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A Whole Life

Robert Seethaler · 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
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The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetSlow-PacedSparse Prose
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The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway · 127 pages

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements.

Sparse ProseElderly ProtagonistBittersweetSlow-Paced
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The Reader

Bernhard Schlink · 224 pages

Sparse ProseBittersweetCharacter-DrivenSlow-Paced
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A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood · 158 pages

Classic fiction. The best prose writer in English' Gore Vidal Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life

Grief Over a SpouseSparse ProseBittersweetSlow-Paced
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Plainsong

Kent Haruf · 301 pages

Sparse ProseElderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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Sweetland

Michael Crummey · 322 pages

For twelve generations, the inhabitants of a remote island in Newfoundland have lived and died together. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, they are facing resettlement. They have each been offered a generous compensation package to leave the island for good. There's just one proviso: everyone must go. Gradually, all of the residents surrender to the inevitable. All of the residents, t

Elderly ProtagonistSparse ProseBittersweetAtmospheric
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Italian Shoes

Henning Mankell

Elderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedBittersweetAtmospheric
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The Dog Stars

Peter Heller · 326 pages

"Hig is a survivor. He has survived the sickness that claimed his wife and family, and the trout he loved to fish. He is coping, just, in the new wilderness of post-apocalyptic America, because he has three things to live for - his dog, Jasper, his neighbour, Bangley, and his Cessna plane. But Hig's loneliness is becoming unbearable. When he picks up the distorted voice of another human on his rad

Sparse ProseGrief Over a SpouseBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Mr Wigg

Inga Simpson · 300 pages

It's the summer of 1971, not far from the stone-fruit capital of New South Wales, where Mr Wigg lives on what is left of his family farm. Mrs Wigg has been gone a few years now and he thinks about her every day. He misses his daughter, too, and wonders when he ll see her again. He spends his time working in the orchard, cooking and preserving his produce and, when it's on, watching the cricket. It

Grief Over a SpouseElderly ProtagonistBittersweetSlow-Paced
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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

Sparse ProseSlow-PacedAtmosphericBittersweet
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The Twin

Gerbrand Bakker · 288 pages

Sparse ProseSlow-PacedElderly ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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The Other Side of the Bridge

Mary Lawson · 296 pages

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenBittersweetSparse Prose
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The Pilot's Wife

Anita Shreve · 304 pages

Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time. As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to

Grief Over a SpouseCharacter-DrivenSlow-PacedBittersweet
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The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am

Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold · 147 pages

Sparse ProseElderly ProtagonistGrief Over a SpouseBittersweet
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The Sound of the Mountain

Yasunari Kawabata · 276 pages

"By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo's life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the sti

Elderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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Train Dreams

Denis Johnson · 116 pages

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. Robert Grainer is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss

Grief Over a SpouseBittersweetElderly ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse · 130 pages

Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha after he traveled to India in the 1910s. It tells the story of a young boy who travels the country in a quest for spiritual enlightenment in the time of Guatama Buddha. It is a compact, lyrical work, which reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom.

Sparse ProseSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
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Sputnik Sweetheart

Haruki Murakami · 224 pages

"The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments - until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated businesswoman. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakami's surreal ye

Sparse ProseSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
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The Body Artist

Don DeLillo · 144 pages

Lauren is an artist living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with uncanny knowledge of her own life. Together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time--time, love and human perception.

Grief Over a SpouseSparse ProseSlow-PacedNovella
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Man in the Holocene

Max Frisch · 128 pages

Elderly ProtagonistSparse ProseSlow-PacedLiterary Fiction
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Last Night at the Lobster

Stewart O'Nan · 146 pages

Stewart O'Nan has been called "the bard of the working class" and has now crafted a frank and funny yet emotionally resonant tale set within a vivid workaday world seldom seen in contemporary fiction. Perched in the far corner of a run-down New England mall, The Red Lobster hasn't been making its numbers and headquarters has pulled the plug. But manager Manny DeLeon still needs to navigate a trick

Sparse ProseBittersweetSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan · 176 pages

A novel of remarkable depth and poignancy from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and

Sparse ProseSlow-PacedBittersweetLiterary 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

Elderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedBittersweetSparse Prose
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The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro · 245 pages

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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