18 books like Lie down in Darkness
Let them eat cake
Lexi Stuart is at a critical crossroads. She's done with college but still living at home, ready to launch a career but unable to find a job, and solidly stalled between boyfriends. When a lighthearted conversation in French with the manager of her favorite bakery turns into a job offer, Lexi accepts. But the actual glamour is minimal: the pay is less than generous, her co-workers are skeptical,…
Shares: Young women--fiction, Young women
Running
"Running brings together an ensemble of outsiders who get by as "runners"hustlers who sell tourists on low-end accommodations for a small commission and a place to stay. Bridey Sullivan, a young American woman who has fled a peculiar and traumatic upbringing in Washington State, takes up with a queer British couple, the poet Milo Rollack and Eton drop-out Jasper Lethe. Slipping in and out of…
Shares: Young women--fiction, Young women
Confessions of a Shopaholic, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, and Shopaholic Ties the Knot (Shopaholic Series, Books 1, 2, & 3)
Meet Becky Bloomwood, America’s favorite shopaholic—a young woman with a big heart, big dreams…and just one little weakness.
Becky has a fabulous flat in London's trendiest neighborhood, a troupe of glamorous socialite friends, and a closet brimming with the season's must-haves. The only trouble is that she can't actually afford it—not any of it.
Her job writing at Successful Savings not only…
Shares: Young women--fiction, Young women
Fledgling
Shori is a mystery. Found alone in the woods, she appears to be a little black girl with traumatic amnesia and near-fatal wounds. But Shori is a fifty-three-year-old vampire with a ravenous hunger for blood, the lost child of an ancient species of near-immortals who live in dark symbiosis with humanity. Genetically modified to be able to walk in daylight, Shori now becomes the target of a vast…
Shares: Young women--fiction, Young women
Voyage Out
“The Voyage Out” by Virginia Woolf.
This is a story about a young English woman, Rachel, on a sea voyage from London, to a South American coastal city of Santa Marina. As I read the story, the title of the story became a metaphor for Rachel's inner journey.
The inner journey within this story is perhaps best summarized in the author's words:
“The next few months passed away, as many years…
Shares: Young women--fiction, Young women
Alice Adams
Alice Adams is Booth Tarkington’s second novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, just three years after his novel The Magnificent Ambersons won it. The novel tells the story of Alice, a Midwestern girl who grows up in a lower-middle-class family just after World War I. Alice meets a wealthy young man and tries to win his affection, despite her lower-class upbringing.
Alice Adams was twice adapted for…
Shares: Young women--fiction, Young women
Tea
On a spring day in 1968, eight-year-old Isabel Gold prepares tea for her mother, certain she will drink it and recover from her mysterious sadness. But the tea remains untouched. Not long after, her mother takes her own life. Struggling to understand the ghost her mother left behind, Isabel grows up trying on new identities. Her yearning for an emotional connection finds her falling in and out of…
Shares: Suicide victims, Young women
The bent twig
Unlike other young women of her generation, who were "bred up from childhood to sit behind tea-tables and say the right things to tea-drinkers," Sylvia Marshall - the "twig" of this novel - was reared to think for herself and to trust her own instincts and experience. This, coupled with her passionate temperament, makes Sylvia a compelling figure as she resists efforts to mold her with every…
Shares: Young women, Families
The dream daughter
"DIANE CHAMBERLAIN is the international bestselling author of twenty-three novels. She lives in North Carolina with her partner, photographer John Pagliuca, and her shelties, Keeper and Cole."--
"From bestselling author Diane Chamberlain comes an irresistible new novel. When Caroline Sears receives the news that her unborn baby girl has a heart defect, she is devastated. It is 1970 and there…
Shares: Time Travel, Families
Judith Paris
Covering the years 1771 to 1822 and set partly in Revolutionary Paris, and partly in romantic Cumbria, Judith Paris is the story of the two very different men who love Walpole's most delightful heroine. Daughter of Francis Herries and Mirabell Starr, Judith was described on publication as "the most delightful of Walpole's heroines." As impetuous, impulsive and passionate as her father, she is…
Shares: Young women, Families
Object Lessons
It is the 1960s, in suburban New York City. Maggie and her family, are in the thrall of her powerful grandfather Jack Scanlan. In the summer of her twelfth year, Maggie is despertately trying to master the object lessons her grandfather fills her head with. But there is too much going on to concentrate. Everything at home is in upheaval, her grandfather is changing, and Maggie is unsure if what…
Shares: Young women, Families
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”
So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life!…
Shares: Young women, Families
Irma Voth
The stifling, reclusive life of nineteen-year-old Irma Voth, recently married and more recently deserted, is turned on its head when a film crew moves in to make a movie about the strict religious community in which she and her family live.
Shares: Young women, Families
Grand Sophy
When the redoubtable Sir Horace Stanton-Lacy is ordered to South America on business, he leaves his only daughter Sophia with his sister, Elizabeth Rivenhall, in Berkeley Square. Newly arrived from her tour of the Continent, Sophy invites herself into the circle of her relatives. When Lady Ombersley agrees to take in her young niece, no one expects Sophy, who sweeps in and immediately takes the…
Shares: Young women, Families
A woman of substance
Emma Harte Lowther Ainsley is seventy-eight years old and one of the richest most powerful women in the world. Self-reliant and ruthless, she uses money as a weapon and adversity as a tool.
In her poverty-stricken youth, Emma exhibited an uncommon amount of initiative and intelligence even as a maidservant on a Yorkshire estate. Pregnant and unwed at fifteen, she fled her shameful situation to…
Shares: Young women, Families
Little Women
Louisa May Alcotts classic novel, set during the Civil War, has always captivated even the most reluctant readers. Little girls, especially, love following the adventures of the four March sisters--Meg, Beth, Amy, and most of all, the tomboy Jo--as they experience the joys and disappointments, tragedies and triumphs, of growing up. This simpler version captures all the charm and warmth of the…
Shares: Young women, Families
After You
"How do you move on after losing the person you loved? How do you build a life worth living? Louisa Clark is no longer just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, she is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can't help but feel she's right back where she started. Her body…
Shares: Young women, Families
REST OF HER LIFE, THE
This incredibly nuanced, beautifully written novel treats moral dilemma with the riveting, character-driven plot of a Jane Hamilton or a Jodi Picoult. This novel looks at one incident and how it changes everything for Leigh, the mother of a pretty, popular high school senior, and their entire family. It’s a novel about mothers, daughters, sisters, and female friends, and the ripple effect that an…
Shares: Young women, Families