I usually read romance but obviously that isn't going to do it for me. I also like mysteries and thrillers and historical fiction.
In a word, I want tragedy. Or maybe adventure thrillers/survival books, but I haven't read many of those.
I'm not big on fantasy and SF that isn't romance. If you absolutely must recommend spec fic, I am not looking for a Dead Sea style splatterpunk, or a Pilgrim-style 'pick them off one by one' adventure where everyone gets slaughtered by alien sea monsters or eaten by cosmic horrors because plot.
I don't want some fun fantasy heist adventure with a plucky band of fantasy brigands who keep escaping by the skin of their teeth, either: I want it to hurt.
What I've already read:
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ROTE, it's one of the few non-romance fantasy books I enjoyed. I liked it precisely because of this.
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Hardy – Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude, Tess, ROTN to some extent
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Doc by Mary Doria Russell (yeah, he's a great doctor, but this felt very emotionally heavy otherwise because of his other choices.) Please do not recommend The Sparrow. I can't with that book.
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The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
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The Years of the Voiceless by Okki Madasari
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Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down
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A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini – Mariam's arc, kind of, although the tone is redemptive rather than crushing.
…yeah, maybe I should just reread Hardy.
Edited to give more examples of what I enjoyed.
by saturday_sun4
4 Comments
This one isn’t tragic because of failure necessarily (though there’s one specific element of failure that is 100% present, but it’s only failure in the sense that there was something they willingly/repeatedly chose not to do, rather than something they tried to do and failed to succeed), but if what you want is tragic then it absolutely is tragic. I’ll clarify that there is a considerable amount of success in this book too, if you don’t want ANY successes whatsoever, look elsewhere. But the tragedies consistently outweigh the successes.
*A Little Life* by Hanya Yanagihara. Disclaimer that if you have any specific trigger warnings that you’d like to avoid, list them in advance, because this book has a LOT of them.
I feel like The Women by Kristen Hannah might be a good match
Lion Women of Tehran
The first thing I was going to recommend was Tess. Glad you’ve already enjoyed it.
I’ll recommend The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I’ve since learned that Junot Diaz is a scumbag, but the book was above reproach.