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The Moment

Douglas Kennedy · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

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.

Writer ProtagonistCold War EraFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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Black Swan Green

David Mitchell · 344 pages

A novel. From hardcover: "Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen l

Cold War EraEmotionalFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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The Prague Orgy

Philip Roth · 89 pages

Cold War EraWriter ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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Sputnik Sweetheart

Haruki Murakami · 224 pages

"The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments - until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated businesswoman. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakami's surreal ye

Writer ProtagonistEmotionalFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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Sweet Tooth

Ian McEwan · 374 pages

An Anglican bishop's daughter gets in over her head with British Intelligence in this John le Carre-esque caper from the author of *Atonement*. Brash, bookish Serena just might make a perfect spy-if she can keep her heart under wraps.

Cold War EraWriter ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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11/22/63

Stephen King · 849 pages

11/22/63 is a novel by Stephen King about a time traveller who attempts to prevent the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on November 22, 1963 (the novel's titular date). It is the 60th book published by Stephen King, his 49th novel and the 42nd under his own name. The novel was announced on King's official site on March 2, 2011. A short excerpt was released o

Cold War EraEmotionalFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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Love and Garbage

Ivan Klima · 240 pages

Cold War EraWriter ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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The Secret Pilgrim

John le Carre · 352 pages

**The rules of the game, and of the world, have changed. Old enemies now yield to glasnost and perestroika. The killing shadows of the Cold War are flooded with light. The future is unfathomable.** **The Berlin Wall is toppled, the Iron Curtain swept aside. The Secret Pilgrim is Ned, a decent, loyal soldier of the Cold War, who has been in British Intelligence all his adult life. Now, approachi

Cold War EraLiterary FictionFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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In One Person

John Irving · 448 pages

A New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect," a phrase first used by John Ir

Writer ProtagonistEmotionalFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver · 528 pages

In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico-from a coastal

Cold War EraWriter ProtagonistLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The Hours Count

Jillian Cantor · 363 pages

A tale based on the story of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the only Americans put to death for espionage during the Cold War, traces the experiences of their friend and neighbor, who takes in the couple's young sons when they are arrested by the FBI in 1950. In 1947, Millie and Ed Stein and their toddler son, David, move into an apartment on the eleventh floor in Knickerbocker Village on New York's

Cold War EraEmotionalFirst Person NarratorEspionage
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Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 588 pages

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented li

Writer ProtagonistEmotionalLong-Distance RomanceLiterary Fiction
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You Are One of Them

Elliott Holt · 293 pages

Sarah Zuckerman is a shy, wary ten-year-old in a seemingly placid, upscale neighbourhood of Washington, D.C., in the politically charged 1980s. In Sarah's unhappy home her mother is agoraphobic and obsessed with the possibility of nuclear war; her father has abandoned the family to return to his native England. Sarah's prospects brighten, however, when she is befriended by Jenny Jones, an all-Amer

Cold War EraFirst Person NarratorLiterary FictionEspionage
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The Zahir

Paulo Coelho · 320 pages

Set in Paris and in the enchanting landscape of central Asia, this new novel by the author of the international bestsellers The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes follows the journey of a man obsessed with finding the wife who left him without an explanation.The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges that money and celebrity bring. His wife of te

Writer ProtagonistEmotionalFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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Leaving Berlin

Joseph Kanon · 377 pages

Targeted by McCarthyism for his prewar politics, a young Jewish writer who fled the Nazis to America makes a desperate bargain with a fledgling CIA to work as a spy in a decimated Berlin. "From the bestselling author of Istanbul Passage--called a "fast-moving thinking man's thriller" by The Wall Street Journal--comes a sweeping, atmospheric novel of postwar East Berlin, a city caught between poli

Cold War EraWriter ProtagonistMale LeadEspionage
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The Paris Wife

Paula McLain · 320 pages

Meeting through mutual friends in Chicago, Hadley is intrigued by brash "beautiful boy" Ernest Hemingway, and after a brief courtship and small wedding, they take off for Paris, where Hadley makes a convincing transformation from an overprotected child to a game and brave young woman who puts up with impoverished living conditions and shattering loneliness to prop up her husband’s career.

Writer ProtagonistEmotionalFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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Yellow Blue Tibia

Adam Roberts · 326 pages

A group of Soviet authors are shocked to watch the science fiction story they wrote 40 years ago slowly come to life, beginning with Chernobyl.

Cold War EraWriter ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
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Bengal Nights

Mircea Eliade · 176 pages

Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a roman a clef of remarkable intimacy. Originally published in Romanian in 1933, this semiautobiographical novel by the world-renowned scholar Mircea Eliade details the passionate awakenings of Alain, an ambitious young French engineer flush with colonial pride and prejudice and full of a European fascination with the mysterious subcontinent. Offered the hospitality

EmotionalWriter ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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The Feast of Love

Charles Baxter · 308 pages

Ein Alptraum reißt den Schriftsteller Charles aus dem Schlaf. Er weiß, dass er keine Ruhe mehr findet und beschließt einen Spaziergang zu machen. Er trifft seinen Freund Bradley Smith der, so wie er, die Nacht betrachtet. Die beiden beginnen zu rden - über die Liebe und über das Leben. Und so entfaltet sich ein ganzes Panorma von Geschichten, in denen es stets um das Eine geht: Gefühle.

Writer ProtagonistEmotionalFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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The Winter Sea

Susanna Kearsley · 527 pages

When novelist Carrie McClelland decides to set her new novel in Slains Castle in Scotland and uses her ancestor, Sophia Paterson, as one of the characters, the novel begins to take on a life of its own and Carrie soon realizes that an unusual bond with her ancestor may be providing her with an immediate window into the past.

Writer ProtagonistEmotionalFirst Person NarratorBittersweet
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Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

Ron Currie Jr. · 340 pages

"The protagonist of Ron Currie, Jr.'s new novel has a problem--or rather, several of them. He's a writer whose latest book was destroyed in a fire. He's mourning the death of his father, and has been in love with the same woman since grade school, a woman whose beauty and allure is matched only by her talent for eluding him. Worst of all, he's not even his own man, but rather an amalgam of fact an

Writer ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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Pushkin Hills

Sergei Dovlatov · 160 pages

"An unsuccessful writer and an inveterate alcoholic, Boris Alikhanov has recently divorced his wife Tatyana, and he is running out of money. The prospect of a summer job as a tour guide at the Pushkin Hills Preserve offers him hope of regaining some balance in life as his wife makes plans to emigrate to the West with their daughter Masha, but during Alikhanov's stay in the rural estate of Mikhaylo

Cold War EraWriter ProtagonistLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The Untouchable

John Banville · 410 pages

(From the Hardcover edition) Twenty years after his "retirement," ex-spy Victor Maskell attempts to come to terms with what has happened to his life by embarking on his memoirs. This is the plot which fuels Banville's stunning new novel--a story that goes beyond the mere facts of espionage to penetrate the intricate heart of the spy.

Cold War EraFirst Person NarratorLiterary FictionMale Lead
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This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz · 240 pages

This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

Writer ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorEmotionalLiterary Fiction
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