What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorMoby-Dick or, The Whale
Herman Melville · 420 pages
A classic of the sea, telling of the pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who defied capture.
Pincher Martin
William Golding · 208 pages
One of Golding’s bleakest novels, this existentialist story is about the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the North Atlantic. Having been washed up on a rocky outcrop with no other land in sight and having no form of sustenance the man soon becomes deranged and the ending quickly becomes more and more inevitable.
Death and the Dervish
Mesa Selimovic · 473 pages
Death and the Dervish is a first-person narrative told from the point of view of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish at a Sarajevo monastery in the eighteenth century during the Turkish occupation. The spiritual leader of a group of Moslems, Sheikh Nuruddin has deliberately removed himself from the day-to-day activities of society. This distance is shattered, though, by the arrest of his brother. As Sheik
The Lime Works
Thomas Bernhard · 256 pages
For five years, Konrad imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, The sense of hearing. As the story begins, he's just blown his wife's head off with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair. No one seems to know why, but the town is steeped in speculation. An unnamed insura
Mystic River
Dennis Lehane · 487 pages
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to
Light in August
William Faulkner · 480 pages
One of Faulkner's most admired and accessible novels, "Light in August reveals the great American author at the height of his powers. Lena Grove's resolute search for the father of her unborn child begets a rich, poignant, and ultimately hopeful story of perseverance in the face of mortality. It also acquaints us with several of Faulkner's most unforgettable characters, including the Reverend Gail
The Godfather
Mario Puzo · 447 pages
The Godfather is a crime novel by American author Mario Puzo. Originally published in 1969 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, the novel details the story of a fictional Mafia family in New York City (and Long Beach, New York), headed by Vito Corleone. Puzo's dedication for The Godfather is "For Anthony Cleri". The novel's epigraph is by the French author Honoré de Balzac: "Behind every great fortune there is
Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs · 304 pages
Trainspotting
Irvine Welsh · 352 pages
Scottish writer Irvine Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting, is a collection of short-stories revolving around a group of friends, their drug use, and struggles in the city of Edinburgh.
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 498 pages
A masterpiece of guilt and redemption that transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, is determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will. When he commits an act of murder and theft, he sets in
De Niro's Game
Rawi Hage · 280 pages
In the Christian part of Beirut, torn by civil war, two befriended young men make a different choice about whether to flee or join the fight.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 418 pages
Emily Bronte's dark romance, with an introduction from best-selling author Alice Hoffman Heathcliff comes to the brooding mansion of Wuthering Heighths as an orphan child. Cathy is the daughter of the wealthy family that takes him in. They are drawn together from the moment they meet, their love consuming, destructive, and full of desire. They cannot be together, and yet they cannot stay apart. Th
Native Son
Richard Wright · 398 pages
Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. ---------- Also contained in: [Early Works](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL506449W)
The Pledge
Friedrich Durrenmatt, Clara Winston · 159 pages
Set in a small town in Switzerland, The Pledge centers around the murder of a young girl and the detective who promises the victim’s mother he will find the perpetrator. After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer—with all the patience of a master fisherman. But cruel turns of plot conspire to make him pay dearly for his pledge. Here
Shella
Andrew Vachss · 225 pages
From the author of the acclaimed Burke private-eye series comes an ambitious and chilling novel that shows us not only what evil is, but where it comes from. For Shella is nothing less than a tour of evil's spawning ground, conducted by one of its natural predators.He is called "Ghost" because he is so nondescript as to be invisible and because he slays with such reflexive ease that he might be on
The Silent Wife
A.S.A. Harrison · 331 pages
Todd Gilbert and Jodie Brett are in a bad place in their relationship. They've been together for twenty-eight years, and with no children to worry about there has been little to disrupt their affluent Chicago lifestyle. But there has also been little to hold it together, and beneath the surface lie ever-widening cracks. When it becomes clear that their precarious world could disintegrate at any mo
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess · 188 pages
A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian satirical black comedy novel by English writer Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. It is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. The teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Na
The Fifth Woman
Henning Mankell · 448 pages
When a serial killer confounds him and his team of detectives with increasingly brutal murders, Wallander must discover how these seemingly unrelated deaths are connected before the killer strikes again.