What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorComrade Don Camillo
Giovannino Guareschi · 190 pages
The hilarious account of an irrepressible village priest's journey to Moscow-disguised as a Communist! Those friendly enemies, Don Camillo and Peppone the Communist mayor of the village, are at it again. In a soccer pool, Peppone wins ten million lira—an unseemly amount of money for a good Communist to possess. So Don Camillo agrees to collect the winnings secretly and-shades of capitalism!-inves
Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene · 240 pages
Wormold's daughter had reached an expensive age - so he accepted a mysterious Englishman's offer of extra income. All he has to do is run agents, file reports, and spy. But his fake reports have an alarming tendency to come true.
The Joke
Milan Kundera · 288 pages
"All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: gre
Omon Ra
Victor Pelevin · 153 pages
Omon Ra, by the gifted Russian writer Victor Pelevin, is a pointed, dead-on-satire of the now-defunct Soviet space program, and a moving account of a cosmonaut's coming-of-age. The story is told in the beguiling voice of its young protagonist, Omon Ra, whose odd name combines a term for the Soviet special forces with the name of the sun god in Egyptian mythology. Ever since he was a boy, Omon has
The Public Burning
Robert Coover · 534 pages
A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon - the vo
Mother Night
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 202 pages
Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.
Forrest Gump
Winston Groom · 240 pages
A man named Forest Gump sits at a bus stop and tells everyone about his life. It starts in a doctor's office when he gets leg braces. Then he goes to school where he meets Jenny, and his entire school career and football. Then it goes on to college football. then to Vietnam where he meets bubba. then bubba dies and forest saves a whole platoon. After the war forest gets a medal of honor and runs a
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared
Jonas Jonasson · 396 pages
Under the Frog
Tibor Fischer · 250 pages
Set in post-war Hungary between 1944 and 1956, the story follows the lives of two young men and in particular their careers in a travelling basketball team. They spend most of their time in the avoidance of work and army service and in the pursuit of sex.
Expo 58
Jonathan Coe · 273 pages
An English public employee becomes embroiled in a Soviet plot while he oversees the construction of an authentic British pub being showcased at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels.
Quesadillas
Juan Pablo Villalobos · 180 pages
It's the eighties in Lagos de Moreno - a town where there are more cows than people, and more priests than cows - and a poor family struggles to overcome the bizarre dangers of living in Mexico. The father, a high school civics teacher, insists on practicing and teaching the art of the insult, while the mother prepares hundreds of quesadillas to serve to their numerous progeny: Aristotle, Orestes,
Slumberland
Paul Beatty · 256 pages
The hip break-out novel from 2016 Man Booker Prize winning author, Paul Beatty, about a disaffected Los Angeles DJ who travels to post-Wall Berlin in search of his transatlantic doppelganger. Hailed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best writers of his generation, Paul Beatty turns his creative eye to man's search for meaning and identity in an increasingly chaotic w
The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel
Laurent Binet · 363 pages
The suspicious death of literary critic Roland Barthes in 1980 Paris reveals the secret history of the French intelligentsia, plunging a hapless police detective into the depths of literary theory as it was documented in a famed linguist's lost manuscript.
The Porcupine
Julian Barnes · 138 pages
Superbly humane in its moral concerns...an excellent novel'... The Times. Stoyo Petkanov, the deposed Party leader of a former Soviet satellite country, is on trial. His adversary, the prosecutor general, stands for the new government's ideals and liberal certainties, and is attempting to ensare Petkanov with the dictator's own totalitarian laws. But Petkanov is not beaten yet. He has been given h
Towards the End of the Morning
Michael Frayn · 237 pages
Tucked away in a sleepy newspaper department, covering nature notes and crosswords, Dyson dreams of liberation and recognition. When a chance occurs to appear on TV, he eagerly prepares to greet the celebrity life.
Once a Greek
Friedrich Durrenmatt · 179 pages
"Greek man, looking for Greek woman" reads the wanted ad that leads the bourgeois accountant Archilochus to a bewitching woman and a fairytale career. An enchanting comedy in prose form that comes from the interpreter of the contemporary, Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
The City and the Mountains
Eca de Queiros · 216 pages
"Born in Paris, Jacinto - the hero of The City and the Mountains - is the heir to a vast estate in the Alentejo in Portugal, which he has never visited. Jacinto lives in a beautiful mansion crammed with books and the latest gadgets. He mixes with the creme de la creme of Paris society, but is monumentally bored. One by one, his gadgets let him down. And then he receives a letter from the estate ma
From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant
Alex Gilvarry · 320 pages
One Fat Englishman
Kingsley Amis · 192 pages
The hero of "One Fat Englishman," a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against everything, not least his own overgrown self. In America, Roger Micheldene must deal with not so obligi
The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen · 384 pages
Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.