18 books like The secret wisdom of the earth
The Good Luck Of Right Now
When his mother dies, 38-year-old Bartholomew Neil, who doesn't know how to be on his own, discovers a letter in his mother's underwear drawer that causes him to write a series of highly intimate letters to actor Richard Gere, while embarking on a quest to find out where he belongs.
Shares: Mothers and sons, Grief, Amerikanisches Englisch, Family life
The Measure
Eight ordinary people. One extraordinary choice.
It seems like any other day. You wake up, drink a cup of coffee, and head out.
But today, when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. The contents of this mysterious box tells you the exact number of years you will live.
From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, every person on every continent receives the same box. In…
Shares: Fate and Fatalism, Families, Friendship
The Queen's gambit
Beth Harmon, an orphan by eight years old, is unremarkable. She is plain and she knows it. In the Kentucky orphanage, she hordes the tranquilizers handed to the children daily to quell the ache of dullness and routine.
A formidable math student, she is allowed to clean the blackboard erasers in the basement where she find the janitor playing chess daily. He is a sour old man and pays her no mind…
Shares: Kentucky, Coming-of-age
His Whole Life
1 volume ; 20 cm
Shares: Mothers and sons, Families
Skylight Confessions
Writing at the height of her powers, Alice Hoffman conjures three generations of a family haunted by love. Cool, practical, and deliberate, John is dreamy Arlyn's polar opposite. Yet the two are drawn powerfully together even when it is clear they are bound to bring each other grief. Their difficult marriage leads them and their children to a house made of glass in theConnecticut…
Shares: Fate and Fatalism, Mothers and sons, Coming-of-age
I'll Give You the Sun
A brilliant, luminous story of first love, family, loss, and betrayal for fans of John Green, David Levithan, and Rainbow Rowell
Jude and her twin brother, Noah, are incredibly close. At thirteen, isolated Noah draws constantly and is falling in love with the charismatic boy next door, while daredevil Jude cliff-dives and wears red-red lipstick and does the talking for both of them. But three…
Shares: Grief, Family life, Coming-of-age, Families
Look Homeward, Angel
An elaborate and moving coming-of-age story about Eugene Gant, a restless and energetic character whose passion to experience life takes him from his small, rural hometown in North Carolina to Harvard University and the city of Boston. The novel's pattern is artfully simple--a small town, a large family, high school and college--yet the characters are monumental in their graphic individuality and…
Shares: Mountain life, Families
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister.... Until Fern's expulsion... she was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half.... I loved her as a sister." As a…
Shares: Amerikanisches Englisch, Family life, Coming-of-age, Families
The Girls from Corona del Mar
"An emotional novel about friendships made in youth and how these bonds-- challenged by loss, illness, parenthood, and distance--either break or endure"--
Shares: Fate and Fatalism, Coming-of-age, Friendship
The Storyteller
Sage Singer becomes friends with an old man who is particularly beloved in her community after they strike up a conversation at the bakery where she works. Josef Weber is everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. One day he asks Sage for a favor, to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses, but then he tells her he deserves to die. Once he reveals his secret, Sage wonders if he is…
Shares: Grief, Amerikanisches Englisch, Friendship
The Interestings
The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty. Their friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their…
Shares: Amerikanisches Englisch, Coming-of-age, Friendship
Pretty Girls
More than twenty years ago, Claire and Lydia's teenaged sister Julia vanished without a trace. The two women have not spoken since, and now their lives could not be more different. Claire is the glamorous trophy wife of an Atlanta millionaire. Lydia, a single mother, dates an ex-con and struggles to make ends meet. But neither has recovered from the horror and heartbreak of their shared loss -- a…
Shares: Grief, Amerikanisches Englisch, Family life
Todos nuestros nombres
Two young friends join an uprising against Uganda's corrupt regime in the early 1970s. As the line blurs between idealism and violence, one of them flees for his life.
Shares: Amerikanisches Englisch, Coming-of-age, Friendship
Dead man's time
"New York, 1922. Five-year-old Gavin Daly and his seven-year-old sister, Aileen, are boarding the SS Mauretania to Dublin--and safety. Their mother has been shot and their Irish mobster father abducted. Suddenly, a messenger hands Gavin a piece of paper on which are written four names and eleven numbers, a cryptic message that will haunt him all his life, and his father's pocket watch. As the…
Shares: Fate and Fatalism, Family life
Leave Myself Behind
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO NOAH YORK:
"Anybody who tells you he doesn't have mixed feelings about his mother
is either stupid or a liar."
"Real life seldom makes me cry. The only thing that gets to me is
the occasional Kodak commercial."
"Sometimes I feel like Michelangelo, chiseling away at all the crap until nothing is left but the exquisite thing in the middle that no one else sees until it's…
Shares: Mothers and sons, Friendship
Asymmetry
Explores the imbalances that spark and sustain dramatic human relations, tracing the overlapping stories of a young American editor's relationship with a famous older writer, an unexpected New York romance during the early years of the Iraq War and an Iraqi-American man who is detained by immigration officers in Heathrow.
Shares: Family life, Coming-of-age
The Last Samurai
"Ludo, age six, is a prodigy. His mother, Sibylla, raises him alone and tries hard to keep his voracious intellect satisfied, while she struggles to make ends meet. With her exasperated guidance, he teaches himself Greek, so that he can read The Odyssey, before moving on to study Hebrew, Arabic, Inuit, and Japanese. And both Sibylla and Ludo share a passion for Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which…
Shares: Mothers and sons, Coming-of-age
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: Grief, Family life, Families