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The Prisoner of Heaven

Carlos Ruiz Zafon · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Historian

Elizabeth Kostova · 690 pages

To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history....Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of-a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconcei

Rare BooksLibrariesHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
❤️

All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy · 301 pages

*All the Pretty Horses* is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Along with *The Crossing* (1994), and C*ities of the Plain* (19

PrisonHistorical FictionSeriesLiterary Fiction
❤️

Shadow of Night

Deborah Harkness · 592 pages

Picking up from A Discovery of Witches’ cliffhanger ending, Shadow of Night takes Diana and Matthew on a trip through time to Elizabethan London, where they are plunged into a world of spies, magic, and a coterie of Matthew’s old friends, the School of Night. As the search for Ashmole 782 deepens and Diana seeks out a witch to tutor her in magic, the net of Matthew’s past tightens around them, and

Rare BooksLibrariesSeriesHistorical Fiction
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The Power of One

Bryce Courtenay · 518 pages

Follows Peekay, a white British boy in South Africa during World War II, between the ages of five and eleven, as he survives an abusive boarding school and goes on to succeed in life and the boxing ring, with help from a chicken, a boxer, a pianist, black African prisoners, and many others.

PrisonLiterary FictionHistorical FictionSeries
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Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi · 320 pages

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the

PrisonLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Secrets
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The Scottish Prisoner

Diana Gabaldon · 560 pages

PrisonSeriesHistorical FictionConspiracy
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Little Dorrit

Charles Dickens · 786 pages

Upon its publication in 1857, Little Dorrit immediately outsold any of Dickens's previous books. The story of William Dorrit, imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea Prison, and his daughter and helpmate, Amy, or Little Dorrit, the novel charts the progress of the Dorrit family from poverty to riches. In his Introduction, David Gates argues that "intensity of imagination is the gift from which Dickens's

PrisonHistorical FictionLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Possession

A.S. Byatt · 555 pages

Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, *Possession* is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist

Rare BooksLibrariesHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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Darkness at Noon

Arthur Koestler · 254 pages

"The newly discovered lost text of Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness at Noon--the haunting portrait of a revolutionary, imprisoned and tortured under totalitarian rule--is now restored and in a completely new translation. Editor Michael Scammell and translator Philip Boehm bring us a brilliant novel, a remarkable discovery, and a new translation of an international classic"--

PrisonHistorical FictionLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Foucault's Pendulum

Umberto Eco · 641 pages

English: An Enthralling Mystery, a breathtaking rollercoaster ride through a world of ideas and aberrations, an adventure into the modern mind. One Colonel Ardenti, who has unnaturally black, brilliantined hair, an Adolphe Menjou mustache, wears maroon socks, and once served in the Foreign Legion, starts it all. He tells three Milan editors that he has discovered a coded message about a Templar

Rare BooksLibrariesLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Holes

Louis Sachar · 240 pages

Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys' detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day, digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green

PrisonSeriesHistorical FictionFamily Secrets
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The Evening Chorus

Helen Humphreys · 294 pages

The story of James, a pilot struggling to survive in a German POW camp, his young war-bride, Rose, back in England trying to make sense of her life, and his sister, whose own story is also rewritten by the tragedies of WWII.

PrisonLiterary FictionHistorical FictionCharacter-Driven
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Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood · 545 pages

In 'Alias, Grace, ' bestselling author Margaret Atwood has written her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since 'The Handmaid's Tale.' She takes us back in time and into the life of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century. Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Mo

PrisonLiterary FictionHistorical FictionMystery
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Speaks the Nightbird

Robert McCammon · 792 pages

In 1699, a traveling magistrate and his clerk, Matthew, come to Fount Royal to try a woman charged with witchcraft.

PrisonSeriesHistorical FictionConspiracy
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The Man in the Iron Mask

Alexandre Dumas · 479 pages

Alexandre Dumas was already a best-selling novelist when he wrote this historical romance, combining (as he claimed) the two essentials of life--"l'action et l'amour." The Man in the Iron Mask climactically concludes the epic adventures of the three Musk3ateers: here, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and their friend D'Artagnan, once invincible, meet their destinies.

PrisonSeriesHistorical FictionConspiracy
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Corrag

Susan Fletcher · 366 pages

The Massacre of Glencoe happened at 5am on 13th February 1692 when 37 members of the Macdonald clan were killed by government troops who had enjoyed the clan's hospitality for the previous ten days. Many more died from exposure in the mountains.

PrisonLiterary FictionHistorical FictionCharacter-Driven
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King Rat

James Clavell · 391 pages

PrisonHistorical FictionCharacter-DrivenSeries
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Work Like Any Other

Virginia Reeves · 331 pages

"In this astonishingly accomplished, morally complicated, "exceptional and starkly beautiful debut" (Kevin Powers, National Book Award-nominated author of The Yellow Birds), a prideful electrician in 1920s rural Alabama struggles to overcome past sins and find peace after being sent to prison for manslaughter. Roscoe T Martin set his sights on a new type of power spreading at the start of the twen

PrisonLiterary FictionHistorical FictionCharacter-Driven
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My Name Is Venus Black

Heather Lloyd · 368 pages

PrisonLiterary FictionFamily SecretsCharacter-Driven
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 174 pages

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Iv

PrisonHistorical FictionLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Us Conductors

Sean Michaels · 347 pages

"In a finely woven series of flashbacks and correspondence, Lev Termen, the Russian scientist, inventor, and spy, tells the story of his life to his "one true love, " Clara Rockmore, the finest theremin player in the world. In the first half of the book, we learn of Termen's early days as a scientist in Leningrad during the Bolshevik Revolution, the acclaim he receives as the inventor of the there

PrisonLiterary FictionHistorical FictionCharacter-Driven
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Canada

Richard Ford · 420 pages

After his parents are arrested and imprisoned for robbing a bank, fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is taken in by Arthur Remlinger who, unbeknownst to Dell, is hiding a dark and violent nature that interferes with Dell's quest to find grace and peace on the prairie of Saskatchewan.

PrisonLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Secrets
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Code Name Verity

Elizabeth Wein · 347 pages

In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage, and great courage as she relates what she must to survive while keeping secret all that she can.

PrisonSeriesHistorical FictionMystery
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Shame and the Captives

Tom Keneally, Thomas Keneally · 367 pages

"Based on true events, this beautifully rendered novel from the author of Schindler's List and The Daughters of Mars brilliantly explores a World War II prison camp, where Japanese prisoners resolve to take drastic action to wipe away their shame. Alice is a young woman living on her father-in-law's farm on the edge of an Australian country town, while her husband is held prisoner in Europe. When

PrisonLiterary FictionHistorical FictionMultiple POV

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