The Quiet You Carry by Nikki Barthelmess

The Quiet You Carry by Nikki Barthelmess

Victoria Parker knew her dad’s behavior toward her was a little unusual, but she convinced herself everything was fine—until she found herself locked out of the house at 3:00 a.m., surrounded by flashing police lights.

Now, dumped into a crowded, chaotic foster home, Victoria has to tiptoe around her domineering foster mother, get through senior year at a new school, and somehow salvage her college dreams . . . all while keeping her past hidden.

But some secrets won’t stay buried—especially when unwanted memories make Victoria freeze up at random moments and nightmares disrupt her sleep. Even worse, she can’t stop worrying about her stepsister Sarah, left behind with her father. All she wants is to move forward, but how do you focus on the future when the past won’t leave you alone?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Paedophilia & child sexual assault
  • Incest (father-daughter)
  • Eating disorders
  • Attempted suicide
  • Self harm
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Waking Romeo by Kathryn Barker

Waking Romeo by Kathryn Barker 

Year: 2083. Location: London. Mission: Wake Romeo.

It’s the end of the world. Literally. Time travel is possible, but only forwards. And only a handful of families choose to remain in the ‘now’, living off the scraps that were left behind. Among these are eighteen-year-old Juliet and the love of her life, Romeo. But things are far from rosy for Jules. Romeo is in a coma and she’s estranged from her friends and family, dealing with the very real fallout of their wild romance. Then a handsome time traveller, Ellis, arrives with an important mission that makes Jules question everything she knows about life and love. Can Jules wake Romeo and rewrite her future?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Ableism
  • Suicide recounted
  • Self harm
  • Coma
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Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron

Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron 

Arrah is a young woman from a long line of the most powerful witch doctors in the land. But she fails at magic, fails to call upon the ancestors and can’t even cast the simplest curse.

Shame and disappointment dog her.

When strange premonitions befall her family and children in the kingdom begin to disappear, Arrah undergoes the dangerous and scorned process of selling years of her life for magic. This borrowed power reveals a nightmarish betrayal and a danger beyond what she could have imagined. Now Arrah must find a way to master magic, or at least buy it, in order to save herself and everything she holds dear.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Parental abuse & neglect
  • Suicide
  • Self harm
  • Death of children
  • Blood depiction
  • Murder & mass murder
  • Poisoning
  • Kidnapping
  • Loss of autonomy (mind control)
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Fierce Fragile Hearts by Sara Barnard

Fierce Fragile Hearts by Sara Barnard

‘This time around, I’m going to be so much better. I’m going to prove to them that it was worth waiting on me.’

Two years after a downward spiral took her as low as you can possibly go, Suzanne is starting again. Again. She’s back in Brighton, the only place she felt she belonged, back with her best friends Caddy and Rosie. But they’re about to leave for university. When your friends have been your light in the darkness, what happens when you’re the one left behind?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Slut shaming
  • Physical & emotional parental abuse
  • Attempted suicide mentioned
  • Depression
  • Hospitals
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Beautiful Broken Things by Sara Barnard

Beautiful Broken Things by Sara Barnard

Best friends Caddy and Rosie are inseparable. Their differences have brought them closer, but as she turns sixteen Caddy begins to wish she could be a bit more like Rosie – confident, funny and interesting. Then Suzanne comes into their lives: beautiful, damaged, exciting and mysterious, and things get a whole lot more complicated. As Suzanne’s past is revealed and her present begins to unravel, Caddy begins to see how much fun a little trouble can be. But the course of both friendship and recovery is rougher than either girl realises, and Caddy is about to learn that downward spirals have a momentum of their own. 

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Child abuse & neglect
  • Bipolar Disorder
  • Attempted suicide
  • Self harm
  • Hospitalisation
  • Death of an infant
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The Bone Ships by RJ Barker

The Bone Ships by R.J. Barker

Two nations at war. A prize beyond compare.

For generations, the Hundred Isles have built their ships from the bones of ancient dragons to fight an endless war.

The dragons disappeared, but the battles for supremacy persisted.

Now the first dragon in centuries has been spotted in far-off waters, and both sides see a chance to shift the balance of power in their favour. Because whoever catches it will win not only glory, but the war.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Alcoholism
  • Suicide mentioned
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The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

The ancient city of Troy has withstood a decade under siege of the powerful Greek army, which continues to wage bloody war over a stolen woman—Helen. In the Greek camp, another woman—Briseis—watches and waits for the war’s outcome. She was queen of one of Troy’s neighboring kingdoms, until Achilles, Greece’s greatest warrior, sacked her city and murdered her husband and brothers. Briseis becomes Achilles’s concubine, a prize of battle, and must adjust quickly in order to survive a radically different life, as one of the many conquered women who serve the Greek army.

When Agamemnon, the brutal political leader of the Greek forces, demands Briseis for himself, she finds herself caught between the two most powerful of the Greeks… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Victim blaming
  • Slavery
  • Graphic rape
  • Paedophilia
  • Cheating
  • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Suicide
  • Self harm
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Death of a baby
  • Graphic murder
  • War themes & battle scenes
  • Animal death
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A Noise Downstairs by Linwood Barclay

A Noise Downstairs by Linwood Barclay

College professor Paul Davis is a normal guy with a normal life. Until, driving along a deserted road late one night, he surprises a murderer disposing of a couple of bodies. That’s when Paul’s “normal” existence is turned upside down. After nearly losing his own life in that encounter, he finds himself battling PTSD, depression, and severe problems at work. His wife, Charlotte, desperate to cheer him up, brings home a vintage typewriter—complete with ink ribbons and heavy round keys—to encourage him to get started on that novel he’s always intended to write.

However, the typewriter itself is a problem. Paul swears it’s possessed and types by itself at night. But only Paul can hear the noise coming from downstairs; Charlotte doesn’t hear a thing. And she worries he’s going off the rails… Read more.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Cheating
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Blood depiction
  • Murder
  • Drowning
  • Animal death
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Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks

Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks

When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name “Bone.”

He finds dangerous refuge with a group of biker-thieves, and then hides in the boarded-up summer house of a professor and his wife. He finally settles in an abandoned schoolbus with Rose, a child he rescues from a fast-talking pedophile. There Bone meets I-Man, an exiled Rastafarian, and together they begin a second adventure that takes the reader from Middle America to the ganja-growing mountains of Jamaica. It is an amazing journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal and redemption.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Attempted suicide
  • Recreational drug use & abuse
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White Lines by Armand Baltazar

White Lines by Armand Baltazar

In 1980s New York City, seventeen-year-old Caitlin tries to overcome her mother’s abuse and father’s abandonment by losing herself in nights of clubbing and drugs, followed by days of stumbling aimlessly through school.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Parental abandonment
  • Physical parental abuse recounted
  • Adult-minor relationship mentioned
  • Substance addiction
  • Attempted suicide by overdose mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Graphic drug use & abuse
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