The Year We Left Home
10 best books like The Year We Left Home (Jean Thompson): Emily, Alone, News from Heaven: The Bakerton Stories, House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home, The Grief of Others, Orientation: And Other Stories, A Small Hotel, Swim Back to Me, In Zanesville, Faith, Once Upon a River
| Author | Stewart O'Nan |
| ISBN | 0670022357 |
Once again making the ordinary and overlooked not merely visible but vital to understanding our own lives, Stewart O'Nan confirms his position as an American master with Emily, Alone.
A sequel to the bestselling, much-beloved Wish You Were Here, O'Nan's intimate novel follows Emily Maxwell,...
| Author | Jennifer Haigh |
| ISBN | 0060889640 |
In News from Heaven, Jennifer Haigh—bestselling author of Faith and The Condition—returns to the territory of her acclaimed novel Baker Towers with a collection of short stories set in and around the fictionalized coal-mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania.
Exploring themes of restlessness,...
House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home
In this otherworldly memoir of extraordinary power, Mark Richard, an award-winning author, tells his story of growing up in the American South with a heady Gothic mix of racial tension and religious fervor.
Called a “special child,” Southern social code for mentally—and...
| Author | Leah Hager Cohen |
| ISBN | 1594488053 |
Is keeping a secret from a spouse always an act of infidelity? And what cost does such a secret exact on a family?
The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous...
| Author | Daniel Orozco |
| ISBN | 0865478538 |
Breakfast’s boiled egg, the overhead hum of fluorescent lights, the midmorning coffee break—daily routines keep the world running. But when people are pushed—by a coworker’s taunt, a face-to-face encounter with a woman in free fall from a bridge—cracks appear, revealing alienation,...
| Author | Robert Olen Butler |
| ISBN | 0802119875 |
A Small Hotel is a beautifully told story of love, loss, and redemption. Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time, the novel chronicles the relationship between Michael and Kelly Hays, who have decided to separate after twenty years of marriage.
The book begins on the day...
| Author | Ann Packer |
| ISBN | 0307877922 |
From Ann Packer, author of the New York Times best-selling novels The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words, a collection of burnished, emotionally searing stories, framed by two unforgettable linked narratives that express the transformation of a single family over the course of a...
| Author | Jo Ann Beard |
| ISBN | 0316084476 |
The beguiling fourteen-year-old narrator of IN ZANESVILLE is a late bloomer. She is used to flying under the radar-a sidekick, a third wheel, a marching band dropout, a disastrous babysitter, the kind of girl whose Eureka moment is the discovery that "fudge" can't be said with an English accent.
Luckily,...
| Author | Jennifer Haigh |
| ISBN | 0060755806 |
When Sheila McGann sets out to redeem her disgraced brother, a once-beloved Catholic priest in suburban Boston, her quest will force her to confront cataclysmic truths about her fractured Irish-American family, her beliefs, and, ultimately, herself. Award-winning author Jennifer Haigh follows...
| Author | Bonnie Jo Campbell |
| ISBN | 0393079899 |
Bonnie Jo Campbell has created an unforgettable heroine in sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, a beauty whose unflinching gaze and uncanny ability with a rifle have not made her life any easier.
After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her...
Adopted by a pair of diehard hippies, restless, marginal Jude Keffy-Horn spends much of his youth getting high with his best friend, Teddy, in their bucolic and deeply numbing Vermont town. But when Teddy dies of an overdose on the last day of 1987, Jude's relationship with drugs and with his parents...
“These short stories approach their subjects from an array of perspectives, but what they share is freshness, surprise, and a compulsion to plumb some absolute extremes of American existence.”—National Book Award citation
American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with...
| Author | Rachel DeWoskin |
| ISBN | 0374112576 |
A scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and unwaveringly serious.
Judy Lohden is your above-average sixteen-year-old - sarcastic and vulnerable, talented and uncertain, full of big dreams for a big future. With a singing voice that can shake...
| Author | Ayelet Waldman |
| ISBN | 0385517866 |
A rich and rewarding story of love, loss, and the power of family from the bestselling author of Bad Mother and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits.
In the aftermath of a devastating wedding day, two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, find their lives unraveled by unthinkable...
