What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorFlood of Fire
Amitav Ghosh · 624 pages
"The stunningly vibrant final novel in the bestselling Ibis Trilogy It is 1839 and China has embargoed the trade of opium, yet too much is at stake in the lucrative business and the British Foreign Secretary has ordered the colonial government in India to assemble an expeditionary force for an attack to reinstate the trade. Among those consigned is Kesri Singh, a soldier in the army of the East In
Empire of Ivory
Naomi Novik
Naomi Novik's stunning series of novels follow the adventures of Cpt Laurence and his dragon Temeraire as they travel from the shores of Britain to China and Africa.Laurence and Temeraire made a daring journey across vast and inhospitable continents to bring home a rare Turkish dragon from the treacherous Ottoman Empire. Kazilik dragons are firebreathers, and Britain is in greater need of protecti
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell · 479 pages
The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, decei
The Caine Mutiny
Herman Wouk · 536 pages
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize this atmospheric novel tells the story in flashback of a mutiny aboard a United States minesweeper during WW2. The murky events of the mutiny emerge during a court-martial and it soon becomes clear that few people will emerge from the trial with any credit.
Tai-Pan
James Clavell · 601 pages
"It is the early 19th century, when European traders and adventurers first began to penetrate the forbidding Chinese mainland. And it is in this exciting time and exotic place that a giant of an Englishman, Dirk Straun, sets out to turn the desolate island of Hong Kong into an impregnable fortress of British power, and to make himself supreme ruler-- Tai-Pan!"--P. [4] of cover.
The Samurai
Shusaku Endo · 272 pages
In 1613 Father Pedro Velasco's dream came true. He set sail with a small group of Japanese Samurai for Mexico, Spain and Rome. Velasco knew Japanese, and his zealous hope was to become primate over a converted, Catholic Japan. His mission, with the Samurai, was to bargain for a Catholic crusade through Japan in exchange for Japanese trading rights with the West. It was a journey of incredible dang
We, the Drowned
Carsten Jensen · 678 pages
Follows a century in the port town of Marstal on an island off the coast of Denmark, whose citizens' lives are indelibly shaped by forces ranging from wars and shipwrecks to taboo survival practices and forbidden passions.
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Cormac McCarthy · 337 pages
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indi
A Falcon Flies
Wilbur Smith · 523 pages
The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton · 834 pages
This novel is a murder mystery set in a remote gold-mining frontier town in 19th-century New Zealand. Arriving in New Zealand in 1866 a weary Englishman, Walter Moody, lands in a gold-mining frontier town on the coast of New Zealand to make his fortune and forever leave behind his family's shame. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to investi
The Kingdoms
Natasha Pulley · 448 pages
This Thing of Darkness
Harry Thompson · 697 pages
The year is 1828. Brilliant young naval officer Robert Fitzroy is given the captaincy of HMS *Beagle*, surveying the wilds of Tierra del Fuego, aged just twenty-three. But Fitzroy hides a dark secret: hereditary manic depression that can strike at any time. He is seized by two ambitions -- that he can prove, contrary to the spirit of the age, that black and white men are equal; and that he can pr
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad · 464 pages
A gripping tale of capitalist exploitation and rebellion, set amid the mist-shrouded mountains of a fictional South American republic, employs flashbacks and glimpses of the future to depict the lure of silver and its effects on men. Conrad's deep moral consciousness and masterful narrative technique are at their best in this, one of his greatest works.
An Ice-Cream War
William Boyd · 402 pages
American, German, and British lives in Eastern Africa were turned upside down by World War I. Settlers in Eastern Africa, once friendly neighbours, reluctantly became enemies. As millions were slaughtered on the Western Front, a ridiculous and little-reported campaign was being waged in East Africa - a war continued after the Armistice because no one told them to stop. This is a story of the men a
Moby-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.
The Golden Lion
Wilbur Smith, Giles Kristian · 402 pages
"The son of pirate and merchant Sir Frances Courtney, Henry "Hal" Courtney was raised at sea. When war broke out between the English and the Dutch empires, his father, fighting for the English crown, attacked a fleet of Dutch East India Company ships off the coast of Africa. That bravery was met with betrayal, and Sir Francis was executed. His heartbroken son witnessed his death and dedicated his
A Moment in the Sun
John Sayles · 955 pages
"In 1897, gold has been discovered in the Yukon. New York is under the sway of Hearst and Pulitzer. And in a few months, an American battleship will explode in a Cuban harbor, plunging the U.S. into war. This is the story of that extraordinary moment: the turn of the twentieth century, as seen by one of our greatest storytellers of all time...'A Moment in the Sun' takes the whole era in its sight
The Mermaid of Black Conch: A novel
Monique Roffey · 240 pages
The Pearl
John Steinbeck · 118 pages
Based on a Mexican folktale, this is the story of a great pearl found by a poor fisherman, the sorrow it brought to his family, and how it was lost again.
Das Boot
Lothar-Gunther Buchheim · 563 pages
Hadji Murad
Leo Tolstoy · 128 pages
Panther in the Sky
James Alexander Thom · 684 pages
A God in Every Stone
Kamila Shamsie · 359 pages
July 1914. A young Englishwoman, Vivian Rose Spencer is running up a mountainside in an ancient land. She picks up a fig and holds it to her nose. Around her is a maze of broken columns, taller than the tallest of men. Nearby is the familiar lean form of her father's old friend, Tahsin Bey, an archaeologist. Viv is about to discover the Temple of Zeus, the call of adventure and the ecstasy of love