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Migratory Animals

Mary Helen Specht · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Scientist ProtagonistContemporary FictionCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Karen Joy Fowler · 336 pages

Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister. . . . Until Fern's expulsion . . . she was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. . . . I loved her as a sister."

Scientist ProtagonistContemporary FictionLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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We Are Not Ourselves

Matthew Thomas · 620 pages

"Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed. Eileen can't help but dream of a calmer life, in a better neighborhood. When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men s

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenChronic Illness
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When the Killing's Done

T.C. Boyle · 369 pages

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionContemporary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Taste of Salt

Martha Southgate · 281 pages

"Josie Henderson is most at home in and around water, and as a senior-level black female scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she is practically alone in her field. But in building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family roots back in Cleveland. When Tick, her brother and childhood ally against their alcoholic father, arrives o

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionContemporary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Heart Broke In

James Meek · 551 pages

Bec Shepherd is a malaria researcher struggling to lead a good life. Ritchie, her reprobate brother, is a rock star turned TV producer. When Bec refuses an offer of marriage from a powerful newspaper editor and Ritchie's indiscretions catch up with him, brother and sister are forced to choose between loyalty and betrayal.

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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Matters of Choice

Noah Gordon · 388 pages

A portrait of a talented and courageous woman physician who stares at her reflection in the glass ceiling, and decides to seek and find a more meaningful life. Roberta Jeanne d’Arc Cole is favored to be named associate chief of medicine at a Boston hospital. She is married to a surgeon. They own a trophy residence on historic Brattle Street in Cambridge and a summer house in the Berkshire Hills.

Scientist ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenContemporary FictionLiterary Fiction
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Flight Behavior

Barbara Kingsolver · 436 pages

Written by Barbara Kingsolver, the Orange Prize-winning author of The Lacuna and million-selling The Poisonwood Bible, and brought to you by FaberShop, Flight Behaviour is a novel about catastrophe and denial. On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature. As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeming miracle, can the

Scientist ProtagonistContemporary FictionLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns

Margaret Dilloway · 416 pages

Scientist ProtagonistContemporary FictionCharacter-DrivenChronic Illness
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Strong Motion

Jonathan Franzen · 518 pages

Another second novel. As always Franzen’s scope is immense, and his talent is clear on every page. If Palanuick is the very best writer, sentence to sentence, then Franzen is clearly the best living novelist. This story involves one Louis Holland, and a Harvard seismologist named Dr. Reneé Seitchek, and it revolves around abortion activists, big corporations, and strange sudden earthquakes appeari

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionContemporary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Crow Lake

Mary Lawson · 298 pages

In the rural farm country of northern Ontario, the lives of two families--the farming Pye family, and zoologist Kate Morrison and her three brothers--are brought together and torn apart by misunderstanding, resentment, family love, and tragedy.

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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State of Wonder

Ann Patchett · 353 pages

As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she jour

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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Solar

Ian McEwan · 296 pages

Michael Beard ist Physiker und Frauenheld. Er hat den Nobelpreis erhalten, doch ist er alles andere als nobel: Im Beruf ruht er sich auf seinen Lorbeeren aus, privat hält es ihn auf Dauer bei keiner Frau. Bis die geniale Idee eines Rivalen für Zündstoff in seinem Leben sorgt. In Solar geht es nicht nur um Sonnen-, sondern auch um kriminelle Energie.

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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Me Before You

Jojo Moyes · 451 pages

Louisa Clark is an ordinary young woman living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has never been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex-Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair-bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cann

Contemporary FictionCharacter-DrivenChronic IllnessSisters
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The Book of Two Ways

Jodi Picoult · 464 pages

Scientist ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenContemporary FictionLiterary Fiction
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To the Moon and Back

Eliana Ramage · 448 pages

Contemporary FictionLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSisters
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Euphoria

Lily King · 272 pages

"English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husban

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
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You Lost Me There

Rosecrans Baldwin

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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The Echo Maker

Richard Powers · 464 pages

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman–who looks, acts, and sounds just like his sister–is really an identical impostor. S

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSisters
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Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 588 pages

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented li

Literary FictionContemporary FictionLong-Distance RomanceCharacter-Driven
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Wellness

Nathan Hill · 696 pages

Scientist ProtagonistContemporary FictionLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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A Reunion of Ghosts

Judith Claire Mitchell · 382 pages

"In the vein of such classic family sagas as Fall on Your Knees, A Reunion of Ghosts is the confessional of three sisters who have decided to kill themselves on the very last day of the 20th century; in it they tell the story of a family haunted by suicide ever since the sisters' great-grandfather, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, developed the first poison gas used in warfare and also the lethal ag

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionContemporary FictionFemale Lead
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The Unseen World

Liz Moore · 464 pages

"The moving story of a daughter's quest to discover the truth about her beloved father's hidden past. Ada Sibelius is raised by David, her brilliant, eccentric, socially inept single father, who directs a computer science lab in 1980s-era Boston. Home-schooled, Ada accompanies David to work every day; by twelve, she is a painfully shy prodigy. The lab begins to gain acclaim at the same time that D

Scientist ProtagonistLiterary FictionContemporary FictionFemale Lead
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle Zevin · 416 pages

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’ BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY • A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GLOBE AND MAIL BESTSELLER • A JIMMY FALLON BOOK CLUB PICKIn this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, du

Literary FictionContemporary FictionCharacter-DrivenChronic Illness
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