After

Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery: A Novel

Jenny Colgan2017

pace
prose
structure
bleakness

5 of 6 directions open — nothing to recover from

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Denser prose

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Middlemarch
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warm → elegiac
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warm → tense
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Gustave Flaubert1856
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warm → tense
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Sally Hepworth2025
An eighty-one-year-old woman with a history of killing people tries to hide her past when a curious young girl moves into the neighborhood.
warm → dark
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Faster

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A.G. Riddle2023
A scientist at CERN discovers a signal from a parallel universe. He must flee a conspiracy while exploring the implications of the data.
warm → propulsive
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An orphaned girl is taken in by a wealthy family with five hostile sons. She must navigate high school bullying and mansion politics.
warm → propulsive, still forced proximity
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warm → propulsive
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warm → tense, still forced proximity
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warm → propulsive
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Slower

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Samuel R. Delany1975
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warm → dreamlike
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Douglas R. Hofstadter1979
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warm → playful
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William Faulkner1936
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warm → elegiac
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Søren Kierkegaard1992
A collection of papers presents two life philosophies: the aesthetic pursuit of pleasure and the ethical commitment to duty.
warm → meditative
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Heavier

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Emily Brontë1846
Two families on the Yorkshire moors deal with the arrival and subsequent revenge of an adopted orphan. The story is told through nested narrators.
warm → bleak
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Ernest Hemingway1929
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A country girl is sent to claim kinship with wealthy relatives. Her life is derailed by a sequence of social betrayals and rigid moral standards.
warm → elegiac
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Annie Proulx1997
Two ranch hands begin a secret sexual and emotional relationship in 1963 Wyoming. The story follows their occasional meetings over twenty years.
warm → elegiac
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Kim Holden2014
An optimistic college student moves to Minnesota for a fresh start while hiding a terminal diagnosis from her best friend.
warm → tender
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