Book picks similar to
The Crime of Being by Alice Lichtenstein


fiction
giveaways-entered
gvwy-drama
justice

The Sophie Lancaster Story


Catherine Smyth - 2016
    The beatings and subsequent murder made international news. This book was written by an investigative journalist who became extremely close to the families of the victims. WITH PHOTOS

Outline


Rachel Cusk - 2014
    Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives.Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.

Mine


J.L. Butler - 2018
    She’s one big case away from securing her place among London’s legal elite. But when she meets her new client, Martin Joy, the natural caution that has protected Francine and fueled her rise melts away. Powerless to fight the irresistible magnetism between them, client and counsel tumble into a blistering affair that breaks every rule.Though Martin insists his marriage is over, Francine doesn’t believe him. Certain details he’s told her don’t quite add up. Consumed with a passion she cannot control and increasingly obsessed with Martin’s relationship with his wife, Donna, Francine follows the woman one night . . . and discovers her having dinner with her supposedly soon-to-be-ex-husband.The next morning, Francine awakens in her neighbor’s apartment with blood on her clothes and no recollection of what transpired after she spied Donna and Martin together. Then Francine receives more devastating news: Martin’s wife has vanished. That dinner was the last place anyone has seen Donna Joy alive.Suddenly, Francine finds herself caught in a dangerous labyrinth of deception, lies, and secrets, in which one false move could lead to her undoing. What happened that night and why can’t Francine remember? Where is Donna and who is responsible for her disappearance? The further Francine goes to find answers, the tighter the net seems to draw—around her lover, herself, and the life she’s meticulously built.

Venice Black


Gregory C. Randall - 2018
    She is planning to lose herself in the maze of canals and forget about her ex-husband’s conviction for operating a meth lab on Cleveland’s south side.The legacy of the Bosnian War’s brutal ethnic cleansing has brought journalist Marika Juric to Venice on a single-minded crusade: to gather enough evidence to keep one of the war’s masterminds from becoming Croatia’s next president. And there are those who’ll do anything to stop her.But these two strangers share more than their unexpected arrivals in the City of Masks. They’re mirror images of each other—down to their hair, their smiles, and the same desperation in their eyes. The resemblance isn’t just uncanny. It’s dangerous.When the secrets of Alex’s escape rush headlong into Marika’s obsession, the fates of both women become entwined in a vaporous hall of mirrors. Working together is their only way to survive.

The Glorious Heresies


Lisa McInerney - 2015
    Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions, while Maureen, the accidental murderer, has returned to Cork after forty years in exile to discover that Jimmy, the son she was forced to give up years before, has grown into the most fearsome gangster in the city. In seeking atonement for the murder and a multitude of other perceived sins, Maureen threatens to destroy everything her son has worked so hard for, while her actions risk bringing the intertwined lives of the Irish underworld into the spotlight . . .Biting, moving and darkly funny, The Glorious Heresies explores salvation, shame and the legacy of Ireland's twentieth-century attitudes to sex and family.

How to kill your friends


Phil Kurthausen - 2019
    Who needs enemies?There’s something about Meredith…Meredith is a young underachiever, living in a squalid apartment, struggling to stay one step ahead of her landlord and the law when she meets a man from her past who offers her a way out and a chance to start over.Having worked her way into the lives of the rich and privileged, Meredith will do just about anything to preserve her new lifestyle.But just how far is she prepared to go?

He Made Me (a Booker & Cash Story Book 2)


Oliver Tidy - 2017
    Someone is demanding a lot of money from her husband and she wants to know why.What do the dying words of one man - he made me - actually mean?As the mystery unfolds people will come undone and reputations will be ruined before the answer becomes clear.At the end of the day Mrs Swaine might end up wishing she’d let sleeping dogs lie… Also available in the Booker & Cash series: Bad Sons

The Liar


Ayelet Gundar-Goshen - 2019
    Serving customers ice cream all summer long, she is desperate for some kind of escape.But one afternoon, a terrible lie slips from her tongue. And suddenly everyone wants to talk to her: the press, her schoolmates, and even the boy upstairs. He is the only one who knows the truth, and he is demanding a price for his silence.Then Nofar meets Raymonde, an elderly immigrant whose best friend has just died. Raymonde keeps her friend alive the only way she knows how, by inhabiting her stories. But soon, Raymonde's lies take on a life of their own.Written with propulsive energy, dark humor, and deep insight, The Liar reveals the far-reaching consequences of even our smallest choices, and explores the hidden corners of human nature to reveal the liar, and the truth-teller, in all of us.

So the Doves


Heidi James - 2017
    When a body is discovered in a Kent orchard, he begins to question everything he has ever believed to be true.

Children of the Salt Road


Lydia Fazio Theys - 2017
    Catherine sets up an art studio, while Mark explores the exciting potential of Italy’s languishing agricultural regions. For a moment, there’s hope for healing on the banks of the sparkling lagoon.But the appearance of a mysterious young boy shakes their relationship to its core. As Catherine begins to devote her attention to the child, Mark follows a troubling path of destruction, betraying Catherine’s trust in devastating ways. Catherine discovers their idyllic surroundings also belie a sinister history, driving the couple even further apart. As they delve deeper into the secrets of their town and in their marriage, will the truths they uncover separate them for good?

The Arrangement


Sarah Dunn - 2017
    They've got a two hundred year-old house, an autistic son obsessed with the Titanic, and 17 chickens, at last count. It's the kind of paradise where stay-at-home moms team up to cook the school's "hot lunch," dads grill grass-fed burgers, and, as Lucy observes, "chopping kale has become a certain kind of American housewife's version of chopping wood."When friends at a wine-soaked dinner party reveal they've made their marriage open, sensible Lucy balks. There's a part of her, though – the part that worries she's become too comfortable being invisible-that's intrigued. Why not try a short marital experiment? Six months, clear ground rules, zero questions asked. When an affair with a man in the city begins to seem more enticing than the happily-ever-after she's known for the past nine years, Lucy must decide what truly makes her happy – "real life," or the "experiment?"

Harriet


Elizabeth Jenkins - 1934
    Elizabeth Jenkins's artistry, however, transforms the bare facts of this case from the annals of Victorian England's Old Bailey into an absolutely spine-chilling exploration of the depths of human depravity.

The Reckless Oath We Made


Bryn Greenwood - 2019
    Almost six-foot, with a redhead's temper and a shattered hip, she has a long list of worries: never-ending bills, her beautiful, gullible sister, her five-year-old nephew, her housebound mother, and her drug-dealing boss.Zee may not be a princess, but Gentry is an actual knight, complete with sword, armor, and a code of honor. Two years ago the voices he hears called him to be Zee's champion. Both shy and autistic, he's barely spoken to her since, but he has kept watch, ready to come to her aid. When an abduction tears Zee's family apart, she turns to the last person she ever imagined--Gentry--and sets in motion a chain of events that will not only change both of their lives, but bind them to one another forever.A provocative love story between a tough Kansas woman on a crooked path to redemption and the unlikeliest of champions, from the New York Times bestselling author of All the Ugly and Wonderful Things.

The Witness Tree


Amy Pendino - 2018
    She agrees to help neighbors take down a strange double-headed tree that has stood alone between two fields for almost a century. Unexplainable accidents begin haunting those who help, and Dani must uncover a community's secret before tragedy claims her as its next victim.Dani's not the only one running from her past—two generations ago, young Lilly Bradstreet is not the person her small town wants her to be. She falls in love with a Mexican migrant worker and is forced to choose between her family's wishes, her passionate romance, and the life of freedom she's always dreamed of.Lilly's long-forgotten quest for independence and Dani's search for answers intertwine at the foot of the Witness Tree, whose secrets are darker and more unnerving than either woman ever expected. Vivid depictions of small-town bonds, young love, racism, and women who've dreamed and been denied make The Witness Tree a moving, page-turning debut novel.

The Lowering Days


Gregory Brown - 2021
    . .Growing up, David Almerin Ames and his brothers, Link and Simon, believed the wild patch of Maine where they lived along the Penobscot River belonged to them. Running down the state like a spine, the river shared its name with the people of the Penobscot Nation, whose ancestral territory included the entire Penobscot watershed--the land upon which the Ames family eventually made their home.The brothers' affinity for the natural world derives from their iconoclastic parents, Arnoux, a romantic artist and Vietnam War deserter who builds boats by hand, and Falon, an activist journalist who runs The Lowering Days, a community newspaper which gives equal voice to indigenous and white issues.But the boys' childhood reverie is shattered when a bankrupt paper mill, once the Penobscot Valley's largest employer, is burned to the ground on the eve of potentially reopening. As the community grapples with the scope of the devastation, Falon receives a letter from a Penobscot teenager confessing to the crime--an act of justice for a sacred river under centuries of assault.For the residents of the Penobscot Valley, the fire reveals a stark truth. For many, the mill is a lifeline, providing working class jobs they need to survive. Within the Penobscot Nation, the mill is a bringer of death, spewing toxic chemicals and wastewater products that poison the river's fish and plants.As the divide within the community widens, the building anger and resentment explodes in tragedy, wrecking the lives of David and those around him.Evocative and atmospheric, pulsating with the rhythms of the natural world, The Lowering Days is a meditation on the flow and weight of history, the power and fragility of love, the dangerous fault lines underlying families, and the enduring land where stories are created and told.