Books like Bodies of Light
Maggie Sullivan, taken into care as a small child in Melbourne, moves through foster homes and institutions into an adult life lived under other names.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Bodies of Light
Faces in the Water
Istina Mavet, a young woman committed to mental hospitals in New Zealand, records the wards, the treatments and the women around her.
The Bluest Eye
A young Black girl in 1940s Ohio prays for blue eyes, and her wish exposes the way American beauty standards destroy the people they exclude.
All the Birds, Singing
Jake Whyte, a woman living alone on a sheep farm on an English island, finds her sheep being killed one by one, while her past in Australia closes in.
Indian Horse
Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibwe man in a treatment centre for alcoholics, goes back over his childhood, his years in a residential school and the hockey that saved him for a while.
The Spare Room
Helen gives her spare room in Melbourne to her old friend Nicola, who has come down from Sydney for three weeks of quack cancer treatment, and has to nurse her through it.
The Eye of the Sheep
Jimmy Flick, a boy who sees the world differently, lives with his loving mother and his violent father in a house in the suburbs of Melbourne.
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing
A girl grows up in rural Ireland with her mother and her brother, whose childhood brain tumour has left him damaged, told in fractured, half-formed prose.
Paco's Story
Paco Sullivan, the only survivor of a massacre of his company in Vietnam, gets off a bus in a small Texas town, scarred and limping, and takes a job washing dishes.
A Little Life
Four college friends make their way in New York, a lawyer, an actor, an architect and an artist, over decades in which one of them, Jude, carries a past of abuse that shapes all their lives.
The Gathering
Veronica Hegarty, one of twelve surviving children, brings her brother Liam's body home from England after he drowns himself, and the family gathers in Dublin for the wake.
Breath, Eyes, Memory
Sophie Caco, raised by her aunt in a Haitian village, is sent at twelve to join the mother she barely knows in New York.
When I Lived in Modern Times
In 1946 Evelyn Sert, a twenty-year-old Jewish hairdresser from Soho, sails to Palestine and is caught up in Tel Aviv and the struggle for a new state.