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Recommendations based on The Abstinence Teacherby Tom Perrotta
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Little Children
by Tom Perrotta
A suburban couple's struggle with the everyday dramas of marriage and parenting.
Sarah, who once considered herself a radical feminist , wonders how she allowed herself to be reduced to a common housewife , constantly at the playground with three other neighborhood Stepford ... (Wikipedia)
The Leftovers
by Tom Perrotta
A family struggles to cope with the mysterious disappearance of loved ones in a post-apocalyptic world.
Several years after a rapture-like event in which millions of people worldwide suddenly vanish without explanation, the citizens of Mapleton, Ohio are still struggling to cope with the massive loss ... (Wikipedia)
Then We Came to the End
by Joshua Ferris
A satirical take on office life, exploring the relationships and dynamics of a group of coworkers facing layoffs.
This wickedly funny, big-hearted novel about life in the office signals the arrival of a gloriously talented new writer. The characters in Then We Came To The End cope with a business downturn in the ... (Goodreads)
Mrs. Fletcher
by Tom Perrotta
A middle-aged divorcee explores her newfound freedom and sexuality while her son navigates college life.
Eve Fletcher is floundering. A forty-six-year-old divorcee whose beloved, clueless only child has just left for college, Eve is slowly learning to contend with life on her own when, late one night ... (Goodreads)
Little Earthquakes
by Jennifer Weiner
A group of friends navigating motherhood, friendships, and life's daily challenges.
Rose and Maggie Feller are two young sisters who share little in common except their shoe size. Rose is the eldest and has been watching after Maggie since they were young children and their mother ... (Wikipedia)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz
An exploration of love, identity, and the power of fate in a family's struggles and triumphs.
Oscar de León (nicknamed Oscar Wao, a bastardization of Oscar Wilde ) is an overweight Dominican growing up in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar desperately wants to be successful with women but, from a ... (Wikipedia)
American Wife
by Curtis Sittenfeld
A woman's story of her life as a wife, mother and political spouse.
On what might become one of the most significant days in her husband’s presidency, Alice Blackwell considers the strange and unlikely path that has led her to the White House–and the repercussions of ... (Goodreads)
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
by George Saunders
A collection of darkly comic stories, exploring the absurdities of life in a post-apocalyptic world.
In six stories and the novella, Bounty, Saunders introduces readers to people struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. ... (Goodreads)
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
by Lisa See
Story of two women in 19th-century China, exploring the power of female friendship.
In rural Hunan province called Puwei (nicknamed the Common Beauty Village), a county in China, Lily is destined to become a, laotong, pair with Snow Flower, a girl of the same age from Tongkou (the ... (Wikipedia)
The Good Thief
by Hannah Tinti
A one-handed orphan boy is taken in by a gang of thieves and embarks on a journey of self-discovery and redemption.
Richly imagined, gothically spooky, and replete with the ingenious storytelling ability of a born novelist, The Good Thief introduces one of the most appealing young heroes in contemporary fiction ... (Goodreads)
Goodnight Nobody
by Jennifer Weiner
A suburban mom becomes obsessed with solving a mystery in her town after discovering a dead body.
New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner’s unforgettable story of adjusting to suburbia—and all the surprises hidden behind its doors. For Kate Klein, a semi-accidental mother of three, ... (Goodreads)
Runaway: Stories
by Alice Munro
A collection of short stories exploring the complexities of human relationships and the struggles of women in rural Canada.
The incomparable Alice Munro’s bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young ... (Goodreads)
Contagious
by Scott Sigler
A deadly virus spreads across the world, causing chaos and destruction. A group of survivors must fight to stay alive and find a cure.
Perry Dawsey and Margaret Montoya attempt to stop an alien infestation of "hatchlings". Dawsey, former Michigan linebacker, has survived the events in Infected , but remains telepathically linked to ... (Wikipedia)
Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
Interconnected stories of ordinary lives in 1970s New York, inspired by a high-wire artist's death-defying feat.
The events of the story are told in a largely non-linear fashion, with several different narrators telling the story from different perspectives. The story is interspersed with fictionalized accounts ... (Wikipedia)
Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Collection of stories exploring the complexities of family, culture, and identity.
From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories—longer and more emotionally complex than any she has yet written—that take ... (Goodreads)
Belong to Me
by Marisa de los Santos
A story of the power of friendship and the search for a place to call home.
“Marisa de los Santos’s Belong to Me is my favorite discovery of the past years: a terrific page-turner that’s also poignant, funny, surprising and deeply heartfelt.” —Harlan Coben “Complex, ... (Barnes & Noble)
Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld
A teenage girl's struggle to find her place and identity in an elite prep school.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, Prep , is an insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ... (Goodreads)
The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes
An exploration of memory and its impact on the present, looking at the choices we make in life.
By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be ... (Goodreads)
The Light Between Oceans
by M.L. Stedman
A lighthouse keeper and his wife make a heartbreaking decision that has lifelong repercussions.
Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found, here, Australia, 1926. After four harrowing years fighting on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns home to take a job as the lighthouse ... (Goodreads)
Amsterdam
by Ian McEwan
Interconnected stories of love and morality among a small group of characters in Amsterdam.
At the funeral of photographer and writer Molly Lane, three of Molly's former lovers converge. They include newspaper editor Vernon Halliday and composer Clive Linley who are old friends, and British ... (Wikipedia)
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 Ruins
by Scott Smith
A group of tourists stranded in a remote Mexican jungle, struggling to survive.
Four American tourists — Eric, his girlfriend Stacy, her best friend and former roommate Amy, and Amy's boyfriend Jeff, a medical student — are vacationing in Mexico. They befriend a German tourist ... (Wikipedia)
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
by Christopher Moore
A retelling of the life of Jesus Christ, told through the eyes of his childhood best friend.
Biff is resurrected in the 20th Century to complete missing parts of the Bible , under the inefficient supervision of Raziel ; wherefore Biff narrates that he and Joshua (by Biff's account, the ... (Wikipedia)
This is Where I Leave You
by Jonathan Tropper
A family comes together during a week of sitting shiva, rediscovering the joys of being a family.
A riotously funny, emotionally raw New York Times bestselling novel about love, marriage, divorce, family, and the ties that bind—whether we like it or not. The death of Judd Foxman’s father marks ... (Goodreads)
Something Blue
by Emily Giffin
A woman navigates the intricacies of marriage, friendships, and career choices.
Darcy Rhone has always been able to rely on a few things: her beauty and charm. Her fiancé Dex. Her lifelong best friend Rachel. She never needed anything else. Or so she thinks until Dex calls of ... (Barnes & Noble)
Loving Frank
by Nancy Horan
A romantic story of love and tragedy, as a woman risks everything for her forbidden passion.
The book opens to notes written by Mamah Borthwick, reminiscing on her life and expressing her longing to tell her views of what happened. The story begins with an account of Mamah’s attendance, with ... (Wikipedia)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers
An autobiographical account of a young man dealing with grief and responsibility.
'When you read his extraordinary memoir you don't laugh, then cry, then laugh again; you somehow experience these emotions all at once.' "Well, this was when Bill was sighing a lot. He had decided ... (Goodreads)
The Most Dangerous Game
by Richard Connell
A hunter's game of survival and strategy, as he pursues and is pursued by his prey.
Big-game hunter Sanger Rainsford and his friend, Whitney, are traveling to the Amazon rainforest for a jaguar hunt. After a discussion about how they are "the hunters" instead of "the hunted," ... (Wikipedia)
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
Blue van Meer navigates her senior year at an eccentric school, uncovering secrets and tragedies along the way.
Blue van Meer is a film-obsessed, erudite teenager. She is the daughter of itinerant and arrogant academic Gareth van Meer, who, after the death of his amateur lepidopteran-catching wife (and Blue's ... (Wikipedia)
Drown
by Junot Díaz
A collection of interconnected stories of a young Dominican-American struggling to find his place in the world.
With ten stories that move from the barrios of the Dominican Republic to the struggling urban communities of New Jersey, Junot Diaz makes his remarkable debut. Diaz's work is unflinching and strong, ... (Goodreads)
