Books like The Names
In 1987 Cora goes to register her newborn son: her violent husband wants him named Gordon, after himself, and her nine-year-old daughter likes Bear, and the novel follows the three different lives that unfold from each name.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Names
Black and Blue
After years of beatings from her husband, a New York City policeman, Fran Benedetto, a nurse, takes their young son and disappears to Florida under a new name.
Memphis
In 1995 Joan, ten, flees with her mother and younger sister to her mother's family home in Memphis, where three generations of women have lived and survived.
Real Americans
In New York in 1999 Lily Chen, twenty-two and the daughter of Chinese immigrants, is scraping by on an unpaid internship when she falls for Matthew, the son of an enormously rich family. In 2021 their teenage son, Nick, who knows little of where he comes from, goes looking for his father.
The Midnight Library
A woman who attempts suicide finds herself in a library between life and death, where every book shows a life she could have lived.
Black Cake
Byron and Benny Bennett, estranged siblings, come home to California after their mother's death to find she has left them a long voice recording, the story of her life in the Caribbean, and a black cake in the freezer.
The Girl with the Louding Voice
Adunni, fourteen, wants above all to go to school and find her louding voice, but in her Nigerian village her father sells her as third wife to an old man, and she runs away to Lagos.
The Shell Seekers
Penelope Keeling, sixty-four and newly home from hospital, owns a painting by her father, a Victorian artist suddenly back in fashion, and her three grown children each have plans for it.
The Forgotten Garden
In 1913 a four-year-old girl is found alone on a ship docked in Australia with nothing but a small suitcase and a book of fairy tales; decades later her granddaughter Cassandra inherits a cottage on the Cornish coast and follows the trail back to where the girl came from.
Weyward
In 2019 Kate flees an abusive partner for the cottage in Cumbria left to her by a great-aunt, and her story twines with those of Violet, a girl confined to her family's estate in 1942, and Altha, tried for witchcraft in 1619.
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
In 1923 Hattie Shepherd, fifteen, flees Georgia for Philadelphia with her mother and sisters. She marries young, and over the following decades raises nine children, each of whom gets a chapter of their own.
The Bastard of Istanbul
Armanoush, an Armenian-American girl from Arizona, secretly visits her stepfather's family in Istanbul, a houseful of women, and befriends Asya, the illegitimate daughter of the youngest aunt.
Mad Honey
Olivia McAfee left an abusive marriage to take over her father's beekeeping business in a small New Hampshire town, and her teenage son Asher falls for Lily Campanello, who is new in town. Months later Lily is dead and Asher is charged with her murder.