Release by Patrick Ness

Release by Patrick Ness

It’s Saturday, it’s summer and, although he doesn’t know it yet, everything in Adam Thorn’s life is going to fall apart. Relationships will change, he’ll change, but maybe, just maybe, he’ll find freedom in the release.

Time is running out though, because way across town a ghost as risen from the lake. Searching, yearning, she leaves a trail of destruction in her wake…

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Homomisia
  • Victim blaming
  • Sexual assault
  • Substance addiction
  • Drug use & abuse
  • Graphic dismemberment
  • Murder
  • Strangulation
  • Drowning
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Run by Kody Keplinger

Run by Kody Keplinger

Bo Dickinson is a girl with a wild reputation, a deadbeat dad, and an alcoholic mom. Everyone in town knows the Dickinsons are a bad lot, but Bo doesn’t care what anyone thinks.

Agnes Atwood has never stayed out past ten p.m., never gone on a date and never broken any of her parents’ overbearing rules. Rules that are meant to protect their legally-blind daughter, but Agnes isn’t quite sure what they are protecting her from.

Despite everything, Bo and Agnes become best friends. But when Bo shows up in the middle of the night, police sirens wailing in the distance, Agnes is faced with the biggest choice she’s ever had to make. Run, or stay?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Slut shaming
  • Toxic friendships
  • Substance addiction
  • Drug use & abuse
  • Alcohol consumption
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The Risk by Elle Kennedy

The Risk by Elle Kennedy

Everyone says I’m a bad girl. They’re only partly right—I don’t let fear rule me, and I certainly don’t care what people think. But I draw the line at sleeping with the enemy. As the daughter of Briar’s head hockey coach, I’d be vilified if I hooked up with a player from a rival team.

And that’s who Jake Connelly is. Harvard’s star forward is arrogant, annoying, and too attractive for his own good. But fate is cruel—I require his help to secure a much-coveted internship, and the sexy jerk isn’t making it easy for me.

I need Connelly to be my fake boyfriend. For every fake date, he wants a real one… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism & ableist language
  • Misogyny
  • Substance addiction
  • Panic attack
  • Drug abuse
  • Teen pregnancy recounted
  • Miscarriage recounted
  • Abortion mentioned
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Going Bovine by Libba Bray

Going Bovine by Libba Bray

All 16-year-old Cameron wants is to get through high school—and life in general—with a minimum of effort. It’s not a lot to ask. But that’s before he’s given some bad news: he’s sick and he’s going to die. Which totally sucks. Hope arrives in the winged form of Dulcie, a loopy punk angel/possible hallucination with a bad sugar habit. She tells Cam there is a cure—if he’s willing to go in search of it. With the help of a death-obsessed, video-gaming dwarf and a yard gnome, Cam sets off on the mother of all road trips through a twisted America into the heart of what matters most. 

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Recreational drug use
  • Fire
  • Physical assault
  • Gun violence
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The Dinner by Herman Koch

The Dinner by Herman Koch

The Dinner by Herman Koch

A summer’s evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of politeness – the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every new course, the knives are being sharpened.

Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified – by everyone except their parents.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Homomisia
  • Misogyny
  • Mental illness
  • Drug use
  • Miscarriage
  • Chronic illness
  • Murder
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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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The Dark Half by Stephen King

The Dark Half by Stephen King

Thad Beaumont is a writer, and for a dozen years he has secretly published violent bestsellers under the name of George Stark. But Thad is a healthier and happier man now, the father of infant twins, and starting to write as himself again. He no longer needs George Stark and so, with nationwide publicity, the pseudonym is retired. But George Stark won’t go willingly.

And now Thad would like to say he is innocent. He’d like to say he has nothing to do with the twisted imagination that produced his bestselling novels. He’d like to say he has nothing to do with the series of monstrous murders that keep coming closer to his home. But how can Thad deny the ultimate embodiment of evil that goes by the name he gave it—and signs its crimes with Thad’s bloody fingerprints?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Nightmares
  • Alcoholism & alcohol abuse
  • Smoking
  • Surgery recounted
  • Murder
  • Animal attack (birds)
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Different Seasons by Stephen King

Different Seasons by Stephen King

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption–the most satisfying tale of unjust imprisonment and offbeat escape since The Count of Monte Cristo.

Apt Pupil–a golden California schoolboy and an old man whose hideous past he uncovers enter into a fateful and chilling mutual parasitism.

The Body–four rambunctious young boys venture into the Maine woods and in sunlight and thunder find life, death, and intimations of their own mortality.

The Breathing Method–a tale told in a strange club about a woman determined to give birth no matter what.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Rape, including prison rape
  • Cheating
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Recreational drug use
  • Dismemberment
  • Gun violence
  • Knife violence & stabbing
  • Animal abuse
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All Of My Friends Are Rich by Michael Sarais

All Of My Friends Are Rich by Michael Sarais

Orphan Leo Cotton has finally built a family, but the advent of bipolar depression wakes him from this dreamlife to reveal dark truths about the man he’d married.

One year later, Leo is lost. Embarrassed by a dead-end job that barely pays the bills, he can’t help but notice that those around him are all enjoying success. When his closest friend, Sara, asks him to be her best man, Leo reaches the last straw: how can he possibly afford these lavish festivities on his wages? A Grindr chance encounter reveals that a shortcut to riches does exist . . . but in the end, this reckless route may cost him the loved-ones he aims to impress and welcome terrible danger . . .

Leo’s trip will take him afar, but answers lie only within.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sex work
  • Depression
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Drug use
  • Death of a parent recounted
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The Magicians by Lev Grossman

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery.

He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableist language
  • Sexual assault
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Drug abuse
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