Fifty Shades Freed by EL James

Fifty Shades Freed by E.L. James

When unworldly student Anastasia Steele first encountered the driven and dazzling young entrepreneur Christian Grey it sparked a sensual affair that changed both of their lives irrevocably. Shocked, intrigued, and, ultimately, repelled by Christian’s singular erotic tastes, Ana demands a deeper commitment. Determined to keep her, Christian agrees.

Now, Ana and Christian have it all—love, passion, intimacy, wealth, and a world of possibilities for their future. But Ana knows that loving her Fifty Shades will not be easy, and that being together will pose challenges that neither of them would anticipate. Ana must somehow learn to share Christian’s opulent lifestyle without sacrificing her own identity. And Christian must overcome his compulsion to control as he wrestles with the demons of a tormented past.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Attempted sexual assault recounted
  • Statutory rape recounted
  • Cheating mentioned
  • Domestic violence mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Unplanned pregnancy
  • Hospitalisation
  • Parent in a medically-induced coma because of a car accident
  • Death of a mother from an overdose recounted
  • Attempted murder
  • Gun violence
  • Kidnapping & attempted kidnapping
  • Blackmail
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Switch by A. S. King

Switch by A. S. King

Switch by A. S. King

Tru Beck is a teenage girl from Pennsylvania who lives in a world that has become trapped in a fold in time and space, where “real” time has stopped but humanity continues to mark artificial time based on a website called N3WCLOCK.com. Tru lives in a house that has a switch at its center. No one knows what the switch controls, but her father continually builds larger and larger boxes around the switch (Tru lives in Box #7). Tru leaves the box through a Tru-shaped hole to go to school, where she pays no attention to the new “Solution Time” curriculum. In fact, the only interesting thing that’s ever happened to Tru at school is when she discovers (on her first try) that she can throw a javelin farther than any human has ever thrown anything before in human history.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Toxic relationship
  • Domestic abuse
  • Emotional abuse
  • Physical abuse
  • Paedophilia implied
  • Statutory mentioned
  • Mental illness
  • Suicidal thoughts
  • Animal cruelty
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Homomisia, including internalised homomisia & homomisic slurs
  • Rape recounted
  • Parental abuse
  • Domestic abuse mentioned
  • Substance addiction
  • Recreational drug use & abuse
  • Cancer
  • Death of a grandparent
  • Vietnam War discussed
  • Animal abuse
  • Bullying
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Insomnia by Stephen King

Insomnia by Stephen King

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovers this when she is nine years old. Lost in the woods.

Trisha has only veered a little way off the path. But in her panic to get back to her family, she takes a turning that leads into the tangled undergrowth, deeper into the woods.

At first it’s just the bugs, midges and mosquitoes. Then comes the hunger. For comfort she tunes her Walkman into broadcasts of the Red Sox baseball games and the performances of her hero Tom Gordon.

As darkness begins to fall and Trisha struggles for survival and a way out, she realizes that she is not alone. There’s something else in the woods – watching. Waiting…

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic violence
  • Sleep maintenance insomnia (theme)
  • Cancer
  • Abortion
  • Fire
  • Animal abuse
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Duma Key by Stephen King

Duma Key by Stephen King

When Edgar Freemantle moves to the remote island of Duma Key to escape his past, he doesn’t expect to find much there.

But Duma has been waiting for him. The shells beneath his house are whispering to him, and something in the view from his window urges him to discover a talent he never knew he had.

Edgar Freemantle begins to paint. And as he paints, the island’s secrets begin to stir. Secrets of children lost in the undertow, of a ghost ship riding the distant horizon – and a family’s buried past reaching long hands into the present.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic violence
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Attempted suicide by gunshot recounted
  • Dementia
  • Blood depiction
  • Physical injuries from a workplace accident, including an amputated right arm and a head injury impairing speech, vision and memory
  • Death of a wife & daughter recounted
  • Death of a sister by drowning
  • Paternal flicide by drowning
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Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

Suspected of murdering the crippled widow for whom she worked as a housekeeper and companion, Dolores Claiborne has a story to tell. But it isn’t the one the police are expecting to hear. It’s a little darker, a little stranger – and a lot more horrifying.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic abuse & violence
  • Marital rape
  • Paedophilia & incestuous child sexual abuse (father-daughter)
  • Alcoholism & alcohol abuse
  • Hallucinations
  • Dementia
  • Stroke recounted
  • Death of a husband in a car accident
  • Murder
  • Death from a fall
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Cujo by Stephen King

Cujo by Stephen King

Outside a peaceful town in central Maine, a monster is waiting… Cujo is a huge Saint Bernard dog, the best friend Brett Camber has ever had. One day Cujo chases a rabbit into a bolt-hole, a cave inhabited by some very sick bats. What happens to Cujo, how he becomes a horrifying vortex inexorably drawing in all the people around him.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Cheating
  • Domestic violence
  • Stalking
  • Gun violence
  • Animal attack, including death from a dog attack (theme)
  • Animal death (dog)
  • Animal injury & illness
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‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

Ben Mears has returned to Jerusalem’s Lot in hopes that exploring the history of the Marsten House, an old mansion long the subject of rumor and speculation, will help him cast out his personal devils and provide inspiration for his new book. But when two young boys venture into the woods, and only one returns alive, Mears begins to realize that something sinister is at work—in fact, his hometown is under siege from forces of darkness far beyond his imagination. And only he, with a small group of allies, can hope to contain the evil that is growing within the borders of this small New England town.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Rape
  • Child abuse
  • Domestic abuse
  • Cheating
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Alcoholism
  • Death of a child
  • Disappearance of a child
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It by Stephen King

It by Stephen King

Welcome to Derry, Maine. It’s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real.

They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But the promise they made twenty-eight years ago calls them reunite in the same place where, as teenagers, they battled an evil creature that preyed on the city’s children. Now, children are being murdered again and their repressed memories of that terrifying summer return as they prepare to once again battle the monster lurking in Derry’s sewers.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Homomisia
  • Hate crimes
  • Sexual assault
  • Domestic abuse
  • Suicide
  • Graphic blood & gore depiction
  • Physical injuries, including broken bones & amputation
  • Dead bodies
  • Decapitation
  • Hospitalisation
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a father
  • Death of a friend
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Bullying
  • Animal death
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Alan Cole Is Not a Coward by Eric Bell

Alan Cole Is Not a Coward by Eric Bell

Alan Cole can’t stand up to his cruel brother, Nathan. He can’t escape the wrath of his demanding father, who thinks he’s about as exceptional as a goldfish. And—scariest of all—he can’t let the cute boy across the cafeteria know he has a crush on him.

But when Nathan discovers Alan’s secret, his older brother announces a high-stakes round of Cole vs. Cole. Each brother must complete seven nearly impossible tasks; whoever finishes the most wins the game. If Alan doesn’t want to be outed to all of Evergreen Middle School, he’s got to become the most well-known kid in school, get his first kiss, and stand up to Dad. Alan’s determined to prove—to Nathan, to the world, to himself—that this goldfish can learn to swim.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Child abuse
  • Domestic violence
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