The Memory Keeper's Daughter
On a snowy night a doctor gives away his newborn daughter and tells his wife she died.
2,154-word summary · 10 min read
Tag: literary fiction
307 books with this tag.
Page 12 of 13
Such a Fun Age
A late-night grocery store clash pulls sitter Emira Tucker and her employer Alix Chamberlain into a tense fight over race, money, and good intentions.
2,339-word summary · 10 min read
Station Eleven
After a flu empties the world, a traveling troupe plays Shakespeare for small towns linked by one dead actor.
2,480-word summary · 11 min read
Love in the Time of Cholera
Florentino waits fifty years for Fermina: youth letters, a marriage to Urbino, hundreds of affairs, and a river trip where old love gets a last hearing.
2,204-word summary · 10 min read
Heart of Darkness
Marlow pilots a steamer up the Congo for a trading company and seeks Kurtz, the brilliant agent who stopped sending ivory and started sending reports no one…
2,315-word summary · 10 min read
Everything I Never Told You
In 1977 Ohio, sixteen-year-old Lydia Lee is found dead in a lake, forcing her interracial family to face the secret pressures around race, school and duty that…
2,711-word summary · 12 min read
Demon Copperhead
Born in a Lee County trailer, Damon Fields survives foster care, football fame, and opioid addiction in Appalachia.
2,447-word summary · 11 min read
Conversations with Friends
Rooney's debut: Frances and Bobbi, Dublin students and ex-lovers, fall into the orbit of married Melissa and Nick, and wit turns into affair and ache.
2,194-word summary · 10 min read
Call Me by Your Name
One summer on the Italian Riviera: seventeen-year-old Elio and grad student Oliver circle each other through swims, talks, and missed chances.
2,627-word summary · 12 min read
Atonement
A thirteen year old misreads two lovers at a country house in 1935, and her false claim follows all three through war.
2,743-word summary · 12 min read
A Gentleman in Moscow
Count Rostov lives under house arrest in the Metropol and builds family from staff.
2,139-word summary · 10 min read
Yellowface
Struggling writer June steals her dead friend Athena's manuscript and publishes it as Juniper Song.
2,081-word summary · 9 min read
The Poisonwood Bible
A missionary drags his wife and four daughters to the Congo in 1959, and Africa remakes each of them.
2,227-word summary · 10 min read
Norwegian Wood
Toru recalls 1969 Tokyo, torn between fragile Naoko and lively Midori after a friend's suicide.
2,051-word summary · 9 min read
Never Let Me Go
Kathy looks back on Hailsham, the English school where she and her friends were raised for an unspoken purpose.
2,102-word summary · 9 min read
Middlesex
Cal Stephanides traces three generations from Greece to Detroit to explain being intersex and becoming himself.
2,013-word summary · 9 min read
Girl with a Pearl Earring
A maid in Vermeer's Delft household is drawn into the painter's world and into his most famous canvas.
1,973-word summary · 9 min read
A Little Life
Four friends in New York orbit Jude, whose hidden past of abuse shapes every page of this 720-page epic.
1,972-word summary · 9 min read
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Childhood friends Sam Masur and Sadie Green build hit games from Ichigo to Mapletown while love, disability, and work strain a thirty year bond through fame…
2,464-word summary · 11 min read
Little Fires Everywhere
In planned Shaker Heights, Elena Richardson rents to drifting artist Mia Warren, and a custody fight over baby May Ling splits friends and teens.
1,911-word summary · 8 min read
Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights retold: Heathcliff and Cathy on the moors, two houses, two generations.
2,056-word summary · 9 min read
Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens's Where the Crawdads Sing: Kya the Marsh Girl, Tate and Chase, the 1969 murder in Barkley Cove, and what the trial misses.
2,568-word summary · 11 min read
The Time Traveler's Wife
Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife retold: Henry's jumps, Clare waiting, art, and a marriage in two tenses.
1,932-word summary · 9 min read
The Song of Achilles
Song of Achilles retold: Patroclus and Achilles from boys to Troy, love and war in Miller prose.
1,925-word summary · 9 min read