Here are 65 books that Girls Burn Brighter fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am the product of biracial parents, and the idea of passing or not has always fascinated me as well as disgusted me. The reasons one would want to pass in this era are much different than the survival aspect my ancestors who passed had to consider in the 19th century. In writing my YA historical novels, being biracial always enters in, no matter the topic, because it is who I am and, in the end, always rears its head for consideration.
The biracial Vigne twins in this book struggle with the choices before them as to which race they will embrace. I loved the book for its poignancy and honest exploration of the sensitivity involved in having a choice to make, no matter the generation.
This book is similar to the movie Imitation of Life but on a grander scale. The stories moved me and hurt me at the same time.
THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP BESTSELLER #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE
'An utterly mesmerising novel..I absolutely loved this book' Bernardine Evaristo, winner of the Booker Prize 2019
'Epic' Kiley Reid, O, The Oprah Magazine
'Favourite book [of the] year' Issa Rae
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years…
I like books about big families, especially unusual ones, but I have only one sister and only one child, so when I set out to write about these families, I read about them first. We place so much importance on how kids are raised, what kind of childhood and home life and family they have growing up, what gifts and what challenges they’re bestowed by genetics, history, identity, society, circumstance. Siblings usually share all or at least most of these markers and yet turn into often wildly different adults. It’s also true that all those fine sibling balances – love/hate, adored/annoyed, admired/appalled, alike/different – are great fun to read and write.
When I first sat down to write a novel about three sisters, step one was to reread King Lear which is about exactly that. The three sisters in Lear are quite different from mine. Among other things, they like each other much less. But for that delicate sisterly balance between so-glad-I-have-you-to-share-the-burdens-of-an-aging-parent and I-might-actually-have-to-kill-you, nothing beats King Lear.
Rabbit Hole is about Teddy’s obsession with her sister Angie’s cold-case disappearance. When Angie was alive, she was angry and difficult, but Teddy still misses her. While writing the book, I thought a lot about my relationships with my own sisters and how unique that particular bond is. I love books that capture the at-times-uncomfortable closeness of sisterhood and grapple with its power.
Austen writes sisters like no one else, and the dynamic between tempestuous Marianne and practical Elinor is the template for so many novels that have followed.
Austen keeps the two sisters from becoming caricatures by making them more alike than different, and the love that anchors their relationship is at the heart of the novel.
I first read this as a freshman in college, and I still think about it every time I’m writing sisters. A classic.
'The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste' Virginia Woolf
Jane Austen's subtle and witty novel of secrets and suppression, lies and seduction, brilliantly portrays a world where rigid social convention clashes with the impulses of the heart. It tells the story of two very different sisters who find themselves thrown into an unkind world when their father dies. Marianne, wild and impulsive, falls dangerously in love, while Elinor suffers her own private heartbreak but conceals her true feelings, even from those closest to her.
Growing up in the sub-tropics of Brisbane, there was a magic in the heat. It was one that spoke to me from a really young age, and I’d daydream about finding portals to secret worlds in the stutter of a sprinkler’s spray, or the ooze of a monster in mid-afternoon sweat. There was no way I couldn’t find a story in the oppressive swelter of year-round summers, and in my head, I’d cast roles for my family and my friends. Over the years, that bred into a love of writing and reading stories about strange families finding their own sorts of magic with each other and their environments, and the ways that little taste of the uncanny can reveal and conceal in equal measure.
Okay, this is a little bit of a cheat, as there’s no magical realism exactly in Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, but there’s certainly the uncanny. This story of two sisters separated during childhood trying to find each other in adulthood is wry and funny, but also immensely heartfelt and dramatic, and the twist at the halfway mark (which I won’t spoil for you!) makes this one a personal favourite.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club introduces a middle-class American family that is ordinary in every way but one in this novel that won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.
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 was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse…
I'm a professor of modern U.S. history and have spent my career researching this list's fascinating era. This moment began our modern political history. The first Red Scare in the United States, erupting in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, was a conflict over the definition and limits of radicalism in a modern democracy and the limits of its repression. It was also tied to other seismic questions of the era that remain relevant, including how far the fights of women and Blacks for opportunities and rights that other Americans took for granted could succeed, whether to end mass immigration, the meaning of ‘Americanism,’ the extent of civil liberties, the limits of capitalism, and the role of social movements in the republic.
The Seattle General Strike was the local event that escalated a national Red Scare at the beginning of 1919 and caused a wave of panic that the Russian Revolution was coming home. Friedheim is great at explaining how this extraordinary event occurred, sketching the key factions in the city, and narrating the drama of the big moments. This classic account of strikers running a city until the troops were called in, first published in 1964, is back in print in a great new edition with photos.
"We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead-NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!" With these words echoing throughout the city, on February 6, 1919, 65,000 Seattle workers began one of the most important general strikes in US history. For six tense yet nonviolent days, the Central Labor Council negotiated with federal and local authorities on behalf of the shipyard workers whose grievances initiated the citywide walkout. Meanwhile, strikers organized to provide essential services such as delivering supplies to hospitals and markets, as well as feeding thousands at union-run dining facilities.
I’m a Hollywood native, writer/actor/mixed-media artist/creative compulsive. When I was a kid, I was really close to my older brother who was an addict. Unfortunately he never stopped using and died too young. I dealt with it by allowing the experience to inspire me. In my recent young adult novel, Just a Girl in the Whirl, the father character is inspired by him. I express myself through all art forms in order to make my way in the world and I love reading about other female characters who do the same! I’m a lifelong optimist and I love feeling inspired and inspiring others to love themselves, find the humor in everything, and create!
This book is about twin Israeli-American teenage girls whose mom has Huntington’s disease and the different ways they go about handling that as individuals and how it affects the sister’s relationship. I love the way religion is handled in this book, with each sister’s different take where it concerns their Judaism. It’s about life, death, and sisterhood. I loved it.
Eighteen-year-old twins Adina and Tovah have little in common besides their ambitious nature. Viola prodigy Adina yearns to become a soloist-and to convince her music teacher he wants her the way she wants him. Overachiever Tovah awaits her acceptance to Johns Hopkins, the first step on her path toward med school and a career as a surgeon.
But one thing could wreck their carefully planned futures: a genetic test for Huntington's, a rare degenerative disease that slowly steals control of the body and mind. It's turned their Israeli mother into a near stranger and fractured the sisters' own bond in…
As a young working mom, I occasionally longed to follow the example of columnist Erma Bombeck and hide from my family in the car. Instead, I channeled the mayhem of family life into a humor column called “The Mother Load,” which detailed the day-to-day challenges of running a business while caring for two daughters, one husband, two guinea pigs, and a dancing rabbit. When I decided to pursue my life-long dream to write fiction, my debut novel was a humorous story about a mother-daughter-grandmother road trip/chase from Boston to Memphis. Although my writing doesn’t shy away from serious issues, I choose to see the world through a humorous and ultimately hopeful lens.
How can you not love a novel about an agoraphobic mother who somehow promises her 15-year-old daughter that she’ll take her to Antarctica?
The mom, Bernadette, knows she can’t handle that kind of trip, but in her desperate attempts to make it work, things get out of hand, and Bernadette disappears. It’s up to 15-year-old Bee to play detective and find her. Set in Seattle, Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is a delightful mix of comedy and satire with a wonderful message about the need to face up to the disappointments in one’s past.
A misanthropic matriarch leaves her eccentric family in crisis when she mysteriously disappears in this "whip-smart and divinely funny" novel that inspired the movie starring Cate Blanchett (New York Times).
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect; and to 15-year-old Bee, she is her best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette vanishes. It all began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle --…
I’m Sarah J. Sover, and I adore smashing genres together, especially when there’s magic involved. My first book, Double-Crossing the Bridge, is a comedic fantasy about drunk trolls pulling a suicidal heist, and my new release, Fairy Godmurder is like Jessica Jones with sparkle. The novels are wildly different from each other, but they both exist in the crime-fantasy sphere, where I can delve deep into character motivations, explore wrongs in the world through a fantastical lens, and play with well-loved tropes, inverting and subverting in unexpected ways. I love that this is a growing genre, and I hope I get an influx of suggestions added to my own TBR tower because of this list!
After a near-death experience, PI Harper Blaine gains the ability to navigate the occult world of magic. But the realm between our world and the next is filled with monsters. Some are malicious, but some are looking to hire. The concept of the Grey is fascinating and slightly terrifying to me. Harper deserves to be on this list because only a true badass could survive her client list.
Meet Harper Blaine. She also sees dead people...Harper Blaine is a small-time private investigator trying to earn a living when a low-life savagely assaults her, leaving her for dead. For two minutes, to be precise. When Harper comes to in the hospital, she begins to feel a bit ...strange. She sees things that can only be described as weird-shapes emerging from a foggy grey mist, snarling teeth, creatures roaring. But Harper's not crazy. Her "death" has made her a Greywalker - able to move between our world and the mysterious, cross-over zone where things that go bump in the night…
Human psychology – particularly the “abnormal” kind – has always fascinated me, enough to study the topic at university. What makes us tick? Why do seemingly ordinary people commit terrible crimes? Psychological crime thrillers allow me to explore our dark side further, and I sprinkle nuggets from that research throughout my novels.
Memories and relationships may appear in disguise. Stories are our way of sharing our experiences – the ones too intense and intimate to express in other ways.
Born and raised in South Africa, I now live in Israel with my wife and daughters. When I’m not writing my next thriller, you’ll find me writing computer code and generally being curious about the world.
It’s every author’s worst nightmare. You’ve just discovered that a famous author has a book that sounds uncannily similar to your new and unpublished masterpiece. Yikes!
Dugoni’s series starter featured a feisty female detective investigating her sister’s past murder. I had to read it. Thankfully, that’s where the similarities ended. The novel is a gripping read with meticulous forensic details and an expertly laid twist. And both our stories warn against the dangers of old secrets. Are some doors better left closed?
The first book in the series that has garnered millions of readers across the globe, from New York Times bestselling author Robert Dugoni.
Tracy Crosswhite has spent twenty years questioning the facts surrounding her sister Sarah's disappearance and the murder trial that followed. She doesn't believe that Edmund House-a convicted rapist and the man condemned for Sarah's murder-is the guilty party. Motivated by the opportunity to obtain real justice, Tracy became a homicide detective with the Seattle PD and dedicated her life to tracking down killers.
When Sarah's remains are finally discovered near their hometown in the northern Cascade mountains…
In the 1980s, my mother “divorced” her mother with a letter in the mail. In 2010 I did the same via email. I thought it was just my dysfunctional family, but come to find out, mother-adult daughter estrangement is not unusual and difficult mother-daughter relationships don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen in the context of patriarchy, white supremacy, internalized misogyny, and other oppressive systems. Through therapy and, later, when I trained to be a life coach, allllll my “mother stuff” came up. The tools and practices I learned and developed were so helpful to me, I couldn’t keep them to myself.
Wells’ novel takes readers to the heart of the pain that an adult daughter experiences at the hands of a troubled mother.
It explores how the pain and trauma of being a woman in a culture that doesn’t value women equally are passed down through generations and how each generation picks it up and carries it, in similar but different ways.
This “wound” shows up in the relationships of mothers who grew up in the 1950s and 60s and their daughters who grew up in the 1970s and 80s. The mothers want so much for their daughters to have more freedom than they themselves did, but instead find themselves experiencing fear, bitterness, and unexpected jealousy.
Film tie-in edition of the international bestseller. When Siddalee Walker, eldest daughter of Vivi Abbott Walker (Ya-Ya extraordinaire - part Scarlett, part Katharine Hepburn, part Tallulah) is interviewed about a hit play she has directed, her mother is described as a 'tap-dancing child abuser'.
Enraged, Vivi disowns Sidda - devastating her daughter who postpones her wedding and puts her life on hold until she is granted forgiveness. Trying to repair the relationship, the Ya-Yas, Vivi's intrepid tribe of Louisiana girlfriends, sashay in and insist Sidda is sent 'The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood', a scrapbook of their lives together…
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