Literary Fiction
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10 summaries
A Very Typical Family
Fifteen years after her actions sent her siblings to prison, Natalie Walker must return to Santa Cruz and reunite with them to inherit their late mother's house, in a darkly funny, tender debut about guilt, forgiveness and second chances.
Broken Country
On a Dorset sheep farm in 1968, a grieving wife's first love comes home with his young son, and a love triangle slides toward a killing and a murder trial.
Dear Edward
A twelve-year-old boy is the only survivor of a plane crash that kills his family, and must learn, slowly and with one fierce friend beside him, how to live afterward.
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver moves David Copperfield to the mountains of Virginia, where a red-haired boy nobody wants narrates his way through foster care, football glory and the opioid epidemic.
Everything I Never Told You
In 1977 Ohio, the favorite daughter of a Chinese American family is found drowned in the town lake, and her parents and siblings discover how little they knew her or each other.
Life of Pi
A sixteen-year-old Indian boy survives a shipwreck and drifts across the Pacific in a lifeboat he must share with a Bengal tiger.
Little Fires Everywhere
A wandering artist and her daughter rent a house in rule-loving Shaker Heights, and a custody fight over a baby sets two mothers, and two ways of living, against each other.
Never Let Me Go
Three friends from an idyllic English boarding school slowly learn what they were made for, in Kazuo Ishiguro's quiet, devastating novel about love, memory and mortality.
The Electric
In the late summer of 1985, a fifteen-year-old finds an abandoned cinema that screens films made by ghosts, for ghosts, in a bittersweet coming-of-age story about loss and the magic of movies.
Where the Crawdads Sing
Abandoned as a child in the North Carolina marsh, Kya raises herself among the gulls and tides, until the town's golden boy turns up dead and she is the one accused.