Joe Hill

Horns by Joe Hill

Ignatius Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke up the next morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache . . . and a pair of horns growing from his temples.

At first Ig thought the horns were a hallucination, the product of a mind damaged by rage and grief. He had spent the last year in a lonely, private purgatory, following the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams, who was raped and murdered under inexplicable circumstances. A mental breakdown would have been the most natural thing in the world. But there was nothing natural about the horns, which were all too real… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism & ableist slurs
  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Homomisia
  • Paedophilia
  • Rape
  • Domestic abuse
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Torture

Birthday Girl by Penelope Douglas

Birthday Girl by Penelope Douglas

He took me in when I had nowhere else to go. He doesn’t use me, hurt me, or forget about me. He listens to me, protects me, and sees me. I can feel his eyes on me over the breakfast table, and my heart pumps so hard when I hear him pull in the driveway after work. I have to stop this. It can’t happen. My sister once told me there are no good men, and if you find one, he’s probably unavailable. Only Pike Lawson isn’t the unavailable one. I am.

I took her in, because I thought I was helping. As the days go by, though, it’s becoming anything but easy. I have to stop my mind from drifting to her and stop holding my breath every time I bump into her in the house. I can’t touch her, and I shouldn’t want to. But we’re not free to give into this. She’s nineteen, and I’m thirty-eight. And her boyfriend’s father. Unfortunately, they both just moved into my house.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Cheating
  • Parental abandonment
  • Intimate partner abuse, off-page
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Death of a friend

Credence by Penelope Douglas

Credence by Penelope Douglas

Tiernan de Haas doesn’t care about anything anymore. The only child of a film producer and his starlet wife, she’s grown up with wealth and privilege but not love or guidance. Shipped off to boarding schools from an early age, it was still impossible to escape the loneliness and carve out a life of her own. The shadow of her parents’ fame followed her everywhere. And when they suddenly pass away, she knows she should be devastated. But has anything really changed? She’s always been alone, hasn’t she? Jake Van der Berg, her father’s stepbrother and her only living relative, assumes… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Misogyny
  • Incest
  • Rape
  • Sexual assault
  • Domestic abuse & violence
  • Child neglect recounted
  • Suicide

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

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca

Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca

Sadomasochism. Obsession. Death. A whirlpool of darkness churns at the heart of a macabre ballet between two lonely young women in an internet chat room in the early 2000s—a darkness that threatens to forever transform them once they finally succumb to their most horrific desires. What have you done today to deserve your eyes?

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Homomisia
  • Parental abandonment & disownment
  • Child abuse recounted
  • Domestic abuse
  • Abusive dom-sub relationship
  • Psychosis
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Attempted suicide
  • Graphic self-harm
  • Pregnancy
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Body horror
  • Death of an infant
  • Animal death & cruelty

This is How We Change the Ending by Vikki Wakefield

This is How We Change the Ending by Vikki Wakefield

Sixteen-year-old Nate McKee is doing his best to be invisible. He’s worried about a lot of things—how his dad treats Nance and his twin half-brothers; the hydro crop in his bedroom; his reckless friend, Merrick.

Nate hangs out at the local youth centre and fills his notebooks with things he can’t say. But when some of his pages are stolen, and his words are graffitied at the centre, Nate realises he has allies. He might be able to make a difference, change his life, and claim his future. Or can he?

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic abuse
  • Child abuse

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

Picture Perfect by Jodi Picoult 

Picture Perfect by Jodi Picoult

To the outside world, they seem to have it all. Cassie Barrett, a renowned anthropologist, and Alex Rivers, one of Hollywood’s hottest actors, met on the set of a motion picture in Africa. They shared childhood tales, toasted the future, and declared their love in a fairy-tale wedding. But when they return to California, something alters the picture of their perfect marriage. A frightening pattern is taking shape—a cycle of hurt, denial, and promises, thinly veiled by glamour.

Torn between fear and something that resembles love, Cassie wrestles with questions she never dreamed she would face: How can she leave? Then again, how can she stay? 

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic abuse & violence

The Shadowed Sun by NK Jemisin

The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin

Gujaareh, the city of dreams, suffers under the imperial rule of the Kisuati Protectorate. A city where the only law was peace now knows violence and oppression. A mysterious and deadly plague now haunts the citizens of Gujaareh, dooming the infected to die screaming in their sleep. Someone must show them the way.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Incestuous rape
  • Domestic abuse
  • Child abuse