AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

The Heart Broke In

James Meek · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Middlemarch

George Eliot · 795 pages

Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.

BlackmailScientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
❤️

Solar

Ian McEwan · 296 pages

Michael Beard ist Physiker und Frauenheld. Er hat den Nobelpreis erhalten, doch ist er alles andere als nobel: Im Beruf ruht er sich auf seinen Lorbeeren aus, privat hält es ihn auf Dauer bei keiner Frau. Bis die geniale Idee eines Rivalen für Zündstoff in seinem Leben sorgt. In Solar geht es nicht nur um Sonnen-, sondern auch um kriminelle Energie.

Scientist ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary Fiction
❤️

Bleak House

Charles Dickens · 815 pages

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, t

BlackmailCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionSatire
❤️

Crow Lake

Mary Lawson · 298 pages

In the rural farm country of northern Ontario, the lives of two families--the farming Pye family, and zoologist Kate Morrison and her three brothers--are brought together and torn apart by misunderstanding, resentment, family love, and tragedy.

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Strong Motion

Jonathan Franzen · 518 pages

Another second novel. As always Franzen’s scope is immense, and his talent is clear on every page. If Palanuick is the very best writer, sentence to sentence, then Franzen is clearly the best living novelist. This story involves one Louis Holland, and a Harvard seismologist named Dr. Reneé Seitchek, and it revolves around abortion activists, big corporations, and strange sudden earthquakes appeari

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Wellness

Nathan Hill · 696 pages

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Karen Joy Fowler · 336 pages

Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister. . . . Until Fern's expulsion . . . she was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. . . . I loved her as a sister."

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️
Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
🙂

Migratory Animals

Mary Helen Specht · 294 pages

Reluctantly leaving her fiance in Nigeria to return to her home in Austin, a young scientist contemplates her future and is devastated to learn that her sister is succumbing to the genetic disease that killed their mother. Flannery, a young scientist, is forced to return to Austin from five years of research in Nigeria. Having left behind her loving fiance without knowing when she can return, Fla

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
🙂

When the Killing's Done

T.C. Boyle · 369 pages

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
🙂

The Casual Vacancy

J.K. Rowling · 512 pages

When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is no

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary FictionSatire
🙂

The Taste of Salt

Martha Southgate · 281 pages

"Josie Henderson is most at home in and around water, and as a senior-level black female scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she is practically alone in her field. But in building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family roots back in Cleveland. When Tick, her brother and childhood ally against their alcoholic father, arrives o

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
🙂

Thinks...

David Lodge · 341 pages

"Ralph Messenger is a man who knows what he wants and generally gets it. As director of the prestigious Holt Belling Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, he is much in demand as a pundit on developments in artificial intelligence and the study of human consciousness. Known to his colleagues as a womanizer, he has reached a tacit understanding with his American wife Carrie

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSatire
🙂

The Echo Maker

Richard Powers · 464 pages

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman–who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister–is really an identical impostor. S

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenBrothers
🙂

Flight Behavior

Barbara Kingsolver · 436 pages

Written by Barbara Kingsolver, the Orange Prize-winning author of The Lacuna and million-selling The Poisonwood Bible, and brought to you by FaberShop, Flight Behaviour is a novel about catastrophe and denial. On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature. As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeming miracle, can the

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
🙂

You Lost Me There

Rosecrans Baldwin

Scientist ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary Fiction
🙂

The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton · 348 pages

BlackmailLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSatire
🙂

Matters of Choice

Noah Gordon · 388 pages

A portrait of a talented and courageous woman physician who stares at her reflection in the glass ceiling, and decides to seek and find a more meaningful life. Roberta Jeanne d’Arc Cole is favored to be named associate chief of medicine at a Boston hospital. She is married to a surgeon. They own a trophy residence on historic Brattle Street in Cambridge and a summer house in the Berkshire Hills.

Scientist ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenContemporary FictionLiterary Fiction
🙂

Bel-Ami

Guy de Maupassant · 303 pages

.I Quand la caissiere lui eut rendu la monnaie de sa piece de cent sous, Georges Duroy sortit du restaurant. Comme il portait beau, par nature et par pose d'ancien sous-officier, il cambra sa taille, frisa sa moustache d'un geste militaire et familier, et jeta sur les dineurs attardes un regard rapide et circulaire, un de ces regards de joli garcon qui s'etendent comme des coups d'epervier. Les fe

BlackmailCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionSatire
🙂

All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

BlackmailLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFamily Secrets
🙂

State of Wonder

Ann Patchett · 353 pages

As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she jour

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
🙂
Scientist ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenContemporary FictionLiterary Fiction
🙂

Sweetness #9

Stephan Eirik Clark · 336 pages

"It's 1973, and David Leveraux is a young and ambitious flavor chemist working at a world-renowned flavor-production house. While testing a new artificial sweetener--Sweetness #9--he notices some unsettling side effects in the laboratory rats and monkeys: anxiety, obesity, mutism, and a general dissatisfaction with life. Years later, Sweetness #9 is America's most popular sweetener--and David's fa

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionFamily Secrets
🙂

The Nice and the Good

Iris Murdoch · 361 pages

"John Ducane, a respected Whitehall civil servant, is asked to investigate the suicide of a colleague. As he pursues his inquiry he uncovers a shabby, evil world of murder, blackmail and black magic. He begins to feel more trapped than trapping." --Cover.

BlackmailLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.