Here are 100 books that Pieces of My Mother fans have personally recommended if you like
Pieces of My Mother.
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Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, I escaped an abusive real life by reading stories that transported me away. They were written by female authors who seemed to speak directly to me. By their example, they told me to be brave and strong. To keep learning. They taught that if I rose to the challenges that presented themselves, I too would end up triumphant like them.
Walls’ recounts her unconventional childhood marked by poverty, instability, and the eccentric choices of her parents.
The memoir offers an unflinching but often tender portrait of a deeply flawed family and the complicated bonds of love and loyalty. Walls’s voice is both clear-eyed and compassionate as she revisits her past.
Wanting to make sense of my own dysfunctional family, I reread this book several times.
Now a major motion picture starring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson.
This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist's journey from the deserted and dusty mining towns of the American Southwest, to an antique filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, 'brilliant' but alcoholic parents.
At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilisation her parents sought to escape, Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the 'mundane,…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I have a great interest in personal stories, well written. My memoir, The Full Catastrophe, was published in 2016. I wanted an answer to my own question “How could a well-educated, intelligent woman marry an abusive man?” Writing allowed me to find my answers. From that time on, I have taught people to write their own memoirs, have lectured on memoir, facilitated group discussions on memoir, and written articles on memoir. I am now in the process of writing another memoir.
I read this book for two reasons—I have two adopted siblings and I am in the midst of writing a memoir about growing up in a rural Ontario village in the 50s and 60s. Petrie tells of her own experience as an unwed mother and the stories of six other women she has managed to locate after all this time, who talk about their experiences of being young and pregnant in the 50s and 60s. At that time, unwanted pregnancies brought shame onto the girl herself and her family, so they had to be carefully hidden. Often the girl was sent to a mother and baby home run by churches and the Salvation Army, where judgment dictated the responses to these girls. Petrie breaks through her own desire to remain separate from the other girls to tell an honest and heartbreaking story of what life was like in…
Thirty or forty years ago, everybody knew what that phrase meant: a girl or a young, unmarried woman had gotten herself pregnant. She was “in trouble.” She had brought indescribable shame on herself and her family. In those days it was unthinkable that she would have her child and keep it. Instead she had to hide. Most likely she would be sent away to a home for unwed mothers, where she would stay in secrecy until her baby was born and given up for adoption. “Gone to an aunt’s” was the usual cover story, a fiction that everyone understood but…
I have a great interest in personal stories, well written. My memoir, The Full Catastrophe, was published in 2016. I wanted an answer to my own question “How could a well-educated, intelligent woman marry an abusive man?” Writing allowed me to find my answers. From that time on, I have taught people to write their own memoirs, have lectured on memoir, facilitated group discussions on memoir, and written articles on memoir. I am now in the process of writing another memoir.
Eisen was a fifteen-year-old boy in 1944 when the Nazis sent him and his family to Auschwitz-Berkenau to become slave labour. He tells the story after seventy years, recalling the back-breaking work and his survival through luck or chance and the kindness of some good people. This is a “must-read” for anyone who thinks that this atrocity didn’t or couldn’t happen in our modern world, and an inspiration to those of us who sometimes feel our own struggles are insurmountable. This book touched me personally because my own children’s grandfather was sent to the same concentration camp.
An award-winning, internationally bestselling Holocaust memoir in the tradition of Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz
In the spring of 1944, gendarmes forcibly removed Tibor “Max” Eisen and his family from their home, brought them to a brickyard and eventually loaded them onto crowded cattle cars bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. At fifteen years of age, Eisen survived the selection process and was inducted into the camp as a slave laborer.
More than seventy years after the Nazi camps were liberated by the Allies, By Chance Alone details Eisen’s story of survival: the backbreaking slave labor in Auschwitz I,…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I have a great interest in personal stories, well written. My memoir, The Full Catastrophe, was published in 2016. I wanted an answer to my own question “How could a well-educated, intelligent woman marry an abusive man?” Writing allowed me to find my answers. From that time on, I have taught people to write their own memoirs, have lectured on memoir, facilitated group discussions on memoir, and written articles on memoir. I am now in the process of writing another memoir.
This recommendation returns to one of my most passionate interests—that of adopted children and the families they are placed in. Beatty is a poet and this is reflected in her memoir—it is not the usual chronological narrative as most memoirs are. She breaks the myth of the “special” or “chosen baby” to tell her truth of the lives of adopted children. Beatty exposes, through vignettes and her poetry, her meetings with her birth mother, her adopted family, her attempts to know who she is and where she came from. She breaks open the belief that you can “create” a perfect family using children from other birth mothers, when all her life, she feels, is a lie and she has no grounding in the world. This memoir is her quest to find out who she is.
American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continents-and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who's won three Stanley Cups-and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This is not the whitewashed story, but the real story, where Beatty writes through complete erasure: loss of name and history, and a culture based on the currency of gratitude as expected payment from the adoptee. American Bastard sandblasts the exaltation of adoption in Western culture and the myth of the "chosen baby." This journey…
What can better give expertise on the books one loves than decades of reading? I’ve always had a passion for sympathetic, strong characters, especially women. At the core of all my novels, readers will find a sympathetic and strong heroine. In Girlfriend Trouble, Lian is the catalyst that changes the lives of everyone around her for the better; or, more precisely, Lian’s compassion, wisdom, and serene nature are what change things. I’m probably too idealistic, but it’s better than being a cynic. There’s an element of this in all the books I’ve recommended, and those I’ve written. I like to think there’s more of it in the real world too.
For me, personally, this book taught me how truly lucky I was while living in my truck for 5 years in the early 2000s. 15-year-old Lutie and her 12-year-old brother, Fate, are thrown into a desperate adventure after their stepmom dies. Their odyssey across America in an attempt to find their long-lost father, and the perils of being homeless in Las Vegas and avoiding the life-threatening perils of living in a car and dodging unsavory and predatory people, is a harshly realistic depiction of...well, reality.
Lutie McFee's history has taught her to avoid attachments...to people, to places, and to almost everything. With her mother long dead and her father long gone to find his fortune in Las Vegas, 15-year-old Lutie lives in the god-forsaken town of Spearfish, South Dakota with her twelve-year-old brother, Fate, and Floy Satterfield, the 300-pound ex-girlfriend of her father. While Lutie shoplifts for kicks, Fate spends most of his time reading, watching weird TV shows and worrying about global warming and the endangerment of pandas. As if their life is not dismal enough, one day, while shopping in their local Wal-Mart,…
Being of Eastern European origins, and also a child of the 80s, definitely had a say in what my likings and my character would become growing up. From the cold long winters and the white landscapes, Fantasy genre, and everything Might and Magic have shaped my childhood, my studies, my art (traditional oil painting and clay sculpting) and lingered until now (and definitely beyond).
The Dwarves series (especially the first two books) bring the readers back in time and sets them up, straight from the beginning, on a simpler way of seeing things and also a simpler way of writing, while also being able to convey the true values of the fantasy genre with class.
For countless millennia, no man or beast has ever succeeded in breaching the stone gateway into Girdlegard. Until now . . .
Abandoned as a child, Tungdil the blacksmith is the only dwarf in a kingdom of men. But when he is sent out into the world to deliver a message and reacquaint himself with his people, the young foundling finds himself thrust into a battle for which he has not been trained. Not only his own safety, but the life of every man, woman and child in Girdlegard depends upon his ability to embrace his heritage.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I’ve always been deeply interested in how people connect to those around them—it is something I write about constantly. My first novel, So Much Love, was about how a community reacts to terrible loss and uncertainty, and my recent book of nonfiction, These Days Are Numbered, is about how my own community—and I—reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic. I am always looking at how humans human, separately and especially together. That is one of the joys of narrative fiction for me—the way we can use it to examine our behaviour and interactions, and how we form relationships and communities. I hope these books enthrall you as much as they did me.
Yes, it’s a Victorian novel but it’s also the slenderest and sweetest one, by my lights.
Cast out from his narrow religious community by the acts of a dishonest friend, Silas Marner flees to a new village and resolves to live a life apart, money his only security. Then along comes a tiny child in need and Silas cannot help but help—even though this new challenge comes on the heels of a devastating robbery.
The man’s generosity has the effect of opening him up to the generosity of others until, little by little, he becomes a part of the community he has lived apart from for so long. There is never a bad time to read this lovely, hopeful little novella about the worst and best of human nature.
Gold! - his own gold - brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken away!
Falsely accused of theft, Silas Marner is cut off from his community but finds refuge in the village of Raveloe, where he is eyed with distant suspicion. Like a spider from a fairy-tale, Silas fills fifteen monotonous years with weaving and accumulating gold. The son of the wealthy local Squire, Godfrey Cass also seeks an escape from his past. One snowy winter, two events change the course of their lives: Silas's gold is stolen and, a child crawls across his threshold.
Born the same year as Winona Ryder, Tupac Shakur, and Elon Musk, I’m a Toronto-based writer of novels, short fiction, graphic stories, nonfiction, and scripts for film and television. My YA books include the graphic novella The Lion of Africa, the supernatural, climate change-fuelled Daughters of Lighttrilogy, and the hard-hitting Since You’ve Been Gone. My writing gives voice to strong, diverse protagonists in urban settings who are dealing with seemingly insurmountable challenges. I’ve been a special education teacher for more than 20 years and my characters are often inspired by the amazing young people I’ve worked with. The cities in my work are living, breathing entities that shape the plot and the protagonist’s character.
In a world where the number of forcibly displaced people is rising faster and to the highest levels ever, I believe this beautifully written story of fourteen-year-old Alem is incredibly important. Thinking he’s on a short holiday to the UK with his father, Alem, who is an aspiring architect, happily soaks in the sights and sounds, making apt comparisons between London and the urban landscapes and architecture of Ethiopia. However, Alem is about to have his world turned upside down. The next day, his father abandons him in the UK in a desperate attempt to keep him safe from the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. This means Alem is forced to navigate the asylum process and get used to living in the UK while trying desperately to hang onto the hope that his parents are still alive and that they might one day be reunited as a family.
'Playful, obstinate and courageously humorous ... hilarious and later heartbreaking' Guardian
'Sweet, funny, highly inventive' Yorkshire Post
The personal, funny and poignant tale of a young refugee, from acclaimed storyteller Benjamin Zephaniah
Acclaimed performance poet and novelist Benjamin Zephaniah's honest, wry and poignant story of a young refugee left in London is of even more power and pertinence today than when it was first published.
Life is not safe for Alem. His father is Ethopian, his mother Eritrean. Their countries are at war, and Alem is welcome in neither place.
So Alem is excited to spend a holiday in London…
In my high school creative writing class, my teacher once said that good writing was a bit like looking at a star. If you look directly at it, it gets a little fuzzy and hard to see. But if you look just off to the side, the star becomes vivid and clear. That, to me, is exactly the power of spooky stories for young readers. We all deal with monsters, to varying degrees, throughout our lives. Even kids. But if we look at it just off to the side, through the angle of a fun, spooky story, those monsters suddenly become much more comprehensible. More faceable. More beatable.
I still think about the setting of The Ash House all the time.
It is so vivid and so real. The eeriness and spookiness of this place starts from the first page, even the first sentence. We know something is off here in the ash house, and we watch as the main character starts being subsumed by the other kids here.
We worry as he starts losing his identity. But this is a powerful and haunting story about listening to yourself and remembering yourself no matter what else is going on around you, and no matter what anyone else believes.
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children meets Lord of the Flies in the exciting debut from Angharad Walker. 'A mesmerising other-worldly story that got deep under my skin - I couldn't put it down.' JASBINDER BILAN, author of Asha & the Spirit Bird
'Dark, tense and intoxicating ... Seriously exciting.' LUCY STRANGE, author of The Ghost of Gosswater
A new boy arrives at the Ash House. He can't remember his name - or why he's been sent there.
Given the name Sol, and troubled by a mystery pain that no medicine can cure, he joins the gang of children living…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Teaching middle school made me painfully aware of the disparity in our students’ lives. Some kids have every advantage, while others struggle to survive without enough food, clean water, or a safe, dry place to sleep for the night. All these kids, with their diverse backgrounds, sit side-by-side in class and are expected to perform at the same academic and social levels. In my novels, I feature ordinary teens that are strong, smart, and resilient, like so many of the students who taught me as much as I taught them.
Homecominghas been around for a long time, but it is a story I’ve never forgotten. Voigt opens her novel with Dicey Tillerman, thirteen, and her three younger siblings abandoned by their mother in the parking lot of a shopping mall. The only way Dicey can keep the family together is to get them to a great-aunt’s home, but that means a long journey with little money. This is a tale of fiction, yet it exemplifies the courage and strength that so many kids muster in the face of impossible odds. I’ve always felt that too many people underestimate the resilience of our youth.
The iconic start to the timeless, Newbery-winning series from Cynthia Voigt.
“It’s still true.” That’s the first thing James Tillerman says to his older sister, Dicey, every morning. It’s still true that their mother has abandoned the four Tillermans in a mall parking lot somewhere in the middle of Connecticut. It’s still true that they have to find their own way to Great-aunt Cilla’s house in Bridgeport. It’s still true that they need to spend as little as possible on food and seek shelter anywhere that is out of view of the authorities. It’s still true that the only way…
