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An Experiment in Love

Hilary Mantel · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante · 336 pages

A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, "My Brilliant Friend" is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but

Class StruggleComing of AgeFemale FriendshipLiterary Fiction
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Circle of Friends

Maeve Binchy · 560 pages

It began with Benny Hogan and Eve Malone, growing up, inseparable, in the village of Knockglen. Benny--the only child, yearning to break free from her adoring parents...Eve--the orphaned offspring of a convent handyman and a rebellious blueblood, abandoned by her mother's wealthy family to be raised by nuns. Eve and Benny--they knew the sins and secrets behind every villager's lace curtains

College CampusClass StruggleComing of AgeFemale Friendship
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Normal People

Sally Rooney · 288 pages

At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal. A year later, they’re b

College CampusClass StruggleComing of AgeLiterary Fiction
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I am Charlotte Simmons

Tom Wolfe · 682 pages

"Dupont University - the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition... Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a wide-eyed, bookish freshman from a strict, devout, poor and poorly educated family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting di

College CampusClass StruggleComing of AgeLiterary Fiction
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Rules of Civility

Amor Towles · 352 pages

A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall Street secretary Katey Kontent into the upper echelons of New York society, where she befriends a shy multi-millionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow.

Class StruggleFemale FriendshipLiterary FictionClassism
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The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he

Coming of AgeLiterary FictionFemale FriendshipFirst Person Narrator
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Swing Time

Zadie Smith · 464 pages

"An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty Two brown girls dream of being dancers--but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood frien

Coming of AgeLiterary FictionFemale FriendshipClassism
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I Capture the Castle

Dodie Smith · 360 pages

Cassandra, the 17-year-old narrator, lives an eccentric existence in a crumbling castle in the English countryside in the 1930s. Her father is a former bestselling novelist now suffering from a chronic case of writer's block and her glamorous but bohemian stepmother Topaz is a sometime artist model. Money is in short supply but Cassandra and her discontented older sister Rose are forced to make th

Class StruggleComing of AgeLiterary FictionClassism
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Clever Girl

Tessa Hadley · 292 pages

Follows Stella, a lower-middle-class British girl born in the 1950s, whose coming-of-age experiences mirror the broader cultural development of her times.

Class StruggleComing of AgeLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Everything Belongs to Us

Yoojin Grace Wuertz · 356 pages

"This debut novel takes place at the elite Seoul National University in 1970s South Korea during the final years of a repressive regime. The novel follows the fates of two women--Jisun, the daughter of a powerful tycoon, who eschews her privilege to become an underground labor activist in Seoul; and Namin, her best friend from childhood, a brilliant, tireless girl who has grown up with nothing, an

College CampusClass StruggleFemale FriendshipLiterary Fiction
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Upstairs at the Party

Linda Grant · 306 pages

'If you go back and look at your life there are certain scenes, acts, or maybe just incidents on which everything that follows seems to depend. If only you could narrate them, then you might be understood. I mean the part of yourself that you don't know how to explain.' In the early Seventies a glamorous and androgynous couple known collectively as Evie/Stevie appear out of nowhere on the isolated

College CampusComing of AgeLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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A Question of Upbringing

Anthony Powell · 226 pages

College CampusComing of AgeLiterary FictionClassism
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Tipping the Velvet

Sarah Waters · 480 pages

Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-h

Class StruggleComing of AgeLiterary FictionClassism
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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

Class StruggleComing of AgeLiterary FictionClassism
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The Country Girls Trilogy

Edna O'Brien · 624 pages

Coming of AgeFemale FriendshipLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Space Between Us

Thrity Umrigar · 328 pages

Each morning, Bhima, a domestic servant in contemporary Bombay, leaves her own small shanty in the slums to tend to another woman's house. In Sera Dubash's home, Bhima scrubs the floors of a house in which she remains an outsider. She cleans furniture she is not permitted to sit on. She washes glasses from which she is not allowed to drink. Yet despite being separated from each other by blood and

Class StruggleFemale FriendshipLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach · 512 pages

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry’s fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love

College CampusComing of AgeLiterary FictionFemale Friendship
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We Need New Names

NoViolet Bulawayo · 304 pages

Whenever foreigners visit Paradise they always ask Darling and her friends to smile for the camera. Here are some of the things Darling and her friends have to smile about: stealing guavas, gifts from NGOs, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices. But they all want to go to the real paradise in America or Britain.

Class StruggleComing of AgeLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

Simone de Beauvoir · 368 pages

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in th

College CampusComing of AgeFemale FriendshipFirst Person Narrator
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The Strays

Emily Bitto · 256 pages

On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends one of the daughters of infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham. He and his wife are trying to escape the stifling conservatism of 1930s Australia by inviting other like-minded artists to live and work at their family home. Lily becomes infatuated with this wild, makeshift family and longs to truly be part of it. As the years pass, Lily observes

Coming of AgeFemale FriendshipLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Just Listen

Sarah Dessen · 377 pages

Last year, Annabel was "the girl who has everything" — at least that's the part she played in the television commercial for Kopf's Department Store. This year, she's the girl who has nothing: no best friend because mean-but-exciting Sophie dropped her, no peace at home since her older sister became anorexic, and no one to sit with at lunch. Until she meets Owen Armstrong. Tall, dark, and mu

Coming of AgeFemale FriendshipEating Disorder ContentEating Disorders
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A Gate at the Stairs

Lorrie Moore · 336 pages

In her best-selling story collection, Birds of America ("[it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability" --James McManus, front page of The New York Times Book Review), Lorrie Moore wrote about the disconnect between men and women, about the precariousness of women on the edge, and about loneliness and loss.Now, in her dazzling new novel--h

College CampusComing of AgeLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Bunny

Mona Awad · 305 pages

College CampusFemale FriendshipLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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La fruta del borrachero

Ingrid Rojas Contreras · 406 pages

Class StruggleFemale FriendshipLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator

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