Books like A Brief Lunacy by Cynthia Thayer

Twenty‑five year‑old Belly Conklin returns to the family summer home on the coast, where a cancer diagnosis forces her to confront love, loss, and growing up amid the familiar rhythm of beach life.

A young woman raised alone in a North Carolina marsh is accused of murder after a local man's death, weaving a tale of survival, love, and secrets in the wilderness.

Sisters Vianne and Isabelle are pulled into the turmoil of World War II, each forging a path of courage and resistance against the Nazi occupation of France.

Set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, Ken Kesey’s novel examines institutional power, mental illness, and the resilience of individualism.

A devoted dog reflects on life, love, and racing while watching his owner, a race car driver, navigate family trials and professional ambition.

Hal Ambler, a former intelligence officer, is held in a secluded psychiatric hospital on Parrish Island, Virginia, where highly classified secrets are hidden. He must escape, discover why he was imprisoned, and uncover the truth about his past.

A white boy captured by Delaware Indians grows up as an Indian, only to be forced by treaty to return to his white family, confronting painful cultural identity struggles along the way.

In the remote Boundary Waters of Minnesota, a missing‑person case resurfaces when a traumatized son, now institutionalized, refuses to speak of his father's disappearance. A speech therapist faces her own past while attempting to bridge the wounded father‑son bond.

When a bartender’s body is found at a Montana ranch, a family’s past resurfaces and danger mounts—testing loyalty, truth, and survival in a high‑stakes mystery.

After a tragic loss, Denis Murphy lives in rigid routines, haunted by obsessive habits. When his ex‑girlfriend returns, he must confront the intrusive ‘monsters’ inside his life and himself.

A haunting tale of a middle-aged man's journey back to the past as he unravels a gruesome mystery at a former mental institution.

The Basque landscape is a delightfully sinister setting. Francis, a sixty-year-old author, has not written a word in the twelve years since his first wife and eldest daughter died in a tragic accident. Now his surviving daughter, Alice, a famous actress, has vanished, leaving her husband and twin daughters clueless as to her whereabouts. Francis's second marriage of ten years, to Judith, is also falling apart, and his distress is compounded by his anxiety over Alice's disappearance. He finds comfort in the company of an old friend, Anne-Marguerite, along with her son, Jérémie, a laconic criminal attempting to remake himself in the outside world. But when Francis employs them to uncover evidence of his second wife's affair and to help find his daughter, things go from bad to worse. A mesmerizing literary thriller, Unforgivable is full of setbacks and revelations--an unsettling and starkly elegant meditation on family bonds, betrayals, and reconciliation.

When private investigator Leonid McGill is hired to solve a murder he once declined, he must confront his own past while uncovering the dark secrets of an old‑money New York family and a missing heiress.

See https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19781733W/Eleanor_Oliphant_Is_Completely_Fine