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Eugénie Grandet

Honore de Balzac · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Middlemarch

George Eliot · 795 pages

Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.

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The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James · 592 pages

The Portrait of a Lady is widely held to be the outstanding work of Henry James’s “early” period, and among the finest novels of his entire career. When the eccentric Mrs. Touchett “takes up” her charming American niece, Isabel Archer, and returns with her to England, her husband and son, the invalid Ralph, are first mystified, then bemused. Soon, however, they are smitten, as also is their aristo

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers · 334 pages

Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior

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The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood · 638 pages

More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...

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The Awakening

Kate Chopin · 190 pages

The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that

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The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton · 320 pages

Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s, the world in which she grew up, and from which she spent her life escaping. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this society; he accepts its standards and abides by its rules but

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Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 349 pages

A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.

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The Thorn Birds

Colleen McCullough · 573 pages

The Thorn Birds is a 1977 best-selling novel by Australian author Colleen McCullough. Set primarily on Drogheda – a fictional sheep station in the Australian Outback named after Drogheda, Ireland – the story focuses on the Cleary family and spans the years 1915 to 1969.

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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

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The Other Bennet Sister

Janice Hadlow · 463 pages

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The Bee Sting

Paul Murray · 645 pages

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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

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The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery · 325 pages

EA novel by the French professor of philosophy Muriel Barbery. The book centers on a working-class concierge of an upscale apartment building in Paris, Renee Michel. She is an auto-didact of immense learning who deliberately conceals her intelligence. Her secret is discovered by a young resident of the building named Paloma. The novel is narrated alternately by each of these two characters. Fir

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The Seamstress

Frances de Pontes Peebles · 646 pages

As seamstresses, the young sisters Emilia and Luzia dos Santos know how to cut, how to mend, and how to conceal. These are useful skills in the lawless backcountry of Brazil, where ruthless land barons called "colonels" feud with bands of outlaw cangaceiros, trapping innocent residents in the cross fire.Emilia, whose knowledge of the world comes from fashion magazines and romance novels, dreams of

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Persuasion

Jane Austen · 255 pages

Persuasion tells the love story of Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, whose sister rents Miss Elliot's father's house, after the Napoleonic Wars come to an end. The story is set in 1814. The book itself is Jane Austen's last published book, published posthumously in December of 1818.

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To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee · 309 pages

One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and voted one of the best novels of the 20th century by librarians across the United States. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poi

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The Book of Ruth

Jane Hamilton · 328 pages

"I learned slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it - to figure out whether, in fact, she's to blame for the mess." Pegged the loser in a small-town family that doesn't have much going for it in the first place. Ruth grows up in the shadow of her

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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pages

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Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

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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

Toxic Family DynamicsSlow-PacedTragicMother and Daughter
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The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 614 pages

Acclaimed by the 20th-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin for its “polyphony” (a literary concept introduced by Bakhtin to describe a plurality of voices within a narrative), The Idiot is regarded by modern critics as one of Dostoevsky’s most experimental and artistically uneven novels. The novel follows the entrance of the epileptic Prince Muishkin—a character Dostoevsky meant to represent a “

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Bleak House

Charles Dickens · 815 pages

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, t

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We Were the Mulvaneys

Joyce Carol Oates · 464 pages

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