What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorSalmon Fishing in the Yemen
Paul Torday · 352 pages
"Dr. Alfred Jones has many reasons to be content with his life. His latest paper 'Effects of Increased Water Acidity on the Caddis Fly Larva' looks set to cause a stir on the pages of Trout & Salmon, his job as a fisheries scientist is satisfactory, and he and his wife, Mary, have just celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary - for which she gave him a replacement electric toothbrush. So why
The Pyramid
Ismail Kadare · 161 pages
When the new Egyptian Pharaoh decrees that he does not want a pyramid built in his honour his advisers are aghast. It is their firm belief that peace and prosperity only make the people more difficult to control – they must be kept under the whip. So the Pharaoh agrees to the construction of a pyramid colossal beyond imagining, an edifice that crushes dozens of people as each block is added and wh
Serious Men
Manu Joseph · 338 pages
"Low-caste Ayyan Mani lives in a Mubai tenement and works in an esteemed research institute as the assistant of top researcher Arvind Acharya. Forever spiteful toward his privileged superiors, Ayyan is deviously mischievous and pulls off a stunt that ends with his half-deaf (but otherwise ordinary) son being proclaimed in the local news as a boy genius. Meanwhile, Arvind is obsessed with proving h
Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 229 pages
Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat's Cr
La Place de l'Étoile
Patrick Modiano · 185 pages
Modiano's debut novel is a sardonic, often grotesque satire of France during the Nazi occupation. We are immediately plunged into the hallucinatory imagination of Raphael Schlemilovitch, a young Jewish man, torn between self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, who may be the heir to a Venezuelan fortune, may have lived during the Nazi Occupation, may have rubbed shoulders with the most notorious col
Picture This
Joseph Heller · 351 pages
As Rembrandt is creating his famous painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer, Aristotle is soon able to see and hear. As the masterpiece makes its way through history, Aristotle's complicated mind finds unanswerable dilemmas.
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 Gilded Age
Mark Twain · 479 pages
A biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America in which Twain and his neighbor attack the greed, lust, and naivete of their time.
Antic Hay
Aldous Huxley · 256 pages
London life just after World War I, devoid of values and moving headlong into chaos at breakneck speed—Aldous Huxley's *Antic Hay*. like Hemingway's *The Sun Also Rises*, portrays a world of lost souls madly pursuing both pleasure and meaning. Fake artists, third-rate poets, pompous critics, pseudo-scientists, con-men, bewildered romantics, cock-eyed futurists—all inhabit this world spinning out o
Caesar and Cleopatra
George Bernard Shaw · 136 pages
Caesar and Cleopatra satirizes Shakespeare's use of history and comments wryly on the politics of Shaw's own time, but the undertone of melancholy makes it one of his most affecting plays.
Twilight Sleep
Edith Wharton · 372 pages
Out of print for several decades, here is Edith Wharton's superb satirical novel of the Jazz Age, a critically praised best-seller when it was first published in 1927. Sex, drugs, work, money, infatuation with the occult and spiritual healing - these are the remarkably modern themes that animate Twilight Sleep. The extended family of Mrs. Manford is determined to escape the pain, boredom and empti
In the Pond
Ha Jin · 178 pages
Set in the northern provincial commune town of Dismount Fort, In the Pond tells the story of Shao Bin, a worker at the Harvest Fertilizer plant who aims above his station. Passed over on the list to receive a larger apartment, while those in favor with the party are selected ahead of him, Shao Bin chafes at his powerlessness until he hits upon a solution: placing a satirical cartoon in the provinc
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
Vernon God Little
D.B.C. Pierre · 283 pages
Teenager Vernon Gregory Little's life has been changed by the Columbine-style slaughter of a group of students at his high school. Soon his home town is blanketed under a media siege, and Vernon finds himself blamed for the killing. Vernon finds himself drawn into a series of increasingly bizarre circumstances and decides to take off for Mexico and a date, with the delectable Taylor Figueros.
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh · 265 pages
Tony Last is an aristocrat whose attachment to an ideal feudal past is so profound that he is blind to his wife Brenda's boredom with the stately rhythms of country life. She sets herself up in a London flat and pursues an affair with the social-climbing idler John Beaver. Tragedy forces the collapse of their relationship to accelerate, and Tony seeks solace in a foolhardy search for El Dorado.
Mumbo Jumbo
Ishmael Reed · 223 pages
Spanning a dizzying host of genres, from cinema to academia to mythology, Mumbo Jumbo is a lively ride through a key decade of American history the 1920's. In addition to ragtime, blues, and jazz, Reed's allegory draws on the Harlem Renaissance, the Back to Africa movement, and America's occupation of Haiti. His style throughout is as avant-garde and vibrant as the music at its center. From New Or
The Silence and the Roar
Nihad Sirees · 154 pages
An unnamed Middle Eastern country resembling Syria is celebrating the twenty-year anniversary of the reigning despot. Desperate to get away from the noise and the zombie-like masses, author Fathi Chin leaves his house to visit his mother. En route, he stops to help a student who is being beaten by the police. Fathi's ID papers are confiscated and he is forced to return home and told to report to t
The Diviners
Rick Moody · 576 pages
A proposed television miniseries becomes the focus of a brutal rivalry between a hot-tempered production head, a Sikh cab driver, a bipolar bicycle messenger, and other industry wannabes.
Yellowface
R F Kuang · 331 pages
White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But At