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They Came Like Swallows

William Maxwell · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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A Death in the Family

James Agee · 339 pages

Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed. On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxvill

Death of a ParentTragicGrief and MourningLyrical Prose
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Pale Horse, Pale Rider : Three Short Novels : Old Mortality, Noon Wine, Pale Horse Pale Rider

Katherine Anne Porter · 264 pages

Contains three short novels, -- Old Mortality, a story of race tracks, of the Deep South, of the survival and shattering of a family legend; Noon Wine, Texas and a dairy farm rescued from decay by a man who turns out to be an escaped lunatic from Dakota and of the tragedy that ended it all; Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a mystical story of the narrow ledge between life and death, set at the time of the

PlagueLyrical ProseGrief and MourningBittersweet
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To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf · 241 pages

This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever.In this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting complexity of adult relationships.

Death of a ParentGrief and MourningLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J

TragicGrief and MourningBittersweetLyrical Prose
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The Plague

Albert Camus · 278 pages

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

PlagueGrief and MourningTragicLiterary Fiction
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The Optimist's Daughter

Eudora Welty · 180 pages

The Optimist's Daughter is the story of Laurel, a widow who returns to Mississippi when her father is ill and witnesses his death and funeral. From there, she embarks on a deeply personal journey to explore her past and her family in order to make sense of her future.

Death of a ParentGrief and MourningLyrical ProseBittersweet
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As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner · 250 pages

Written in stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators, the story follows a journey wherein the family of a dead woman try to transport her body to her birthplace in Mississippi in accordance with her wishes. When a ford across a river is flooded they are forced to take a roundabout route and it becomes a desperate race to complete their mission before the body begins to decompose.

Death of a ParentGrief and MourningTragicLiterary Fiction
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Out of the Dust

Karen Hesse · 235 pages

"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ." A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands. To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. Wh

Death of a ParentGrief and MourningTragicBittersweet
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The Tiger's Wife

Tea Obreht · 360 pages

Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the ti

Death of a ParentTragicGrief and MourningPlague
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A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving · 543 pages

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." So begins John Irving's new novel. In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys - best friends - are playing ina Li

Death of a ParentTragicBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Daytripper

Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba · 247 pages

Presents key moments in the life of Brás de Oliva Domingos, a Brazilian writer and sometime journalist, and the son of a prominent author, as if each episode would turn out to be the day in which he was about to die.

Death of a ParentTragicGrief and MourningLyrical Prose
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The Book Thief

Markus Zusak · 566 pages

The extraordinary #1 New York Times bestselling story about the ability of books to feed the soul is now a major motion picture. This enhanced ebook edition is perfect for new fans and collectors alike. It includes: · An exclusive video welcome to the enhanced edition from Markus Zusak. · The official movie trailer for The Book Thief. · Videos featurettes introducing Sophie Nélisse (Leisel Mem

Grief and MourningDeath of a ParentTragicLyrical Prose
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

TragicGrief and MourningLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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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

Grief and MourningBittersweetLyrical ProseDeath of a Parent
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The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

Heidi W. Durrow · 264 pages

After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.

Death of a ParentGrief and MourningTragicLyrical Prose
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Year of Wonders

Geraldine Brooks · 310 pages

This is the story of a young woman's struggle to save her family and her soul during the year of 1666, when plague suddenly visits her small Derbyshire village and the villagers, inspired by a charismatic preacher, elect to quarantine themselves.

PlagueTragicGrief and MourningLyrical Prose
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The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje · 307 pages

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of

Lyrical ProseLiterary FictionDeath of a ParentTragic
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Nine Stories

J.D. Salinger · 208 pages

First published short story volume by the author of Catcher In The Rye.

TragicBittersweetGrief and MourningLiterary Fiction
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Like the Willow Tree: The Diary of Lydia Amelia Pierce, Portland, Maine, 1918

Lois Lowry · 224 pages

After being orphaned during the influenza epidemic of 1918, eleven-year-old Lydia Pierce and her fourteen-year-old brother are taken by their grieving uncle to be raised in the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake. Includes author's note about the Shakers.

PlagueDeath of a ParentGrief and MourningWorld War I
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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

Grief and MourningDeath of a ParentLyrical ProseBittersweet
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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

Grief and MourningTragicLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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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.

Grief and MourningTragicLyrical ProseBittersweet
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The Piano Cemetery

Jose Luis Peixoto · 288 pages

Death of a ParentGrief and MourningLyrical ProseBittersweet
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Mary and O'Neil

Justin Cronin · 243 pages

Mary and O'Neil frequently marveled at how, of all the lives they might have led, they had somehow found this one together. When they met at the Philadelphia high school where they'd come to teach, each had suffered a profound loss that had not healed. How likely was it that they could learn to trust, much less love, again?Justin Cronin's poignant debut traces the lives of Mary Olson and O'Neil Bu

Death of a ParentGrief and MourningLyrical ProseBittersweet
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