What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorThe Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini · 368 pages
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacri
Christ in Concrete
Pietro Di Donato · 240 pages
The Lowland
Jhumpa Lahiri · 406 pages
Brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue vastly different lives--Udayan in rebellion-torn Calcutta, Subhash in a quiet corner of America--until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz · 352 pages
Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us
In a Free State
V.S. Naipaul · 246 pages
Winner of the Booker Prize in 1971 this book comprises three novellas, set in three very different countries. The stories are about people surviving as best they can in states with varying levels of political, social and economic freedom.
What Is the What
Dave Eggers · 475 pages
*What Is the What* is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children--the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the Un
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair · 342 pages
Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c
Continental Drift
Russell Banks · 384 pages
After his ill-fated pursuit of the American dream, Bob Dubois finds employment on a fishing boat off the Florida Keys where he becomes involved in a plot to smuggle two Haitians into Florida.
Kane and Abel
Jeffrey Archer · 550 pages
Born on the same day near the turn of the century on opposite sides of the world, both men are brought together by fate and the quest of a dream.These two men — ambitious, powerful, ruthless — are locked in a relentless struggle to build an empire, fuelled by their all-consuming hatred. Over 60 years and three generations, through war, marriage, fortune, and disaster, Kane and Abel battle for the
Under This Unbroken Sky
Shandi Mitchell · 354 pages
The story of an immigrant family trying to build a life in an unforgiving new world, Under This Unbroken Sky is a mesmerizing and absorbing first novel of love and greed, pride and desperation. Award-winning writer Shandi Mitchell based this evocative and compelling narrative of struggle and survival on the Canadian prairie on her own family history. Evocative and compelling, rich in imagination a
Maps for Lost Lovers
Nadeem Aslam · 379 pages
The disappearance of Jugnu and Chanda turns tragic when Chanda's brothers are arrested for their murders and the families struggle to reconcile their Islamic faith and the crime's impact on their families.
Everything I Never Told You
Celeste Ng · 300 pages
"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl
The Embassy of Cambodia
Zadie Smith · 96 pages
Zadie Smith takes us deep into the life of a young woman, Fatou, domestic servant to the Derawals and escapes from one set of hardships to another. Beginning and ending outside the Embassy of Cambodia, which happens to be located in Willesden, NW London, Zadie Smith's absorbing, moving and wryly observed story suggests how the apparently small things in an ordinary life always raise larger, more e
Paradise Reclaimed
Halldor Laxness · 254 pages
The Engineer of Human Souls
Josef Skvorecky · 571 pages
From the New York Review of Books Review: Home from Home SEPTEMBER 27, 1984 D.J. Enright On the title page Josef Skvorecky’s novel describes itself as “An entertainment on the old themes of life, women, fate, dreams, the working class, secret agents, love and death.” All that in slightly under six hundred pages? In the event, we witness what seems a miracle of organization, helped out by t
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee · 560 pages
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision
On Black Sisters Street
Chika Unigwe · 298 pages
At the house on Zwarterzustertraat four very different women have made their way from Africa to claim for themselves the riches of Europe.
House of Sand and Fog
Andre Dubus III · 365 pages
Little Bee
Chris Cleave · 288 pages
A haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers--one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.
Amerika
Franz Kafka · 299 pages
"Franz Kafka's diaries and letters suggest that his fascination with America grew out of a desire to break away from his native Prague, even if only in his imagination. Kafka died before he could finish what he liked to call his ''American novel," but he clearly entitled it Der Verschollene ("The Missing Person") in a letter to his fiancee, Felice Bauer, in 1912. Kafka began writing the novel that
Job: The Story of a Simple Man
Joseph Roth · 238 pages
A View from the Bridge: A Play in Two Acts
Arthur Miller · 86 pages
In A View from the Bridge Arthur Miller explores the intersection between one man's self-delusion and the brutal trajectory of fate. Eddie Carbone is a Brooklyn longshoreman, a hard-working man whose life has been soothingly predictable. He hasn't counted on the arrival of two of his wife's relatives, illegal immigrants from Italy; nor has he recognized his true feelings for his beautiful niece, C
Hunger
Lan Samantha Chang · 191 pages
These stories reveal the lives of immigrant families haunted by lost loves. The characters, whose culture and families have been lost to the forces of history, mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment. Lan Samantha Chang shows how history impinges upon family love, as she explores the profound and painful ties between husband and wife, parent and child, sister and sister. A ghost sed