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After Leaving Mr Mackenzie

Jean Rhys · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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All the Broken Places

John Boyne · 400 pages

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The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway · 251 pages

Hemingway's profile of the Lost Generation captures life among the expatriates on Paris' Left Bank during the 1920s, the brutality of bullfighting in Spain, and the moral and spiritual dissolution of a generation.

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The Street

Ann Petry · 435 pages

The Street is a novel published in 1946 by African-American writer Ann Petry . Set in World War II era Harlem, it centers on the life of Lutie Johnson. Petry's novel is a commentary on the social injustices that confronted her character, Lutie Johnson, as a single black mother in this time period. Lutie is confronted by racism, sexism, and classism on a daily basis in her pursuit of the American d

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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Patrick Suskind · 272 pages

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in eighteenth-century France, the classic novel that provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man’s indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors

BleakParisCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Tin Flute

Gabrielle Roy · 393 pages

A family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance while searching for love.

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Hard Rain Falling

Don Carpenter · 308 pages

Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling is a tough-as-nails account of being down and out, but never down for good - a Dostoyevskian tale of crime, punishment, and the pursuit of an ever-elusive redemption. The novel follows the adventures of Jack Levitt, an orphaned teenager living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool halls of Portland, Oregon. Jack befriends Billy Lancing, a young black r

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Little Jewel

Patrick Modiano · 176 pages

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The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood · 352 pages

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Play It as It Lays

Joan Didion · 214 pages

Set in a place beyond good and evil---literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul---it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

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Untouchable

Mulk Raj Anand · 160 pages

With precision, vitality, and a fury that earned him praise as India's Charles Dickens, Mulk Raj Anand recreates in" Untouchable" what it was like to live on the fringes of society in pre-independence India. Bakha, an attractive, proud, and strong young man, is also an Untouchable, the lowest of the low in India's caste system. A sweeper and a toilet-cleaner, he must warn others on the street of h

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Aimez-Vous Brahms...

Francoise Sagan · 129 pages

Paule a 39 ans, c'est une femme libre et douce, sur qui les années passent avec nonchalance. Son amant, Roger, entretient avec elle une relation légère qui lasse et emprisonne Paule par sa versatilité. Lorsque Simon, un jeune homme de 25 ans, décide de la séduire, elle se laisse aimer, par vengeance mais aussi parce qu'elle veut être heureuse. Les paradoxes et les écueils de l'amour craquèlent peu

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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 174 pages

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Iv

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L'Assommoir (The Dram Shop)

Emile Zola · 480 pages

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The Grass is Singing

Doris Lessing · 245 pages

Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair pro

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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.

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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

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Post Office

Charles Bukowski · 160 pages

"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sad

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A Clergyman's Daughter

George Orwell · 317 pages

One of Orwell’s earlier novels this relates the strange story of a young unmarried woman who is seemingly content to keep house for her father, a village rector. After a dinner with a local bachelor she wakes eight days later in the Old Kent Road in London’s East End with amnesia and no idea how she came to be there. Being without funds she accompanies some vagrants to Kent for hop-picking and the

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The Short Novels of John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck · 550 pages

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Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy · 457 pages

An intimate portrait of a woman, one of literature's most admirable and tragic heroines...Tess Durbeyfield knows what it is to work hard and expect little. But her life is about to veer from the path trod by her mother and grandmother. When her ne'er-do-well father learns that his family is the last of a long noble line, the d'Urbervilles, he sends Tess on a journey to meet her supposed kin—a jour

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The L-Shaped Room

Lynne Reid Banks · 320 pages

Jane is unmarried and pregnant when she is turned out by her father. She moves into a room at the top of a squalid house. She cares nothing for it, or for her neighbours. But it is these neighbours that draw her back into life - Toby, a Jewish writer, John, a jazz player, and even her landlady. The first book of a trilogy.

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Midnight Cowboy

James Leo Herlihy · 253 pages

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The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Brian Moore · 230 pages

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