Books like The Dead Mother by Gregorio Kohon

Kurt Vonnegut’s "Mother Night" follows American spy Howard W. Campbell, Jr., who faces a war‑crime trial in Israel after World War II, exploring the gray areas of morality and the cost of truth.

An orphan with Tourette's teams up with a trio of street‑smart boys to run a low‑budget detective agency in Brooklyn—only to find himself embroiled in a murder mystery after their mobster boss is killed.

A timely collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit that examines gender, feminism, misogyny, and the cultural treatment of women with sharp insight and humor.

In *Mothering Sunday*, Graham Swift traces the life of orphaned maid Jane Fairchild, whose years of service in an English country house and secret affair with the neighboring estate’s heir span from 1924 to the end of the twentieth century.

To abuse or neglect a child, to deprive the child of a separate identity and joy in life, is to commit soul murder. Children desperately need to maintain a mental image of a loving and rescuing parent. Torture and deprivation under conditions of complete dependency elicit a terrifying combination of helplessness and rage- feelings that the child must supress in order to survive. The child therefore denies or justifies what has happened, deadens emotions, identifies with the aggressor, and even takes on the guilt that is appropriate to the tormentor. In this book, Dr. Shengold explores various forms of child abuse and deprivation and the resulting psychological trauma that often surface when the victims reach adulthood. He also describes the abuse suffered by four famous authors when they were children and shows how this ill treatment is reflected in their writing. Discussing both his own cases and some of Freud's, Dr. Shengold clarifies the pathogenesis of soul murder and the psychoanalytic techniques used to deal with it. He supports and elaborates on the frequent observation that those who have been abused as children tend to abuse their own children, experiencing sadomasochistic impulses and a susceptibility to terrible rage as well as a compulsion to repeat the traumatic experiences- both as victim and as aggressor. One optimistic note that Dr. Shengold strikes in this saga of pain is that a terrible childhood sometimes strengthens a person. To survive and adjust, he says, some children develop special gifts and talents; these are demonstrated by his analysis of the early lives and literary works of Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Anton Chekhov, and George Orwell. -- from Book Jacket.