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The End of Vandalism

Tom Drury · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Malgudi Days

R.K. Narayan · 250 pages

Introducing this collection of stories, R. K. Narayan describes how in India “the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character and thereby a story.” Composed of powerful, magical portraits of all kinds of people, and comprising stories written over almost forty years, Malgudi Days presents Narayan’s imaginary city in full color, revealing the essence of India and of human exper

Dry HumorSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Idea of Perfection

Kate Grenville

Dry HumorSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Medicine River

Thomas King · 264 pages

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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Nobody's Fool

Richard Russo · 549 pages

In 1750, without warning or apparent reason, the mineral springs of the colonial resort town of Bath, New York, ran dry. A little more than two hundred years later, after numerous warnings and for too many reasons, Sully, the unluckiest man in this unlucky town, isn't doing too hot either. He's broke, out of a job, and the owner of a dead pickup truck. The good news? Sully has the dumbest man in N

Small TownDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Small House at Allington

Anthony Trollope, Julian Thompson · 611 pages

Dry HumorSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Dry HumorSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Jane and Prudence

Barbara Pym · 222 pages

The setting of this very funny novel, one of Barbara Pym's earliest, is an English village, where Jane's husband is the newly appointed vicar, and where Prudence will pay Jane a visit and find herself courted by a fatuous young widower. Prudence, at twenty-nine, has achieved nothing in life but a dull research job in London and a string of dud affairs; Jane, now in her forties, was Prudence's tuto

Character-DrivenDry HumorSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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A Boy of Good Breeding

Miriam Toews · 256 pages

Small TownDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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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.

Small TownDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Remarkably Bright Creatures

Shelby Van Pelt · 368 pages

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night cleaner shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Ever since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat over thirty years ago keeping busy has helped her cope. One night she meets Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium who sees everything, but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his hum

Dry HumorSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Dry HumorSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Dr. Thorne

Anthony Trollope · 522 pages

"Doctor Thorne, considered by Trollope to be the best of his works, is a telling examination of the relationship between money and morality. It recounts the story of the son of a bankrupt landowner, Frank Gresham, who is intent on marrying his beloved Mary Thorne despite her illegitimacy and apparent poverty. Frank's ambitious mother and haughty aunt are set against the match, however, and push hi

Small TownDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Helen Simonson · 394 pages

You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson's wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major P

Small TownDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Ponder Heart

Eudora Welty · 156 pages

Edna Earle Ponder, who runs a hotel in a small Mississippi town, tells the story of her beloved, softhearted, but trying Uncle Daniel.

Dry HumorSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Snapper

Brian Kimberling · 227 pages

Working as a birdwatching guide to scrape together enough money to survive, Nathan Lochmueller performs nature research in backwater Indiana, where he falls in love with a heartbreaking free spirit named Lola and confronts the accidental turns of his life.

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionSmall Town
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The Bean Trees

Barbara Kingsolver · 240 pages

Taylor, a poor Kentuckian making her way west with an abandoned baby girl, stops in Tucson where she finds friends and discovers resources in apparently empty places.

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionCharming
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The Spinning Heart

Donal Ryan · 160 pages

In the aftermath of Ireland's financial collapse, dangerous tensions surface in an Irish town. The collapse of Pokey Burke's construction company and subsequent disappearance of its boss, leaving employees unpaid and a housing project half-finished, send ripples throughout the entire community. As violence flares, the locals - from Pokey's foreman Bobby, simmering as he waits for his father's deat

Dry HumorSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Ladder of Years

Anne Tyler · 336 pages

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKBALTIMORE WOMAN DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION, declares the headline. Forty-year-old Delia Grinstead is last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing nothing more than a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To her husband and three almost-grown children, she has vanished without trace or reason. But for Delia, who f

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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A View of the Harbour

Elizabeth Taylor · 316 pages

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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The Vacationers

Emma Straub · 372 pages

Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionCharming
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Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen · 342 pages

Pride and Prejudice is an 1813 novel of manners written by Jane Austen. The novel follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the dynamic protagonist of the book who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness. Mr. Bennet, owner of the Longbourn estate in Hertfordshire, has five daughters, b

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionSmall Town
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows · 278 pages

"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers." January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she's never met, a native of the island of Guernsey,

Dry HumorSmall TownCharacter-DrivenEnsemble Cast
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Funny Girl

Nick Hornby · 452 pages

"From the bestselling author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down comes a highly anticipated new novel. Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingenue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest d

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionCharming
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Cannery Row

John Steinbeck · 183 pages

Cannery Row is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, published in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California, on a street lined with sardine canneries that is known as Cannery Row. The story revolves around the people living there. Steinbeck revisited these characters and this milieu nine years later in his novel Sweet Thursday.

Small TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionCharming

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