The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Parental abuse
  • Cheating
  • Suicide
  • Attempted murder
  • Animal death
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When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

England, 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country’s most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him; the mysterious disappearance of his parents, in Old Shanghai, when he was a small boy. Now, as the world lurches towards total war, Banks realises the time has come for him to return to the city of his childhood and at last solve the mystery – that only by his doing so will civilisation be saved from the approaching catastrophe.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Attempted suicide
  • Drug abuse
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Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her.

But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life’s lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world–until the unthinkable happens.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Slavery mentioned
  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Antiziganism
  • Victim blaming
  • Slut shaming
  • Domestic abuse
  • Child neglect
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Murder
  • Animal death
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Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.

Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Rape
  • Teacher-student relationship
  • Domestic violence
  • Suicide
  • Murder
  • Animal abuse
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Under the Magnolias by T. I. Lowe

Under the Magnolias by T. I. Lowe

Under the Magnolias by T. I. Lowe

Magnolia, South Carolina, 1980
Austin Foster is barely a teenager when her mama dies giving birth to twins, leaving her to pick up the pieces while holding her six siblings together and doing her best to stop her daddy from retreating into his personal darkness.

Scratching out a living on the family’s tobacco farm is as tough as it gets. When a few random acts of kindness help to ease the Fosters’ hardships, Austin finds herself relying upon some of Magnolia’s most colorful citizens for friendship and more. But it’s next to impossible to hide the truth about the goings-on at Nolia Farms, and Austin’s desperate attempts to save face all but break her.

Just when it seems she might have something more waiting for her–with the son of a wealthy local family who she’s crushed on for years–her father makes a choice that will crack wide-open the family’s secrets and lead to a public reckoning. There are consequences for loving a boy like Vance Cumberland, but there is also freedom in the truth.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Attempted suicde
  • Bipolar disorder
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Dark Room by Tom Becker

Dark Room by Tom Becker

When Darla and her feckless dad, Hopper, move to Saffron Hills, Darla hopes it’ll be a new start for the both of them. But she stands no chance of fitting in with the image-obsessed in-crowd at her new school. Then one of her classmates is brutally killed when taking a photo of herself. A murder Darla herself predicted in a bloody vision. When more teens die in a similar fashion it appears that a serial killer is on the loose – the ‘Selfie Slayer’. Darla alone is convinced that the murderer might not be flesh and blood…

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Transmisia
  • Suicide recounted
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Death of a parent recounted
  • Death of a friend
  • Murder
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Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father.

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Paedophilia
  • Suicide
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The Traitor’s Kiss by Erin Beaty

The Traitor’s Kiss by Erin Beaty

With a sharp tongue and an unruly temper, Sage Fowler is not what they’d call a lady―which is perfectly fine with her. Deemed unfit for marriage, Sage is apprenticed to a matchmaker and tasked with wrangling other young ladies to be married off for political alliances. She spies on the girls―and on the soldiers escorting them.

As the girls’ military escort senses a political uprising, Sage is recruited by a handsome soldier to infiltrate the enemy ranks. The more she discovers as a spy, the less certain she becomes about whom to trust―and Sage becomes caught in a dangerous balancing act that will determine the fate of her kingdom.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Sexual assault, including nonconsensual kiss and unwanted touching
  • Domestic abuse mentioned
  • Suicide
  • Miscarriage mentioned
  • Torture mentioned
  • Poisoning
  • Knife violence

The Good Girls by Claire Eliza Bartlett

The Good Girls by Claire Eliza Bartlett

The troublemaker. The overachiever. The cheer captain. The dead girl. Like every high school in America, Jefferson-Lorne High contains all of the above.

After the shocking murder of senior Emma Baines, three of her classmates are at the top of the suspect list: Claude, the notorious partier; Avery, the head cheerleader; and Gwen, the would-be valedictorian.

Everyone has a label, whether they like it or not–and Emma was always known as a good girl. But appearances are never what they seem. And the truth behind what really happened to Emma may just be lying in plain sight. As long-buried secrets come to light, the clock is ticking to find Emma’s killer–before another good girl goes down.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Attempted coerced marriage
  • Staged suicide
  • Emesis
  • Murder mentioned
  • Poisoning
  • Drowning
  • War themes
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The Winter Duke by Claire Eliza Bartlett

The Winter Duke by Claire Eliza Bartlett

When Ekata’s brother is finally named heir, there will be nothing to keep her at home in Kylma Above with her murderous family. Not her books or science experiments, not her family’s icy castle atop a frozen lake, not even the tantalizingly close Kylma Below, a mesmerizing underwater kingdom that provides her family with magic. But just as escape is within reach, her parents and twelve siblings fall under a strange sleeping sickness.

In the space of a single night, Ekata inherits the title of duke, her brother’s warrior bride, and ever-encroaching challengers from without—and within—her own ministry. Nothing has prepared Ekata for diplomacy, for war, for love…or for a crown she has never wanted.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Attempted coerced marriage
  • Staged suicide
  • Emesis
  • Murder mentioned
  • Poisoning
  • Drowning
  • War themes
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