18 books like The Sopranos
A Pale View of Hills
In his highly acclaimed debut, A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But then as she recalls her strange…
Shares: Female friendship
The Night Watch
The Night Watch series has caused a sensation never before seen in Russia -- its popularity is frenzied and unprecedented, and driven by a truly great, epic story. In 2005 Fox Searchlight announced it had acquired the Russian film adaptation for an American release. Interest in the books here is now set to reach a fever pitch.Set in modern day Moscow, Night Watch is a world as elaborate and…
Shares: Community pick
Huntingtower
Dickson MCunn, a recently retired prosperous Scots grocer decides on a walking tour in SW Scotland as a suitable beginning to his retirement activities. To his surprise, he stumbles into a sinister plot involving kidnapping, crown jewels, and terrorism.To his surprise (and deep satisfaction) our 56 year old hero acquits himself very well, in the process proving that the Geritol crowd can and do…
Shares: Scotland in fiction, Scotland
The carnival at Bray
his promising debut, set in the heyday of grunge, tells the story of Maggie Lynch, a displaced Chicagoan and grunge music fan, living in a quiet town (Bray) on the Irish Sea. Maggie was uprooted from her friends, her music scene, and her beloved Uncle Kevin when her romantically fickle mother married her latest boyfriend, resulting in a move to his hometown. During her time of difficult…
Shares: Teenage Girls, Bildungsromans
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner (With A Detail of Curious Traditionary Facts, And Other Evidence, By The Editor)
"This now-famous book was given a hostile reception when it first appeared in 1824. It was not reprinted until the late 1830s, when a heavily bowdlerised version was included in a posthumous edition of Hogg's collected Tales and Sketches published by Blackie & Son of Glasgow. Thereafter Confessions of a Justified Sinner attracted little interest until the 1890s, when the unbowdlerised text was…
Shares: Scotland in fiction, Scotland
The quick and the dead
"Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents - from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wild-life museum - accompanied by…
Shares: Female friendship, Teenage Girls, Bildungsromans, Friendship
Annals of the parish, or
The book is narrated by the Reverend Micah Balwhidder, a Presbyterian minister in the Ayrshire town of Dalmailing, and covers the years 1760 to 1810, the period of Robert Burns and the Industrial Revolution, when the economic and moral shape of Scottish life was changing in ways both explicit and invisible. The novel charts all this: the work of smugglers at Troon, new births in the parish, old…
Shares: Scotland in fiction, Scotland
Effi Briest
Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife. Isolated and bored, Effi finds comfort and distraction in a brief liaison with Major Crampas, a married man with a dangerous reputation. But years later, when Effi has almost forgotten her affair, the secret returns to haunt her - with…
Shares: Teenage girls in fiction, Teenage Girls
Promise Me
It began with a promise... 2.17am: the phone rings on Myron Bolitar's nightstand; at the other end of the line is Aimee Biel - a frightened teenager who has called the one adult who had promised to help her if she ever got into any trouble. But Myron's help will not be enough. Stumbling from his Manhattan bed, he races down to pick her up from a cold street corner and take her back to safety. But…
Shares: Teenage girls in fiction, Teenage Girls
Idoru
From first page Berkley paperback September 1997:
21st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Is something different here, in the very nature of reality? Or is it that something violently new is about to happen...
Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the "signature" an individual creates simply by going about the business of living.…
Shares: Musicians, Teenage Girls, Friendship
Where the heart is
Talk about unlucky sevens. An hour ago, seventeen-year-old, seven months pregnant Novalee Nation was heading for California with her boyfriend. Now she finds herself stranded at a Wal-Mart in Sequoyah, Oklahoma, with just $7.77 in change. But Novalee is about to discover hidden treasures in this small Southwest town--a group of down-to-earth, deeply caring people willing to help a homeless,…
Shares: Teenage Girls, Bildungsromans, Friendship
Sanctuary
Ajax the Younger violates Cassandras sanctuary at the Palladium: tondo of an Attic cup, ca. 440–430 BCE]]
Shares: Female friendship, Friendship
Mapp and Lucia (Make Way for Lucia, Part 4)
Meet Mapp and Luciatwo of the most unpleasant, disgraceful women you're ever likely to encounter, in E.F. Benson's carefully observed tale of 1930s village life and social ranking Emmeline Lucas (known as Lucia to her friends) is emerging from mourning following the death of her husband. Pretentious, snobbish, and down-right devious, she feels her hometown of Riseholme offers no challenges and…
Shares: Female friendship, Friendship
The Invisible Circus
In Jennifer Egan’s highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O’Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith’s life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San…
Shares: Teenage Girls, Bildungsromans
Grand avenue
"Looking back, it seemed like paradise; lives filled with the blessings of friendship, marriage, children, and career. For twenty years, four friends, Chris, Barbara, Susan, and Vicki shared everything through good times and bad, and faced the challenges of life and love head-on. Now, one sits alone to ponder the strange twists and turns of fate and circumstance. Now, she must sift through each…
Shares: Female friendship, Friendship
Wonder Woman--Warbringer
She will become one of the world's greatest heroes: Wonder Woman. But first she is Diana, Princess of the Amazons, and longs only to prove herself to her legendary warrior sisters.
Shares: Female friendship, Bildungsromans
Ghost Wall
The light blinds you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside.
In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age.
For two weeks, the length of her father’s vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in…
Shares: Female friendship, Teenage Girls
Nana
Publishers Weekly: Nana, Japan's most popular shojo (girl's) manga, is appearing in English for the first time. Nana Komatsu is a flaky young woman who's just emerged from an emotionally devastating affair with an older, married man. She dreams of a perfect romantic love, like in the movies, but her best friend, Junko, counsels her that it might be time to try being friends with a guy instead of…
Shares: Female friendship, Friendship