Books like The Butcher's Wife
In a coastal town in Taiwan in the 1930s, Lin Shi, an orphan, is married off to a brutal pig-butcher, and her neighbours gossip while he starves and abuses her.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Butcher's Wife
Woman at Point Zero
Firdaus, a woman awaiting execution in a Cairo prison for killing a man, tells a psychiatrist the story of her life.
The Family of Pascual Duarte
Awaiting execution, Pascual Duarte, a peasant from Extremadura, sets down the story of his life of poverty and violence.
Man Tiger
Margio, a young man in a seaside village in Java, kills a man, and the village tries to understand why, and whether it was the white tiger that lives inside him.
The Notebook
Twin boys sent to live with their cruel grandmother in a border town during the war train themselves to feel nothing, and write it all down in a notebook.
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.
In Evil Hour
In a small Colombian town under a military mayor, anonymous lampoons start appearing on doors overnight, exposing the residents' secrets, and one of them leads to a killing.
The Garlic Ballads
When the farmers of a county in Shandong are told to grow garlic and the market then collapses, they riot and burn down the government offices.
Salka Valka
Salka Valka arrives as a little girl with her destitute mother in an Icelandic fishing village, where she grows up tough, poor and in thrall to the merchant who owns everything.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Twenty-seven years later, a narrator reconstructs the hours before the murder of Santiago Nasar in a Caribbean town where everyone knew the killers' plan, and no one stopped them.
The Village
Two brothers born serfs in the village of Durnovka, Tikhon, who has clawed his way to owning a shop and land, and Kuzma, a self-taught poet, take stock of the brutal country life around them.
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.
The Lottery and Other Stories
Stories of suburban menace and domestic cruelty, anchored by the infamous title story of a village ritual.