18 books like The Stone Diaries

What to read after The Stone Diaries — books similar to it, matched on shared themes.

Nora, Nora Anne Rivers Siddons · 2000 · 263p · ≈ 8h · Moderate "Peyton is not ready to share her widowed father with anyone, let alone a barely remembered cousin who just rolled into town, a cousin who smokes cigarettes and drives a pink Thunderbird. However, her father seems to like Nora well enough, and she does make for good conversation at the Losers Club, and prim Aunt Augusta hates her, which raises Nora slightly in Peyton's esteem. Maybe she isn't so… Shares Fiction - General, Literary, General, Literature

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Iris Murdoch · 1974 · ★ 3.9 · 365p · ≈ 12h · Moderate This is a story of different loves; and of how a man may need two women in such a way that he can be happy with neither. Sacred and profane love are related opposites; the one enjoyed renders the other necessary, so that the ever unsatisfied heart swings constantly to and fro. Shares Women authors, Domestic fiction

Women Writers in Renaissance England Randall Martin · 1997 · 480p · ≈ 16h · Moderate This lively book surveys women writers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its selection is vast, historically representative, and original, taking examples from twenty different, relatively unknown authors in all genres of writing, including poetry, fiction, religious works, letters and journals, translation, and books on childcare. It establishes new contexts for the debate about… Shares Femmes, Women authors, Histoire, Women

A Bird in the House Margaret Laurence · 1963 · ★ 4.0 · 207p · ≈ 6h · Moderate *A Bird in the House* is a series of eight interconnected short stories narrated by Vanessa MacLeod as she matures from a child at age ten into a young woman at age twenty. Wise for her years, Vanessa reveals much about the adult world in which she lives. Shares Canadian fiction, Canada, Women

Ladder of Years Anne Tyler · 1993 · ★ 3.7 · 326p · ≈ 10h · Moderate A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKBALTIMORE WOMAN DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION, declares the headline. Forty-year-old Delia Grinstead is last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing nothing more than a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To her husband and three almost-grown children, she has vanished without trace or reason. But for Delia, who… Shares Femmes, Women authors, Women, Literature

Writing a woman's life Carolyn G. Heilbrun · 1988 · ★ 4.1 · 144p · ≈ 4h · Moderate Drawing on the experience of celebrated women, from George Sand and Virginia Woolf to Dorothy Sayers and Adrienne Rich, Heilbrun examines the struggle these writers undertook when their drives made it impossible for them to follow the traditional "male" script for a woman's life. Refreshing and insightful, this is an homage to brave women past and present, and an invitation to all women to write… Shares Femmes, Women authors, Women, Literature

The Love of a Good Woman Alice Munro · 1998 · ★ 4.0 · 360p · ≈ 12h · Moderate In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes - the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met - the summer, as it turns… Shares National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Canada, Women

Grand avenue Joy Fielding · 2001 · ★ 3.8 · 392p · ≈ 13h · Moderate "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 Femmes, Domestic fiction, Women

Unless Carol Shields · 2002 · ★ 3.6 · 319p · ≈ 10h · Moderate Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck. Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and… Shares Women authors, Domestic fiction, Women, Literature

Butcher's Crossing John Williams · 1960 · ★ 4.2 · 265p · ≈ 8h · Moderate In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an… Shares Fiction - General, Literary

Women's Life Writing And Imagined Communities Cynthia Huff · 2004 · 337p · ≈ 11h · Moderate "Women's life writings provide an incomparable window into the various cultural and historical communities in which we live. This book presents a unique view of this great legacy by critically examining how these writings both reflect and shape our communities. It draws on a wealth of material such as novels, memoirs, autobiographies, letters, religious records and many other sources, from many… Shares Women authors, Women, Literature

Kristin Lavransdatter III Sigrid Undset · 1922 · ★ 4.0 · 394p · ≈ 13h · Moderate In her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political and religious undercurrents of the period. Now in one volume, Tiina Nunnally's award-winning definitive… Shares Women authors, Women, Literature

Act of will Barbara Taylor Bradford · 1986 · ★ 4.0 · 432p · ≈ 14h · Moderate Audra is an impoverished children's nanny from Leeds who sacrificed everything for her only daughter. Christina is a talented art student who won world renown as a fashion designer – yet who has known pain and heartache. Kyle is a rebellious young woman who chafes against her mother's success – and in whom her grandmother's spirit of duty and sacrifice is reborn. Moving from the bleak Yorkshire… Shares Domestic fiction, Women, Literature

Cross Purposes and The Shadows George MacDonald · 2006 · 42p · ≈ 1h · Light The fairy Peaseblossom and the goblin Toadstool set off on the oddest mission: to lure a girl and a boy to Fry, to bring before the Queen -- for her subjects in Fairyland are too well-behaved to be amusing. Can they find the right dreamers? Then Peaseblossom encounters Alice, who wishes she could watch a setting sun at all times -- while Toadstool runs into the nearly penniless Richard, who wants… Shares Fiction - General

Drôle de garçon Shyam Selvadurai · 1994 · ★ 4.1 · 314p · ≈ 10h · Moderate Arjie is funny. The second son of a privileged family in Sri Lanka, he prefers staging make-believe wedding pageants with his female cousins to battling balls with the other boys. When his parents discover his innocent pastime, Arjie is forced to abandon his idyllic childhood games and adopt the rigid rules of an adult world. Bewildered by his incipient sexual awakening, mortified by the bloody… Shares Fiction - General, Literary, Domestic fiction, Literature

Larry's Party Carol Shields · 1997 · ★ 3.7 · 358p · ≈ 11h · Moderate Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator's perception, irony and tenderness. Carol Shields gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997 that flash back and forward seamlessly. As Larry journeys toward the millennium, adapting to society's changing expectations of men, Shields' elegant prose makes the trivial into the… Shares Fiction - General, General, Literature

A Good Yarn Debbie Macomber · 2005 · ★ 4.5 · 400p · ≈ 13h · Moderate A place of welcome and warmth, of friends old and new. Discover how knitting can change your life!Lydia Hoffman owns the shop on Blossom Street. In the year since it opened, A Good Yarn has thrived--and so has Lydia. A lot of that is due to Brad Goetz. But when Brad's ex-wife reappears, Lydia is suddenly afraid to trust her newfound happiness.Three women join Lydia's newest class. Elise Beaumont,… Shares Fiction - General, Women, General

The Edible Woman Margaret Atwood · 1969 · ★ 3.7 · 359p · ≈ 11h · Moderate A determined young lady who losses her focus along the line while trying to balance her life and relationship Shares Canadian fiction, Femmes, Women

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