Your favourite novels about grinding hardship

[JesusInTheCabbageVan]

Apparently these really cheer me up. I'm not talking about misery/abuse memoirs, but things like the following:

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazer
The Good Earth, Pearl S Buck
Gap Creek, Robert Morgan
Night Waking, Sarah Moss.

Do you know what I mean? Books that make you think, 'I'm so glad I don't have to work that hard. I'm sure I'll remember more in a bit.

Wild Swans by Jung Chang. 20th century China was no picnic. I've read it twice.

The memoirs of Ralph Glasser. He got himself from the Gorbals in Glasgow to Oxford uni in the 1920s with a little help from a librarian at the Mitchell library.

No Mean City, by Long and MacArthur. Life in the Gorbals between the wars.

Emile Zola
George Gissing

@mammmamia and @seriousandloyal isn’t Zola great? I think there’s just the right degree of separation because of culture and time that they’re interesting rather than harrowing.

A Fine Balance, as mentioned previously, is one of my favourite books. Two other miserable ones are The Siege by Helen Dunmore and The House With Green Shutters, George Douglas Brown

I capture the castle
Grapes of wrath
My own childhood.

Any Zola.

Germinal is a book of desolation.

Les Miserables but it's utterly boring and very long - and I love a long 19th century novel with loads of suffering and poverty. There's no humour in it - unlike Dickens who writes with lots of life and humour.

Lots of Dickens - Oliver Twist?

The Color Purple

But Night Waking - no. As a pp has said. Fed up lady looks after children iirc. Decent description of my life but it's not grinding poverty.

I came here to recommend A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, and if you can find Joy in the Morning by her it is also lovely.

I can really recommend Zola's The Masterpiece.
It is about an artist... based on Cézanne , I think ?
They fell out over it.

ProbablyFault I read that A Million Little Pieces turned out to be made up, and not a true story.

@Squince fair point! I still wouldn't want her life though - it's pretty miserable, and the bit where she fantasises about a hotel for mums resonated powerfully with me. Also loved the descriptions of the horrible meals.

[quote mammmamia]@WellThankyouAJPTaylor I loved Zola, have you read La Bête Humaine?[/quote]
No, I haven't, I'm afraid

I downloaded Nana to read after L'assommoir, but then lockdown hit and the world went bananas and I fled to the comfort of PG Wodehouse and Jilly Cooper

I hope to get back to it, though

These are amazing, thank you so much!

Yes, I really should clarify wrt Night Waking - I'm certainly not claiming the character lived in poverty! It's more... I don't know, the sense that every little thing is a battle. She wants lettuce, she has to sail to the mainland. She wants bread, she has to bake it while placating her DC and fending off the revolting visiting family. Can't get any time to work or sleep.

Come to think of it, her life seems a lot easier post-lockdown. At least her DH buggers off sometimes to count puffins

Helen Forester!!!! I was transfixed by the kerbside over the road from my Nana's house... It was where she took shelter during a raid.

Her writing was so evocative of the place I grew up in a time when such hardships were still very much a fact of life. Those pictures of 60s slum life in Liverpool and Everton were my own family's experience... my parents were the first generation to move out in the Bessie Braddock's great housing diaspora!

George Gissing - late Victorian writer, start with The Nether World and go on from there.

Also most Cormac McCarthy - the western ones and The Road - will hit the spot.

I know exactly what you mean OP about such books being strangely uplifting. If you want really strong medicine of that type then some of the Holocaust memoirs are terrific. In a fucking awful way.

Though I would recommend Amy Tan. Her tales of multi generation Chinese women are indeed grinding and inspirational.

The Bonesetters Daughter
The Kitchen God's Wife
A Hundred Secret Senses

And Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible

Germinal, by Zola.
Should add that I read it in English - it was a set book on an OU course. (The 19thC novel.).
Bloody depressing! Was glad to see the back of it.

I just finished L'Assommoir by Zola. Fuck me, it's depressing! I enjoyed it though but a real eye opener to the poverty of 19th century Paris.

Zola and Cezanne were at school together, fact fans.

I agree with @BankofNook - The Book Of Lost Things. It is so, so good, but I was in floods of years (and I'm not a cryer at all).

Anything by Solzhenitsyn, but particularly A Day in the Life...

I've read all those Amy Tans too, definitely recommend.

What about Wild Swans by Jung Chang?

There are some brilliant memoirs from North Korean defectors that might fall into this category.

In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park
The Girl with Seven Names by Hyenonseo Lee

I am reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter to my 9yo as I thought it might help her process lockdown... Also vote for the Grapes of Wrath. (In a similar but different vein, in that it describes feats of human endurance, what about Touching the Void?) Also Goodnight Mister Tom.