Books like Bastard Out of Carolina
Ruth Anne 'Bone' Boatwright grows up among the hard-drinking, fiercely loyal Boatwright clan of Greenville, South Carolina, while her mother's new husband turns her childhood into a fight to survive.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Bastard Out of Carolina
Nightcrawling
Kiara Johnson, seventeen, is trying to keep the rent paid on the East Oakland apartment she shares with her older brother when a chance encounter pulls her into a scandal that runs through the city's police department.
The Prince of Tides
A Southern football coach goes to New York to help his suicidal twin sister's psychiatrist understand the family, and the family turns out to be much worse than either of them told.
The Secret Life of Bees
In 1964 South Carolina a fourteen-year-old white girl runs off with her black housekeeper to a pink house kept by three beekeeping sisters who know the secret of her dead mother.
The Book of Ruth
Ruth, a plain and overlooked girl in a small Illinois town, grows up under a bitter mother who favours her clever brother, and marries Ruby Dahl, a damaged young man, who comes to live with them.
Joe
Joe Ransom, a hard-drinking ex-convict who runs a crew poisoning trees for a timber company in north Mississippi, takes on a teenage boy from a drifter family and tries to protect him from his own father.
Salvage the Bones
A pregnant fifteen-year-old in rural Mississippi weathers Hurricane Katrina with her brothers, her fighting dogs, and a ferocity that refuses to break.
Shuggie Bain
In 1980s Glasgow, Shuggie, a gentle, different boy, devotes his childhood to saving his glamorous mother Agnes from the drinking that is destroying her, as poverty closes in around them.
Ham on Rye
A boy grows up in Depression-era Los Angeles with an abusive father and an imagination fuelled by books, and the suffering is leavened by a stubborn refusal to be defeated.
We the Animals
Three brothers run wild in upstate New York, sons of a Puerto Rican father and a white mother from Brooklyn whose love for each other is as volatile as it is fierce.
A Woman Is No Man
In 1990 Isra, seventeen, is married off in Palestine and taken to live with her husband's family in Brooklyn. In 2008 her daughter Deya, eighteen and under pressure to marry, starts to learn the truth about her mother.
The Yearling
Jody Baxter, a boy living with his parents on a hardscrabble farm in the Florida scrub in the 1870s, adopts an orphaned fawn and calls it Flag.
The Color Purple
A young Black woman in rural Georgia finds her voice and her freedom through sisterhood, love, and the slow, fierce work of self-creation.