What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorA Severed Wasp
Madeleine L'Engle · 388 pages
Katherine Forrester Vigneras, in a continuation of her story from The Small Rain, returns to New York City from Europe to retire. Now in her seventies, she encounters an old friend from her Greenwich Village days who, it turns out, is the former Bishop of New York. He asks Katherine to give a benefit concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This leads to new demands on her resources--human
Going to Meet the Man
James Baldwin · 235 pages
"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of
The Sweetest Hallelujah
Elaine Hussey · 344 pages
Betty Jewel Hughes was once the hottest black jazz singer in Memphis. But when she finds herself pregnant and alone, she gives up her dream of being a star to raise her beautiful daughter, Billie, in Shakerag, Mississippi. Now, ten years later, in 1955, Betty Jewel is dying of cancer and looking for someone to care for Billie when she's gone. With no one she can count on, Betty Jewel does the unth
Age of Iron
J.M. Coetzee · 198 pages
Mrs. Cullen, the narrator in this novel, is an elderly white woman dying of cancer in a country afflicted with its own mortal sickness. "In Cape Town, South Africa, an old woman is dying of cancer. A classics professor, Mrs. Curren has been opposed to the lies and brutality of apartheid all her life, but has lived insulated from its true horrors. Now she is suddenly forced to come to terms with
The Time of Our Singing
Richard Powers · 640 pages
"Tout commence en 1939, lorsque Delia Daley et David Strom se rencontrent à un concert de Marian Anderson. Peut-on alors imaginer qu'une jeune femme noire épouse un juif allemand fuyant le nazisme? Et pourtant ... Leur passion pour la musique l'emporte sur les conventions et offre à leur amour un sanctuaire de paix où, loin des hurlements du monde et de ses vicissitudes, ils élèvent leurs trois en
Clock Without Hands
Carson McCullers · 241 pages
Set in Georgia on the eve of court-ordered integration, Clock Without Hands contains McCullers's most poignant statement on race, class, and justice. A small-town druggist dying of leukemia calls himself and his community to account in this tale of change and changelessness, of death and the death-in-life that is hate. It is a tale, as McCullers herself wrote, of "response and responsibility--of m
The Snow Queen
Michael Cunningham · 272 pages
A heartbroken man turns to religion after seeing a vision in the sky above Central Park while his musician brother takes drugs he thinks will help him compose a ballad for his seriously ill wife.
Gilead
Marilynne Robinson · 256 pages
**WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION** In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civi
The Brooklyn Follies
Paul Auster · 320 pages
Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore - a far cry from the brilliant academic career he'd begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the
The Street Sweeper
Elliot Perlman · 626 pages
"From the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, an epic that reaches across generations and spans continents, revealing the interconnectedness and interdependence of humanity and the profound impact of memory on our lives"--
All the Little Live Things
Wallace Stegner · 345 pages
An Eastern couple retire to California in search of peace after the death of their wayward son, only to have their paradise shattered by painful reminders of the past.
Quicksand
Nella Larsen · 157 pages
Brave, bold, and brilliant, Larsen's autobiographical portrait of a biracial woman's quest for self-identity and acceptance offers a cautionary tale of an individual lost between two cultures.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Fannie Flagg · 403 pages
Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Ala
A Gathering of Old Men
Ernest J. Gaines · 213 pages
Beau Boutan, a hated Cajun farmer, is shot, and a dozen aging black men claim to be the murderer.
Bruno's Dream
Iris Murdoch · 304 pages
Bruno, dying, obsessed with spiders and preoccupied with death and reconciliation, lies at the centre of an intricate spider's web of relationships and passions. Including creepy Nigel the nurse and his besotted twin Will, fighter of duels.
How the Dead Live
Will Self · 404 pages
Lily Bloom, an elderly American dying of cancer in a British hospital, retraces her life and then enters a rather banal world of the dead.
Italian Shoes
Henning Mankell
Let Me Be Frank With You
Richard Ford · 240 pages
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Frank Bascombe travels to the site of his former home on the shore, visits his ex-wife, who is suffering with Parkinson's, and meets a dying former friend. Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity. It is a moving and wondrous
The Dying Animal
Philip Roth · 166 pages
"David Kepesh is white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder.". "Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when he left his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living
Tinkers
Paul Harding · 192 pages
The Last Song
Nicholas Sparks · 390 pages
#1 bestselling author Nicholas Sparks's new novel is at once a compelling family drama and a heartrending tale of young love.Seventeen year old Veronica "Ronnie" Miller's life was turned upside-down when her parents divorced and her father moved from New York City to Wilmington, North Carolina. Three years later, she remains angry and alientated from her parents, especially her father...until her
The Fortress of Solitude
Jonathan Lethem · 511 pages
This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most si
Under The Visible Life
Kim Echlin · 348 pages
Fatherless Katherine carries the stigma of her mixed-race background through an era that is hostile to her and all she represents. It is only through music that she finds the freedom to temporarily escape and dream of a better life for herself, nurturing this hard-won refuge throughout the vagaries of unexpected motherhood and an absent husband, and relying on her talent to build a future for her