Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah

This novel explores the emotional chasm between two sisters and their cold, enigmatic mother, whose harrowing tale of survival in wartime Leningrad becomes the key to healing their fractured bond.

 

Mother Mary Comes to Me is Arundhati Roy’s 2025 memoir about her complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy—a formidable educator, activist, and feminist.

This deeply personal work marks Roy’s first foray into memoir, and it offers a searing, lyrical exploration of her mother as both “shelter and storm.”

 

– The Memory Library by Kate Storey

Ella returns home after decades of estrangement to care for her ailing mother, uncovering a lifetime of secrets hidden in a house filled with books and silence.

 

– Bad Fruit by Ella King

A chilling psychological portrait of a daughter trapped in her mother’s unraveling world, where love is laced with control, suspicion, and inherited trauma.

 

– Regretting You by Colleen Hoover

Told in alternating voices, this emotionally charged novel explores the widening rift between a mother and teenage daughter after a tragic loss exposes long-buried betrayals.

 

– This Is Where We Talk Things Out by Caitlin Marceau

A horror-tinged novella where a daughter’s attempt to reconnect with her estranged mother in a remote cabin spirals into a claustrophobic nightmare of control and emotional manipulation.

 

– Mothered by Zoje Stage

During pandemic lockdown, a woman reluctantly shelters her estranged mother, only to find their shared past—and her own psyche—fracturing under the weight of buried grief and blame.

 

– Black Candle Women by Diane Marie Brown

Four generations of women bound by a magical curse confront the legacy of secrecy, maternal protection, and the cost of love in this lush, intergenerational tale.

 

– The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

Set during the Dust Bowl, this sweeping historical novel follows a mother’s fierce struggle to protect her children while navigating abandonment, poverty, and the limits of maternal sacrifice.

 

– What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera

A lyrical and devastating novel about a Sri Lankan immigrant whose idyllic childhood and traumatic past collide in America, leading to a shocking act that reframes her relationship with her mother.

 

– White Oleander by Janet Fitch

After her glamorous, poisonous mother is imprisoned for murder, a young girl is cast into a series of foster homes, each reshaping her identity and her understanding of maternal love.

 

– The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett

A pregnant woman flees her marriage and reinvents herself at a home for unwed mothers, where her daughter grows up questioning the silences and choices that shaped their lives.

 

– End of August by Paige Dinneny

A tender, multigenerational debut about a teenage girl, her restless mother, and her alcoholic grandmother, all bound by cycles of abandonment, longing, and the fragile hope of healing.