Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day by Seanan McGuire

Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day by Seanan McGuire

When her sister Patty died, Jenna blamed herself. When Jenna died, she blamed herself for that, too. Unfortunately Jenna died too soon. Living or dead, every soul is promised a certain amount of time, and when Jenna passed she found a heavy debt of time in her record. Unwilling to simply steal that time from the living, Jenna earns every day she leeches with volunteer work at a suicide prevention hotline.

But something has come for the ghosts of New York, something beyond reason, beyond death, beyond hope; something that can bind ghosts to mirrors and make them do its bidding. Only Jenna stands in its way.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Suicide*
  • Suicidal ideation*
  • Grief depiction
  • Death themes
  • Death of a sister
  • Death of a husband
  • Death of a daughter
  • Murder
  • Loss of autonomy
  • Death of pet/s, specifically cats

*Main character works at a suicide hotline

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The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

The Empress of Salt & Fortune by Nghi Vo

A young royal from the far north is sent south for a political marriage. Alone and sometimes reviled, she has only her servants on her side. This evocative debut chronicles her rise to power through the eyes of her handmaiden, at once feminist high fantasy and a thrilling indictment of monarchy.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Body shaming
  • Misogyny
  • Parental abandonment
  • Arranged marriage
  • Suicide discussed
  • Pregnancy & childbirth mentioned
  • Nonconsensual & consensual adoption
  • Emesis mentioned
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a partner & wife mentioned
  • Murder
  • Exile
  • War themes, including rebellion & a political coup

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Homomisia
  • Racism
  • Suicide (theme)

The View on the Way Down by Rebecca Wait

The View on the Way Down by Rebecca Wait

This novel is the story of Emma’s two brothers: the one who died five years ago, and the one who left home on the day of the funeral and never came back. It is the story of Emma’s parents, who have been keeping the truth from her, and from each other. It is the story of Emma herself, caught in the middle and trying to work out how everything fell apart.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Suicide (on-page & theme)
  • Attempted suicide
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a brother

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson

In an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a freshman girl stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics who carry her away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, a quarantine is established. The National Guard is summoned.

Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate. Two visiting professors try to protect their newborn baby. And at the hospital, a new life grows within a college girl, unbeknownst to her—even as she sleeps. A psychiatrist, summoned from Los Angeles, attempts to make sense of the illness as it spreads. Those infected are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, more than has ever been recorded. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racist language
  • Suicide
  • Epidemic
  • Animal death
  • Bullying

Shallow Graves by Kali Wallace

Shallow Graves by Kali Wallace

Breezy remembers leaving the party: the warm, wet grass under her feet, her cheek still stinging from a slap to her face. But when she wakes up, scared and pulling dirt from her mouth, a year has passed and she can’t explain how.

Nor can she explain the man lying at her grave, dead from her touch, or why her heartbeat comes and goes. She doesn’t remember who killed her or why. All she knows is that she’s somehow conscious—and not only that, she’s able to sense who around her is hiding a murderous past.

Haunted by happy memories from her life, Breezy sets out to find answers in the gritty, threatening world to which she now belongs—where killers hide in plain sight, and a sinister cult is hunting for strange creatures like her. What she discovers is at once empowering, redemptive, and dangerous.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism & ableist language
  • Racism
  • Victim blaming
  • Domestic abuse
  • Attempted suicide
  • Self-harm
  • Murder
  • Kidnapping
  • Stalking
  • Cults

Malice by Heather Walter

Malice by Heather Walter

Once upon a time, there was a wicked fairy who cursed a line of princesses to die, and could only be broken by true love’s kiss. You’ve heard this before, haven’t you? The handsome prince. The happily-ever-after. Utter nonsense.

Princess Aurora. The last heir to the throne. One who isn’t bothered that I am abhorred and feared for the mysterious dark magic that runs in my veins. Aurora says I should be proud of my gifts. That she . . . cares for me. But with less than a year until that curse will kill her, any future I might see with Aurora is swiftly disintegrating – and she can’t stand to kiss yet another insipid prince. I want to help her. If my power began her curse, perhaps it’s what can lift it. Perhaps, together, we could forge a new world.

Nonsense again. Because we all know how this story ends, don’t we? Aurora is the beautiful princess. And I- I am the villain.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Lesbomisia
  • Suicide recounted
  • Torture mentioned

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

The Strange & Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender. Ava—in all other ways a normal girl—is born with the wings of a bird.

In a quest to understand her peculiar disposition and a growing desire to fit in with her peers, sixteen-year old Ava ventures into the wider world, ill-prepared for what she might discover and naïve to the twisted motives of others. Others like the pious Nathaniel Sorrows, who mistakes Ava for an angel and whose obsession with her grows until the night of the Summer Solstice celebration.

That night, the skies open up, rain and feathers fill the air, and Ava’s quest and her family’s saga build to a devastating crescendo.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Death of a queer character
  • Graphic rape
  • Emotional abuse
  • Alcoholism
  • Suicide
  • Stalking
  • Animal abuse
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The Price Guide to the Occult by Leslye Walton

The Price Guide to the Occult by Leslye Walton

When Rona Blackburn landed on Anathema Island more than a century ago, her otherworldly skills might have benefited friendlier neighbors. Guilt and fear instead led the island’s original eight settlers to burn “the witch” out of her home. So Rona cursed them.

Fast-forward one hundred–some years: All Nor Blackburn wants is to live an unremarkable teenage life. She has reason to hope: First, her supernatural powers, if they can be called that, are unexceptional. Second, her love life is nonexistent, which means she might escape the other perverse side effect of the matriarch’s backfiring curse, too. But then a mysterious book comes out, promising to cast any spell for the right price. Nor senses a storm coming and is pretty sure she’ll be smack in the eye of it.

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Child abuse
  • Rape
  • PTSD
  • Suicide
  • Self-harm
  • Blood & gore depiction
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The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

This is the story of four Londoners – three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching. Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret. Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover. Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war.

Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances…

GoodreadsThe Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Attempted suicide
  • Self-harm
  • Abortion
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • War themes
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