What are the most recommended books matching 'raw and brutal'?

A stunning "portrait of the enduring grace of friendship" (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.

A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

A MAN BOOKER PRIZE ... Read more about A Little Life

THE ELEVENTH APARTMENT had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and ...

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The novel's central character is ...tienne Lantier, previously seen in L'Assommoir (1877), a young migrant worker who arrives at the forbidding coalmining town of Montsou in the bleak far north of France to earn a living as a miner. Sacked from his p... Read more about Germinal

Out on the open plain, on a starless, ink-dark night, a lone man was following the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometres of paved road that cut directly across the fields of beet. He cou...

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Carol Lynch Willams' The Chosen One is a dazzling novel about a young teenager's rebellion from the polygamist cult that would have her become the seventh wife to her 60-year-old uncle

Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated community wit... Read more about The Chosen One

I kick the toe of my sneaker into the desert sand. Even this late in the evening, with the sun sinking over my shoulder, the ground is leftover hot from the day. I can feel the heat through the soles ...

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A new breed of evil in Old New York

New York, 1886: Lower Manhattan's underworld is ruled by a new generation of cold-blooded criminals...Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt battles widespread corruption within the department's ranks...and a shoc... Read more about The Alienist

The words as I write them make as little sense as did the sight of his coffin descending into a patch of sandy soil near Sagamore Hill, the place he loved more than any other on earth. As I stood ther...

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This emotional and honest novel recounts a young man's experiences during World War II and digs deep into what he and his fellow soldiers lived through during those dark times.

The nightmares began for William Manchester 23 years after WW II. In his... Read more about Goodbye, Darkness

Our boeing 747 has been fleeing westward from darkened California, racing across the Pacific toward the sun, the incandescent eye of God, but slowly, three hours later than West Coast time, twilight g...

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A gritty and darkly hilarious novel quaking with life-winner of Australia's Miles Franklin Award-that follows a queer, First Nations Australian woman as she returns home to face her family and protect the land of their ancestors.

Wise-cracking Kerry... Read more about Too Much Lip

A stranger rode into town only it wasn’t a stranger, it was Kerry, come to say goodbye to Pop before he fell off that perch he’d been clinging to real stubborn way for so long. Cancer, Ken reckoned, n...

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From the #1 New York Times bestselling author behind the acclaimed Starz series The White Queen comes the story of lady-in-waiting Margaret Pole and her unique view of King Henry VIII's stratospheric rise to power in Tudor England.

As an heir to the ... Read more about The King's Curse

In the moment of waking I am innocent, my conscience clear of any wrongdoing. In that first dazed moment, as my eyes open, I have no thoughts; I am only a smooth-skinned, tightly muscled young body, a...

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By the spring of 1945, the Second World War was drawing to a close in Europe. Allied troops were sweeping through Nazi Germany and discovering the atrocities of SS concentration camps. The first to be reached intact was Buchenwald, in central Germany... Read more about Theory and practice of hell

two months in the spring of 1943 he was clerk in the “ Pathology Section.” During these weeks three different or ders from the Reich Main Security Office were received, assigning him to Auschwitz for ...

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Named a best book of 2017 by NPR, The Guardian, Slate, NYLON and The Globe and Mail (Canada)

From Durga Chew-Bose, "one of our most gifted, insightful essayists and critics" (Nylon), comes "a warmly considered meld of criticism and memoir" (New York... Read more about Too Much and Not the Mood

"Devastatingly good. Unputdownable. Mind Blowing." - Desperately Seeking HEA's book blog

*A girl with a darkness...*

He comes to my room every night.

Whispers sweet violence in my ear, one hand wrapped tight around my throat as we do things we sho... Read more about Gun Shy

The darkness wasn’t always there. I was bright and shiny once. There was no tarnish at my edges, no very bad thing that existed inside me. I had a mother, and a boyfriend, and a life. I was loved. I h...

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