What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorMidnight's Children
Salman Rushdie · 548 pages
Partitions
Amit Majmudar · 211 pages
As India is rent into two nations, communal violence breaks out on both sides of the new border and streaming hordes of refugees flee from blood and chaos. At an overrun train station, Shankar and Keshav, twin Hindu boys, lose sight of their mother and join the human mass to go in search of her. A young Sikh girl, Simran Kaur, has run away from her father, who would rather poison his daughter than
Clear Light of Day
Anita Desai · 183 pages
Set in India's Old Delhi, CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY is Anita Desai's tender, warm, and compassionate novel about family scars, the ability to forgive and forget, and the trials and tribulations of familial love. At the novel's heart are the moving relationships between the members of the Das family, who have grown apart from each other. Bimla is a dissatisfied but ambitious teacher at a women's college w
Coal Black Horse
Robert Olmstead · 218 pages
The Great World
David Malouf · 332 pages
Every city, town and village has its memorial to war. Nowhere are these more eleoquent than in Australia, generations of whose young men have enlisted to fight other people's battles - from Gallipoli and the Somme to Malaya and Vietnam. In this book David Malouf gives voice to that experience, ranging over seventy years of Australian life.
Palpasa Cafe
Narayan Wagle · 240 pages
Train to Pakistan
Khushwant Singh · 206 pages
“In the summer of 1947, when the creation of the state of Pakistan was formally announced, ten million people—Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs—were in flight. By the time the monsoon broke, almost a million of them were dead, and all of northern India was in arms, in terror, or in hiding. The only remaining oases of peace were a scatter of little villages lost in the remote reaches of the frontier. On
Toba Tek Singh: Stories
Saadat Hasan Manto · 149 pages
The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
Bao Ninh · 228 pages
The Sorrow of War - by turns bleak and poetic, pellucid and cunning - opens with Kien, an infantry cadre from Hanoi, engaged in the grim business of retrieving and burying the dead at the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. From here, the novel ranges back to Kien's youth and the pains of adolescent love, and moves forward to his attempts, as a struggling writer in postwar Hanoi, to
The Glass Palace
Amitav Ghosh · 560 pages
Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love
The Collaborator
Mirza Waheed · 307 pages
The Blind Man's Garden
Nadeem Aslam · 367 pages
Jeo and Mikal are foster brothers from a small town in Pakistan. Though they were inseparable as children, their adult lives have diverged: Jeo is a dedicated medical student, married a year; Mikal has been a vagabond since he was fifteen, in love with a woman he can't have. But when Jeo decides to sneak across the border into Afghanistan--not to fight with the Taliban against the Americans, rathe
Refiner's Fire
Mark Helprin · 407 pages
The hero is Marshall Pearl born in a sea battle in an illegal immigrant ship of the coast of Palestine in 1947. Adopted into America by the wealthy and childless Livingstons, he grows up on a Hudson Valley estate, taught by his adventures on the river riding ice floes, jumping freights, climbing precipices and shaped by the imperatives of his own personality and destiny – his peculiar sensitivity
White Doves at Morning
James Lee Burke · 324 pages
Despite their misgivings about "the Cause," Willie Burke and his best friends, three young men from New Iberia, Louisiana, enlist in the Confederate Army and head off to war. Set at the end of the Civil War in New Iberia, Louisiana, "White Doves at Morning" contains memorable characters, unforgettable battle scenes, and a vivid picture of the era from a Southern perspective. The colorful story is
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Geoff Dyer · 296 pages
A wildly original novel of erotic fulfillment and spiritual yearning. Every two years the international art world descends on Venice for the opening of the Biennale. Among them is Jeff Atman--a jaded and dissolute journalist--whose dedication to the cause of Bellini-fuelled partygoing is only intermittently disturbed by the obligation to file a story. When he meets the spellbinding Laura, he is re
Days Without End
Sebastian Barry · 301 pages
Winner of the 2016 Costa Book of the Year and longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Sebastian Barry's sensational new novel set in mid-19th Century America. After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, fight in the Indian Wars and the Civil War.Having both fled terrible hardships, their days are now vivid and fil
Johnny Got His Gun
Dalton Trumbo · 271 pages
This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered--not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives ... This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome ... but so is wa
Bengal Nights
Mircea Eliade · 176 pages
Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a roman a clef of remarkable intimacy. Originally published in Romanian in 1933, this semiautobiographical novel by the world-renowned scholar Mircea Eliade details the passionate awakenings of Alain, an ambitious young French engineer flush with colonial pride and prejudice and full of a European fascination with the mysterious subcontinent. Offered the hospitality
Corelli's Mandolin
Louis de Bernieres · 437 pages
The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical, heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an i
The Romantics
Pankaj Mishra · 288 pages
Set in contemporary India, "The Romantics" tells the story of Samar, a young, uprooted Brahmin intellectual still deeply committed to his uncertain society and its fracturing caste system, but who is no less powerfully drawn to the West and its literature of self-discovery.
The Story of a Brief Marriage
Anuk Arudpragasam · 208 pages
"Very seldom in a reading life does a novel alter your sense not only of literature but of the world. This extraordinary debut is of that class."--Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You. In the last months of the Sri Lankan Civil War, Dinesh's world has contracted to an evacuee camp, where he measures his days by shells that fall like clockwork. Alienated from language, home, and family, h
Reef
Romesh Gunesekera · 192 pages
Triton is a young chef who was forced to leave his father's house to work for Mr. Ranjan Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by swamps, sea movements, and a Sri Lankan island's disappearing reef. Almost immediately, thanks to his master's obsessions, Triton works hard to please him with his carefully prepared delicacies. But neither of them know that the political unrest threatening Sri Lanka wil