In Paradise--her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature--Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain," assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose." Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.

(Amazon)

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It's not a major theme but one of the characters has an issue with self-injury. The following is an excerpt:

    The little streets were narrow and straight, but as soon as she made them they flooded. Sometimes she held toilet tissue to catch the blood, but she liked to let it run too. The trick was to slice at just the right depth. Not too light, or the cut yielded too faint a line of red. Not so deep it rose and gushed over so fast you couldn’t see the street.

    Although she had moved the map from her arms to her thighs, she recognized with pleasure the traces of old roads, avenues that even Norma had been repelled by. One was sometimes enough for months. Read more »

Books & Other Media Information

Book Title: 

Paradise

Author: 

Toni Morrison

Amazon: 

Paradise

Author: Toni Morrison

Publisher: Knopf (1997)

Binding: Hardcover, 318 pages

iTunes: 

Viva Cohen, a self-proclaimed "insecure teenage Jew," is the starstruck heroine of Forrest's zippy, pop-conscious debut. When Viva's mother decides to live a life of New Age ashram hopping, Viva is raised by Manny, her gay uncle in a North London flat coated with posters of Elizabeth Taylor. With Manny as her father figure, "Liz" as her matriarch, and her two best friends, Ray, a 33-year-old rock star, and Treena, a feckless bombshell, Viva, at 17, knits up her life with celluloid threads. She dresses up as Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer, and she's both lighthearted and cynical about love. The novel is a love story of sorts, but the objects of Viva's affection are in a constant state of teenage flux. In London, it's Ray, who's more big brother than romantic interest; in Edinburgh, it's Ray's opening act, Drew, an anorexic self-mutilator who shares Viva's love for Marilyn Monroe; and in Las Vegas it's Dillon, a misunderstood tweenie pop heartthrob. Eventually, she and Treena achieve their ambition of staying at the Chateau Marmont in L.A., but disillusion follows. Unlike the unnamed protagonist of contemporary Rebecca Ray's Pure (a fellow Brit, Forrest, at 22, is just two years older than Ray), Viva remains refreshingly chaste. Losing her virginity, Viva believes, is simply too complicated without the correct camera angle or the prospect of a second take. Her would-be silver screen life is as exasperating as it is self-aware. Read more »

Books & Other Media Information

Book Title: 

Namedropper: A Novel

Author: 

Emma Forrest

Amazon: 

Namedropper: A Novel

Author: Emma Forrest

Publisher: Touchstone (2000)

Binding: Paperback, 240 pages

Following King's triumphant return to the world of gory horror in Cell, the bestselling author proves he's still the master of supernatural suspense in this minimally bloody but disturbing and sorrowful love story set in rural Maine. Lisey's husband, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Scott Landon, has been dead for two years at the book's start, but his presence is felt on every page. Lisey hears him so often in her head that when her catatonic sister, Amanda, begins speaking to her with Scott's voice, she finds it not so much unbelievable as inevitable. Soon she's following a trail of clues that lead her to Scott's horrifying childhood and the eerie world called Boo'ya Moon, all while trying to help Amanda and avoid a murderous stalker. Both a metaphor for coming to terms with grief and a self-referencing parable of the writer's craft, this novel answers the question King posed 25 years ago in his tale "The Reach": yes, the dead do love. 

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Amanda has a history with self-injury.

Books & Other Media Information

Book Title: 

Lisey's Story: A Novel

Author: 

Stephen King

Amazon: 

Lisey's Story: A Novel

Author: Stephen King

Publisher: Gallery Books (2008)

Binding: Paperback, 528 pages

iTunes: 

In this run-of-the-mill police procedural from bestseller Kellerman, his 23rd novel to feature L.A. consulting psychologist Alex Delaware (after Compulsion), high school miscreant Chance Brandt has been assigned to perform community service at the Bird Marsh, a nature sanctuary near Marina del Rey. After Chance dismisses as a prank an anonymous phone call warning him that there's a corpse buried in the marsh, Lt. Milo Sturgis, now Special Case Investigator for the LAPD, and Sturgis's team find four bodies there, all women missing their right hand. When Sturgis identifies one of the victims as Selena Bass, who worked as a piano teacher for the wealthy Vander family, the police focus on Travis Huck, the manager of the Vanders' Pacific Palisades estate, as the prime suspect because Travis has a criminal past. Kellerman fans wanting more of the same should be satisfied, though Sturgis gets less benefit from Delaware's psychological expertise than usual.

(from Publishers Weekly)

One of the suspects, Simone Vander, has a daughter named Simone who enjoys cutting herself and likes the taste of her blood. She cuts herself because she enjoys the rush it brings. She also self-induces vomiting and pretends to kill herself by placing a gun in her mouth.

Books & Other Media Information

Book Title: 

Bones (Alex Delaware, No. 23)

Author: 

Jonathan Kellerman

Amazon: 

Bones (Alex Delaware, No. 23)

Author: Jonathan Kellerman

Publisher: Ballantine Books (2009)

Binding: Mass Market Paperback, 448 pages

iTunes: