Books like Sparrow rock by Nate Kenyon

Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods. Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt. The boy and his father hope to avoid the marauders, reach a milder climate, and perhaps locate some remnants of civilization still worthy of that name. They possess only what they can scavenge to eat, and the rags they wear and the heat of their own bodies are all the shelter they have. A pistol with only a few bullets is their only defense besides flight. Before them the father pushes a shopping cart filled with blankets, cans of food and a few other assets, like jars of lamp oil or gasoline siphoned from the tanks of abandoned vehicles—the cart is equipped with a bicycle mirror so that they will not be surprised from behind. Through encounters with other survivors brutal, desperate or pathetic, the father and son are both hardened and sustained by their will, their hard-won survivalist savvy, and most of all by their love for each other. They struggle over mountains, navigate perilous roads and forests reduced to ash and cinders, endure killing cold and freezing rainfall. Passing through charred ghost towns and ransacking abandoned markets for meager provisions, the pair battle to remain hopeful. They seek the most rudimentary sort of salvation. However, in The Road, such redemption as might be permitted by their circumstances depends on the boy’s ability to sustain his own instincts for compassion and empathy in opposition to his father’s insistence upon their mutual self-interest and survival at all physical and moral costs. The Road was the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. ([source][1]) [1]: https://www.cormacmccarthy.com/works/the-road/

The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. “The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —The New York Times

One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of "King Lear." Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them. Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten's arm is a line from Star Trek: "Because survival is insufficient." But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave. In a future in which a pandemic has left few survivors, actress Kirsten Raymonde travels with a troupe performing Shakespeare and finds herself in a community run by a deranged prophet. The plot contains mild profanity and violence.

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands. True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus per formers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead. Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart. - Publisher.

Libby Day tinha apenas sete anos quando testemunhou o brutal assassinato da mãe e das duas irmãs na fazenda da família. O acusado do crime foi seu irmão mais velho, que acabou condenado à prisão perpétua. Desde aquele dia, Libby passou a viver sem rumo. Uma vida paralisada no tempo, sem amigos, família ou trabalho. Mas, vinte e quatro anos depois, quando é procurada por um grupo de pessoas convencidas da inocência de seu irmão, Libby começa a se fazer as perguntas que até então nunca ousara formular. Será que a voz que ouviu naquela noite era mesmo a do irmão? Ben era considerado um desajustado na pequena cidade em que viviam, mas ele seria mesmo capaz de matar? Existiria algum segredo por trás daqueles assassinatos? Gillian Flynn intercala a trajetória detetivesca de Libby com flashbacks dos acontecimentos do dia dos crimes com tanta habilidade que o leitor é levado a diferentes direções. Escrito com primor, Lugares escuros não só mostra como a memória é passível de falhas, mas também evidencia as mentiras que uma criança pode contar a si mesma para superar um trauma.

The plan was only to scare their English teacher... They never actually intended to *kill* Mr. Griffin. But sometimes plans go wrong.

Eden, Michigan, high school student Kate Winters strikes a bargain with Henry, Greek god of the underworld, if he'll cure her dying mother of cancer. The bargain she strikes with him is a grim one, but the full enormity of what she has undertaken--"live forever or die trying"--is not revealed until it's too late to recant.

In the alley on his way home from work, Derrick Shaw witnesses a murder. To save his life, he promises not to reveal the identity of the shooter, a former Tubman student. But Derrick feels sick and guilty about his vow of silence.

They found Karen Holly dead in the mountain stream, her skull crushed. There was only one witness to the tragedy, Karen's boyfriend, Jason Whitfield. He said a grizzly had killed her. But a lot of people didn't believe him. They thought Jason had murdered her in a fit of rage. And now weeks have passed, and Jason has another girlfriend, Cindy Jones. And there are the new kids in town Joni Harper, the quiet English beauty that Cindy's brother, Alex, cannot get out of his mind. And Bala, the foreign exchange student from Africa, the grandson of a powerful shaman. Together they will return to the place where Karen was killed. Some will die. The others will come face to face with a horror beyond imagining.

Aya joins Tôya on the quest for his real memories. On an island where Aya spent a summer as a child, they discover that they met back then, but he looks the same now as he did then. They decide to start over together in Niigata Prefecture, but Kagami is getting closer all the time to Ceres' hagoromo.

Several high school students, transferred to a new school when their old one closes, invite classmates, new and old, to a party. One of the girls is found dead. Was it suicide or murder?

They hated each other enough to kill.

Now on the cusp of manhood, Finnikin, who was a child when the royal family of Lumatere was brutally murdered and replaced by an imposter, reluctantly joins forces with an enigmatic young novice and fellow-exile, who claims that her dark dreams will lead them to a surviving royal child and a way to regain the throne of Lumatere.

High school student Miaka Yuki is suddenly transported into a fictional version of ancient China where she encounters enemies with mystical powers.

It was the worst of all possible worst-case scenarios in the Cold War - an American general loses his reason and orders a full-scale nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R.From that premise, Peter George's 1958 novel Red Alert spins a grim tale of just how close to nuclear destruction the world can be. A dying man suffering from the paranoid delusion that he will make the world a better place, Air Force Brigadier General Quinten has set in motion a catastrophic air attack on the Soviet Union with Strategic Air Command bombers armed with nuclear weapons. The President of the United States and his advisors frantically try to stop the attack, once it is underway. They order the American bombers shot down, and they succeed -- with one frightening exception. A lone bomber called the "Alabama Angel" eludes destruction. Its crew ignores the President's new orders and proceeds with its deadly mission.Originally published in the U.K. as "Two Hours to Doom" -- with George using the nom de plume "Peter Bryant" -- this deliberate, precisely plotted novel conjures with the apocalyptic threat of nuclear war and the almost absurd ease with which it can be triggered. A virtual genre of such topical fiction sprang up in the late 1950s -- led by Nevil Shute's "On the Beach" -- of which "Red Alert" was among the earliest and finest examples. Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's later bestseller "Fail Safe" so closely resembled "Red Alert" in its premise that George sued on the charge of plagiarism and won an out-of-court settlement. Both novels would inspire very different films that would both be released in 1964.