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Recommendations based on Serenaby Ron Rash
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Winter's Bone
by Daniel Woodrell
A teenage girl's struggle to save her family from poverty and despair in the rural Ozarks.
In the rural Ozarks of Missouri , seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly looks after her mentally ill mother, twelve-year-old brother Sonny, and six-year-old sister Ashlee. She makes sure her siblings eat and ... (Wikipedia)
The Cove
by Ron Rash
A haunting tale of love, loss, and betrayal set in the Appalachian Mountains.
The novel takes place in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina in 1918. Laurel Shelton lives in the cove with her brother Hank, who has just returned home from fighting in World War I and is ... (Wikipedia)
Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
Epic tale of two former Texas Rangers on a cattle drive from Texas to Montana.
It is the late 1870s. , Captain Woodrow F. Call and Captain Augustus "Gus" McCrae, two famous retired Texas Rangers , run the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium in the small Texas border ... (Wikipedia)
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
by Anne Tyler
A family grapple with their disappointments, as they come to terms with the past.
Pearl Tull is a rigid perfectionist. She has three children with her husband, traveling salesman Beck, who abandons the family. After Beck leaves, Pearl struggles to maintain a front as if nothing is ... (Wikipedia)
The Devil All the Time
by Donald Ray Pollock
A dark tale of sin and redemption, set in a rural southern town.
The Devil All the Time follows the events and fates of various characters who all carry their own secrets from the past. As the novel progresses the lives of these people converge in unexpected ways. ... (Wikipedia)
A Land More Kind Than Home
by Wiley Cash
An exploration of the rural American South, casting a spotlight on the bonds of family and the power of faith.
In his phenomenal debut novel—a mesmerizing literary thriller about the bond between two brothers and the evil they face in a small North Carolina town—author Wiley Cash displays a remarkable talent ... (Barnes & Noble)
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
Exploration of the timeless struggle between good and evil, set against a backdrop of a family saga.
In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas ... (Goodreads)
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy
A man's passage from a broken home to embracing a life of freedom and solitude.
The novel begins with Suttree observing police as they pull a suicide victim from the river. Suttree is living alone in a houseboat, on the fringes of society on the Tennessee River, earning money by ... (Wikipedia)
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
by David Wroblewski
An epic tale of family and loyalty set in a rural Wisconsin landscape.
Forte's Children Edgar comes from a line of dog breeders. After buying a farm, his grandfather, John Sawtelle, rents out the farmland and starts dog breeding . He and his wife have two sons, Edgar's ... (Wikipedia)
The Silver Linings Playbook
by Matthew Quick
A man with bipolar disorder tries to rebuild his life after being released from a mental institution. He finds hope and love in unexpected places.
The book is narrated through the eyes of Pat Peoples, and occasionally Tiffany's through letters. A former history teacher who has moved back to his childhood home in Collingswood, New Jersey , after ... (Wikipedia)
Look Homeward, Angel
by Thomas Wolfe
A young man's quest for meaning and identity, journeying through a world of broken dreams.
The book is divided into three parts, with a total of forty chapters. The first 90 pages of the book deal with an early biography of Gant's parents, very closely based on the actual history of ... (Wikipedia)
The Gashlycrumb Tinies
by Edward Gorey
An alphabet book featuring children meeting their untimely demise in various ways, illustrated in Gorey's signature macabre style.
The Gashlycrumb Tinies: or, After the Outing is an abecedarian book written by Edward Gorey that was first published in 1963. Gorey tells the tale of 26 children (each representing a letter of the ... (Goodreads)
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
by Alan Bradley
A young girl's detective journey to solve a murder mystery in a picturesque English village.
As the novel opens, Flavia Sabina de Luce schemes revenge against her two older sisters, Ophelia (17) and Daphne (13), who have locked her inside a closet in Buckshaw, the family's country manor home ... (Wikipedia)
Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
A tangled web of family secrets, betrayal, and tragedy in the American South.
Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen , a white man born into poverty in West Virginia who moves to Mississippi with the complementary aims of gaining wealth and becoming a ... (Wikipedia)
The Crossing
by Cormac McCarthy
A father and son's perilous journey across a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Following All the Pretty Horses in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy is a novel whose force of language is matched only by its breadth of experience and depth of thought. In the bootheel of New Mexico ... (Goodreads)
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
by Cormac McCarthy
A violent and bloody western epic, exploring the depths of human depravity.
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." ... (Barnes & Noble)
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
A tale of the consequences of a child's mistake, and how its effects ripple through generations.
Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old English girl with a talent for writing, lives at her family's country estate with her parents Jack and Emily Tallis. Her older sister Cecilia has recently graduated from ... (Wikipedia)
The Lacuna
by Barbara Kingsolver
Exploring the ties between art, politics and identity in tumultuous 1930s Mexico.
The novel tells the story of Harrison William Shepherd beginning with his childhood in Mexico during the 1930s. His parents are separated so he lives back and forth between the United States with his ... (Wikipedia)
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
A collection of short stories exploring the human condition, from the comic to the grotesque.
This now classic book revealed Flannery O'Connor as one of the most original and provocative writers to emerge from the South. Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often ... (Goodreads)
Sarah's Key
by Tatiana de Rosnay
A French journalist unravels an untold story of the Holocaust, uncovering hidden secrets.
From beloved international sensation and #1, New York Times, bestselling author Tatiana de Rosnay come's her most celebrated novel, Sarah's Key,—now in mass market paperback!, Paris, July 1942: ... (Barnes & Noble)
Nightwoods
by Charles Frazier
A woman is tasked with raising her deceased sister's twins in a secluded mountain cabin, where she confronts her own troubled past and dangerous present.
The extraordinary author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons returns with a dazzling new novel of suspense and love set in small-town North Carolina in the early 1960s. Charles Frazier puts his ... (Goodreads)
The Paris Wife
by Paula McLain
A woman's journey of self-discovery, navigating the complexities of a passionate and tumultuous relationship.
The Paris Wife focuses on the romance, marriage and divorce of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley Richardson, who met when Hemingway was 20 years old, and Richardson 28. They marry and move ... (Wikipedia)
Breathing Lessons
by Anne Tyler
A couple's journey of self-discovery over the course of one day.
The story describes the joys and pains of the ordinary marriage of Ira and Maggie Moran as they travel from Baltimore to attend a funeral and back home again in one day. It also examines Maggie's ... (Wikipedia)
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
An escaped slave's daring escape to freedom, fighting against the brutality of slavery.
The story is told in the third person, focusing mainly on Cora. Scattered single chapters also focus on Cora's mother Mabel, the slavecatcher Ridgeway, a reluctant slave sympathizer named Ethel, and ... (Wikipedia)
I Am Pilgrim
by Terry Hayes
A former operative is called back into action to track down a terrorist plotting a global attack.
A breakneck race against time...and an implacable enemy. An anonymous young woman murdered in a run-down hotel, all identifying characteristics dissolved by acid. A father publicly beheaded in the ... (Goodreads)
The Widow of the South
by Robert Hicks
Based on a true story, a woman struggles to cope with the aftermath of the Civil War and the Battle of Franklin.
Tennessee, 1864. On a late autumn day, near a little town called Franklin, 10,000 men will soon lie dead or dying in a battle that will change many lives for ever. None will be more changed than ... (Goodreads)
The Killer Angels
by Michael Shaara
A gripping story of the Battle of Gettysburg, told through the eyes of the soldiers on both sides.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain , one of the major characters, remembers reciting to his father a speech from, Hamlet, : "What a piece of work is man...in action how like an angel!" Sgt. Buster Kilrain ... (Wikipedia)
Thirteen Moons
by Charles Frazier
A coming-of-age story of a young orphan boy who becomes a trader in the Cherokee Nation during the 19th century.
Near the end of his life, frontiersman Will Cooper reflects on his formative experiences from the unfamiliar comfort of his twentieth-century house. A call, which could be from Claire, the love of ... (Wikipedia)
Get Shorty
by Elmore Leonard
A criminal comedy about a low-level hoodlum's ambitions to become a Hollywood producer.
The story centers on Ernesto "Chili" Palmer, a small-time loan shark based in Miami . After a run-in with mobster Ray "Bones" Barboni, Chili goes to Las Vegas in pursuit of Leo Devoe, a dry cleaner ... (Wikipedia)
A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
A mosaic of characters, lives, and relationships as they intertwine and evolve over time.
Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. ... (Goodreads)
