What are the most recommended books matching 'unflinching and intense'?

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#1

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 ... More details on 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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#2

In the #1 New York Times bestseller, A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government ... More details on A Long Way Gone

I AM PUSHING a rusty wheelbarrow in a town where the air smells of blood and burnt flesh. The breeze brings the faint cries of those whose last breaths are leaving their mangled bodies. I walk past th...
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#3

The international Number One bestseller from the author of The Song of Achilles, shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction

Woman. Witch. Myth. Mortal. Outcast. Lover. Destroyer. Survivor. CIRCE.

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightie... More details on Circe

When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modes...
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#4

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl, and the basis for the major motion picture starring Charlize Theron

Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in "The Satan Sacrifice of K... More details on Dark Places

Ihave a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood. Something’s wrong with it. I w...
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#5

The inspiration for the film starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, this resonant story of a mother's unsettling quest to understand her teenage son's deadly violence, her own ambivalence toward motherhood, and the explosive link between them rem... More details on We Need to Talk About Kevin

I’m unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you. But since we’ve been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a ...
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#6

It is 1944. The Jews of Sighet, Hungary are rounded up and driven into Nazi concentration camps. For the next terrible year, young Elie Wiesel experiences the loss of everything he loves - home, friends, family - in an agonizing journey through Birke... More details on Night

THEY CALLED HIM MOISHE THE BEADLE, as if his entire life he had never had a surname. He was the jack-of-all-trades in a Hasidic house of prayer, a shtibl. The Jews of Sighet—the little town in Transyl...
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#7

Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio.

Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her priv... More details on The Bluest Eye

Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men with sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel. Rosemary Villanucci, our next-door friend who lives above her father's cafe, sits in a 1939 Buick eat...
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#8

National Bestseller

"A harrowing tale of the perils of high-altitude climbing, a story of bad luck and worse judgment and of heartbreaking heroism." -PEOPLE

A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer J... More details on Into Thin Air

Rob Hall New Zealand, leader and head guide Mike Groom Australia, guide Andy “Harold” Harris New Zealand, guide Helen Wilton New Zealand, Base Camp manager Dr. Caroline Mackenzie New Zealand, Base Cam...
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#9

The first ten lies they tell you in high school.

"Speak up for yourself-we want to know what you have to say." From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. ... More details on Speak

WELCOME TO MERRYWEATHER HIGH It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache. The school bus wheezes to my corner. The door opens and I step up. I ...
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#10

What do readers say about The Narrow Road to the Deep North?

strange and wonderful brutal and graphic war and love hard and luminous

Winner of the Man Booker Prize

"Nothing since Cormac McCarthy's The Road has shaken me like this." -The Washington Post

In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan displays the gifts that have made him one of the most acclaimed writers of ... More details on The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans’ earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother. A wooden church hall. Blindin...
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