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Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Tells the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing into manhood in a British working-class community near the Nottingham coalfields. His mother Gertrude, unhappily married to Paul's hard-drinking father, devotes all her energies to her son. They develop a powerful and passionate relationship, but eventually tensions arise when Paul falls in love with a girl and seeks to escape his family ties. Torn between his desire for independence and his abiding...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
What You Have Left is an unforgettable story of love, loss, and, most of all, longing.
In 1976, on the day of his wife's funeral, Wylie Greer drops off his five-year-old daughter, Holly, at his father-in-law's dairy farm on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. Wylie tells her he just needs a little time to clear his head, but thirty years pass before Holly sees her father again -- "time I spent wondering what I'd done to make him leave," she...
Author
Language
English
Description
"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's war on heavy industry has put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for his artistic brother and practical sister. She dreams of...
Author
Language
English
Description
Bestseller Alan Brennert's spellbinding story about a family of dreamers and their lives within the legendary Palisades Amusement Park Growing up in the 1930s, there is no more magical place than Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey-especially for seven-year-old Antoinette, who horrifies her mother by insisting on the unladylike nickname Toni, and her brother, Jack. Toni helps her parents, Eddie and Adele Stopka, at the stand where they sell homemade...
7) Scrapper
Publisher
Kino Lorber
Language
English
Formats
Description
A vibrant and inventive father-daughter comedy follows Georgie, a resourceful twelve-year-old girl who secretly lives alone in her flat in a working-class suburb of London following the death of her mother. She makes money stealing bikes with her best friend Ali and keeps the social workers off her back by pretending to live with an uncle. Out of nowhere, her estranged father Jason arrives and forces her to confront reality. Uninterested in this sudden...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.4 - AR Pts: 20
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The story of an entire generation growing up too quickly…impossible to put down until the dramatic and realistic conclusion." - Library Journal, starred review
"A brilliant portrait of a small town teenage girl, whose secret affair…feels utterly true…a fresh and indelible book." - Joan Silber
It's 1960 in the Panhandle town of Charnelle, Texas-a year and a half since sixteen-year-old Laura Tate's mother boarded a bus and mysteriously disappeared....
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child. Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than bluegrass music, tobacco fields, and a...
Author
Pub. Date
[2020]
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In the 1950s, Ellie and Brick are teenagers in love. A basketball star, Brick could escape his abusive father and be the first person in his working-class family to go to college. But when Ellie becomes pregnant, they marry, she gives up her dream of nursing school, and Brick gets a union card instead. This riveting novel tells the story of three generations in a working-class family; especially Brick and Ellie's daughter Samantha. Illuminating issues...
11) The old romantic
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Meet Ken. He's obsessed with death, planning his own funeral and desperate to die in the bosom of his family. Unfortunately for Ken, that's the last place his family wants him.
An Oprah Book of The Week. In her fourth book award-winning, Booker Prize longlisted British author Louise Dean sings a hymn to England in this dark comedy hailed by reviewers as 'extremely funny' with 'a clever plot and plenty of surprises.'
His oldest son Nick left...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"The story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James. Born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Their environment is a hyper-masculine and sectarian one, for gangs of young men and the violence they might dole out dominate the Glaswegian estate where they live. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A powerful first novel about a family that slips from fortune's favor and a town broken by the forces of modernity.
Across a bend of Ontario's Attawan River lies the Island, a working-class neighborhood of whitewashed houses and vine-freighted fences, black willows and decaying sheds. Here, for generations, the Walkers have lived among the other mill workers.
The family's troubles begin in the summer of 1965, when a union organizer comes to town...
14) My life as a dog
Publisher
The Criterion Collection
Pub. Date
c2003
Language
Swedish
Description
Ingemar is a working-class 12-year old boy who is sent to live with his uncle after his mother falls ill. There, he takes refuge from his troubles with the help of the town's warmhearted eccentrics. A bittersweet evocation of the struggles and joys of childhood and the pains of coming-of-age.
15) Overboard
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Formats
Description
A spoiled, wealthy yacht owner is thrown overboard and becomes the target of revenge from his mistreated employee. A remake of the 1987 comedy.
16) Incendiary
Author
Language
English
Description
Chris Cleave's debut novel Incendiary-winner of the Book-of-the-Month Club's First Fiction Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize-is sure to captivate the same people who made Little Bee one of the most talked-about novels of the last decade. Written as an open letter to Osama bin Laden from a distraught woman whose husband and son were killed in a massive suicide bombing, Incendiary was published in the UK on July 7, 2005- eerily, the day of the...
17) Vessel: a memoir
Author
Publisher
HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"An unprecedented and heartfelt memoir that illuminates the lives of rural Chinese workers, offering a portrait of generational strife, family, love, and loss that crosses cultures and time. Cai Chongda spent his childhood in a rural fishing village in Fujian province. When his father-a former communist gang leader turned gas station owner-has a stroke that partially paralyzes him, his responsibilities fall to Cai, his only son. Assuming his new role...
18) Plutopia: nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In Plutopia, Kate Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington, and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias-communities of nuclear families living in highly subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed...
20) Ricky
Publisher
IFC Films
Pub. Date
2011
Language
Français
Description
When a struggling single mother has an affair with a Spanish co-worker, they have a miraculous baby boy who develops physical traits that make him a media star.