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Recommendations based on Moral Disorder and Other Storiesby Margaret Atwood
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The Edible Woman
by Margaret Atwood
A young woman's exploration of identity, as she learns to confront her own desires.
Marian MacAlpin works in a market research firm, writing survey questions and sampling products. She shares the top-floor apartment of a house in Toronto (never named in the novel) with her roommate ... (Wikipedia)
Surfacing
by Margaret Atwood
A woman returns to her childhood home in search of her missing father, uncovering buried memories and confronting her own identity.
Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with ... (Goodreads)
The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood
A complex, interwoven story of family secrets, love, tragedy, and mystery.
The novel's protagonist , Iris Chase, and her sister Laura, grow up well-off but motherless in a small town in southern Ontario. As an old woman, Iris recalls the events and relationships of her ... (Wikipedia)
A Complicated Kindness
by Miriam Toews
A teenage girl navigates life in a strict Mennonite community while dealing with family dysfunction and questioning her faith.
The novel is set in a small religious Mennonite town called East Village, generally considered to be a fictionalized version of Toews' hometown of Steinbach , Manitoba . The narrator is Nomi Nickel, ... (Wikipedia)
The Stone Angel
by Margaret Laurence
An elderly woman reflects on her life and relationships with family, friends, and society.
In a series of vignettes , The Stone Angel tells the story of Hagar Shipley, a 90-year-old woman struggling to come to grips with a life of intransigence and loss. The themes of pride and the ... (Wikipedia)
Through Black Spruce
by Joseph Boyden
A journey of reconciliation, to uncover the truth and find peace.
A haunting novel about identity, love, and loss by the author of, Three Day Road, Will Bird is a legendary Cree bush pilot, now lying in a coma in a hospital in his hometown of Moose Factory, ... (Goodreads)
Commonwealth
by Ann Patchett
Intertwining story of two families across multiple generations, and how their lives become intertwined.
It started at Franny Keating’s christening party. Bert Cousins wasn’t even invited, but looking for an excuse to get out of the house, away from his three noisy children and pregnant wife for a few ... (Wikipedia)
Slammerkin
by Emma Donoghue
The turbulent life of a young woman in 18th century England, exploring the consequences of poverty and gender inequality.
Mary Saunders is a highly intelligent girl living in poverty in 1760 London. She is repelled when her mother Susan encourages her to become a seamstress, wanting nothing to do with the "wretched ... (Wikipedia)
Three Day Road
by Joseph Boyden
Two Cree snipers fight in WWI, one returns home addicted to morphine, the other lost to the war.
It is 1919, and Niska, the last Oji-Cree woman to live off the land, has received word that one of the two boys she saw off to the Great War has returned. Xavier Bird, her sole living relation, is ... (Goodreads)
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
Exploring the lives of diverse characters in a small Southern town, unearthing secrets and desires.
The book begins with a focus on the relationship between two close friends, John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos, deaf-mutes who have lived together for several years. Antonapoulos becomes mentally ... (Wikipedia)
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
A fantastical exploration of the cities of the imagination and the possibilities of life.
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young ... (Goodreads)
Barney's Version
by Mordecai Richler
A man's life story told with humour and heart, reflecting on his relationships, successes and regrets.
The story is written as if it is an autobiography by Barney Panofsky recounting his life in varying detail. Barney's version of events may be viewed as that of two unreliable narrators , in that his ... (Wikipedia)
The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A philosophical exploration of morality, faith, and family dynamics among a group of brothers.
The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich ... (Goodreads)
As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
A family's struggle to fulfill the dying wish of their mother, amidst personal and societal challenges.
The book is narrated by 15 different characters over 59 chapters. It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor, rural family's quest and motivations—noble or selfish—to honor her wish ... (Wikipedia)
Swimming Lessons
by Claire Fuller
A woman disappears, leaving behind letters to her husband hidden in his books. Her daughter tries to uncover the truth about her mother's disappearance.
Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides them in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When ... (Goodreads)
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)
This Is How You Lose Her
by Junot Díaz
A collection of stories about young love, heartache, and the struggle to find one's place in the world.
On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a ... (Goodreads)
The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
A young Indian-American's journey of reconciling two different cultures and his own identity.
The story begins as Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, a young Bengali couple, leave Calcutta , India, and settle in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts . Ashoke is an engineering student at the ... (Wikipedia)
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
A day in the life of a high-society woman, delving into her inner thoughts and feelings.
Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes her wonder about ... (Wikipedia)
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
A satirical tale of an eccentric slacker's misadventures in New Orleans.
Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found, here, "A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles ... (Goodreads)
The Girl with No Shadow
by Joanne Harris
A magical tale of a woman with a dark past, struggling to balance her family, career, and the temptation of her supernatural abilities.
Vianne Rocher, now with two daughters, Anouk and Rosette, has forsaken magic and adventure for a monotonous life running a small chocolaterie in the Montmartre district of Paris. Vianne is now known ... (Wikipedia)
Annabel
by Kathleen Winter
Born as a hermaphrodite in 1968, Wayne decides to become Annabel and struggles with identity and acceptance in a small Canadian town.
A baby is born in 1968, in far-from-everywhere Croydon Harbour, Labrador , Canada. He is intersex – a word unfamiliar to the midwife present at his birth, and to his stoic father and his fanciful ... (Wikipedia)
The Mists of Avalon
by Marion Zimmer Bradley
An immersive retelling of the Arthurian legend from a female perspective.
The Mists of Avalon is a generations-spanning retelling of the Arthurian legend that brings it back to its Brythonic Celtic roots (see Matter of Britain ). The plot tells the story of the women who ... (Wikipedia)
The Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
A man's attempt to rebuild his life in a small Newfoundland town, discovering compassion and joy.
The story centers around Quoyle, a newspaper reporter from upstate New York , whose father had emigrated from Newfoundland . Shortly after his parents' joint suicide, Quoyle's unfaithful and abusive ... (Wikipedia)
The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
A woman's journey of self-discovery, challenging the norms of the Victorian era.
When first published in 1899, The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken ... (Goodreads)
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
A young boy's quest to find the lock that matches a mysterious key his father left behind.
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and ... (Goodreads)
Cloudstreet
by Tim Winton
Two families share a house in Perth, Australia, and navigate their lives over two decades. A story of love, loss, and redemption.
In 1943, precipitated by separate personal tragedies, two poor families, the Lambs and the Pickles, flee their rural homes to share a large house called Cloudstreet in Perth, Western Australia. , The ... (Wikipedia)
A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
A gripping story of four unlikely lives intertwined in the tumult of India's caste system.
The book exposes the changes in Indian society from independence in 1947 to the Emergency called by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi . Mistry was generally critical of Indira Gandhi in the book. ... (Wikipedia)
Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Collection of stories exploring the struggles of Indian-American immigrants in the US.
A married couple, Shukumar and Shoba, live as strangers in their house until an electrical outage brings them together when all of sudden "they [are] able to talk to each other again" in the four ... (Wikipedia)
The Leavers
by Lisa Ko
A story of the struggles and triumphs of two individuals navigating the complexities of immigration and identity.
Told in four parts, the novel begins as Deming Guo's mother Polly suddenly disappears from the family's New York City apartment without warning. Deming is placed into foster care , ultimately to be ... (Wikipedia)
