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🧲 Books like this

Last Night in Twisted River

John Irving · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Tinkers

Paul Harding · 192 pages

Multiple TimelinesFather and SonGrief Over a ParentNonlinear Narrative
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Mark Haddon · 240 pages

This is Christopher's murder mystery story. There are no lies in this story because Christopher can't tell lies. Christopher does not like strangers or the colours yellow or brown or being touched. On the other hand, he knows all the countries in the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7507. When Christohper decides to find out who killed the neighbour's dog, his mystery st

Single FatherFather and SonWriter ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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The Nix

Nathan Hill · 640 pages

"An epic novel about a son, the mother who left him as a child, and how his search to uncover the secrets of her life leads him to reclaim his own"--

Multiple TimelinesWriter ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-Driven
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Writer ProtagonistMultiple TimelinesNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-Driven
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Commonwealth

Ann Patchett · 322 pages

"One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six

Multiple TimelinesWriter ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenNonlinear Narrative
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Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar · 352 pages

Cyrus Shams is lost. Ever since his mother’s plane was senselessly shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby, Cyrus has been grappling with her death. Now, newly sober, he is set to learn the truth of her life. When an encounter with a dying artist leads Cyrus towards the mysteries of his past - an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as an Angel of Death, a haun

Grief Over a ParentWriter ProtagonistFather and SonNonlinear Narrative
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Daytripper

Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba · 247 pages

Presents key moments in the life of Brás de Oliva Domingos, a Brazilian writer and sometime journalist, and the son of a prominent author, as if each episode would turn out to be the day in which he was about to die.

Multiple TimelinesGrief Over a ParentWriter ProtagonistNonlinear Narrative
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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

Single FatherCharacter-DrivenWriter ProtagonistFamily Secrets
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My Struggle Book One

Karl Ove Knausgård

Father and SonWriter ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-Driven
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Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison · 338 pages

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s ori

Nonlinear NarrativeFather and SonCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Tiger's Wife

Tea Obreht · 360 pages

Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the ti

Grief Over a ParentMultiple TimelinesNonlinear NarrativeFamily Secrets
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The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

David Wroblewski · 566 pages

A tale reminiscent of "Hamlet" that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father's death.

Father and SonGrief Over a ParentCharacter-DrivenFamily Secrets
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The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Mitch Albom · 196 pages

The Five People You Meet In Heaven is a 2003 novel by Mitch Albom. It follows the life and death of a ride mechanic named Eddie who is killed in an amusement park accident and sent to heaven, where he encounters five people who had a significant impact on him while he was alive. It was published by Hyperion and remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 95 weeks.

Multiple TimelinesFather and SonNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-Driven
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Underworld

Don DeLillo · 827 pages

Nick Shay and Kiara Sax knew each other once, intimately and they meet again in the Sahara desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, she is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence. Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of Th

Multiple TimelinesNonlinear NarrativeFather and SonLiterary Fiction
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The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri · 304 pages

"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, c

Grief Over a ParentMultiple TimelinesCharacter-DrivenFamily Secrets
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Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 400 pages

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenFamily Secrets
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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...

Writer ProtagonistMultiple TimelinesNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-Driven
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And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini · 446 pages

Presents a story inspired by human love, how people take care of one another, and how choices resonate through subsequent generations. Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pari, as beaut

Multiple TimelinesNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenFamily Secrets
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A Secret Kept

Tatiana de Rosnay · 305 pages

It's been thirty years since Antonie's and Melanie's mother died. But when a visit to the sea at Noirmoutier Island triggers painful memories of their haunting childhood--and Melanie lies in the hospital recovering from a near fatal accident--Antoine must confront his past and also his troubled relationships with his own children.

Grief Over a ParentMultiple TimelinesSingle FatherCharacter-Driven
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Untouchable

Scott O'Connor · 381 pages

Grief Over a ParentFather and SonSingle FatherLiterary Fiction
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The Art of Racing in the Rain

Garth Stein · 321 pages

Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television extensively, and by listening very closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver.Through Denny, Enzo has gained tremendous insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing,

Single FatherFramed for a CrimeCharacter-DrivenNonlinear Narrative
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Beach Music

Pat Conroy · 784 pages

An American living in Rome with his daughter after his wife's suicide tracks a classmate who went underground as a Vietnam protester and never resurfaced.

Single FatherMultiple TimelinesCharacter-DrivenFamily Secrets
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This Time Tomorrow

Emma Straub · 310 pages

Single FatherGrief Over a ParentWriter ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Julia Alvarez · 304 pages

It\'s a long way from Santo Domingo to the Bronx, but if anyone can go the distance, it\'s the Garcia girls. Four lively latinas plunged from a pampered life of privilege on an island compound into the big-city chaos of New York, they rebel against Mami and Papi\'s old-world discipline and embrace all that America has to offer.

Multiple TimelinesNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenFamily Secrets
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