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Just Above My Head

James Baldwin · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

Sexual OrientationRacismMusicianLyrical Prose
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Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng · 300 pages

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl

Death of a SiblingRacismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Twin

Gerbrand Bakker · 288 pages

Death of a SiblingSexual OrientationCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon · 468 pages

The new novel from Michael Chabon, his first in 5 years, is a lovingly painted pop-culture epic. One street, two families. As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, longtime friends, band mates and co-regents of Brokeland Records. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary nurse mi

MusicianRacismSprawling EpicCharacter-Driven
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Fall on Your Knees

Ann-Marie MacDonald · 510 pages

MusicianDeath of a SiblingSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
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The Time of Our Singing

Richard Powers · 640 pages

"Tout commence en 1939, lorsque Delia Daley et David Strom se rencontrent à un concert de Marian Anderson. Peut-on alors imaginer qu'une jeune femme noire épouse un juif allemand fuyant le nazisme? Et pourtant ... Leur passion pour la musique l'emporte sur les conventions et offre à leur amour un sanctuaire de paix où, loin des hurlements du monde et de ses vicissitudes, ils élèvent leurs trois en

MusicianRacismSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
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Love Letters to the Dead

Ava Dellaira · 327 pages

When Laurel starts writing letters to dead people for a school assignment, she begins to spill about her sister's mysterious death, her mother's departure from the family, her new friends, and her first love.

Death of a SiblingCharacter-DrivenSexual OrientationLyrical Prose
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The Story of a Marriage

Andrew Sean Greer · 266 pages

A Today Show Summer Reads Pick A Washington Post Book of the Year "We think we know the ones we love." So Pearlie Cook begins her indirect, and devastating exploration of the mystery at the heart of every relationship--how we can ever truly know another person. It is 1953 and Pearlie, a dutiful young housewife, finds herself living in the Sunset District in San Francisco, caring not only

Sexual OrientationRacismLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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Learned by Heart

Emma Donoghue · 338 pages

Sexual OrientationRacismLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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Enigma Variations

Andre Aciman · 277 pages

"A passionate portrait of love's contradictory power, in five illuminating stories André Aciman, who has been called "the most exciting new fiction writer of the twenty-first century" (New York magazine), has written a novel that chronicles the life of Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and covetous throughout his life as they were in adolescence. Whether in southern Italy, where as a boy he ha

Sexual OrientationCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri · 406 pages

Brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue vastly different lives--Udayan in rebellion-torn Calcutta, Subhash in a quiet corner of America--until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds.

Death of a SiblingSprawling EpicLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Menewood

Nicola Griffith · 720 pages

Lyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenSprawling EpicSexual Orientation
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The Fortress of Solitude

Jonathan Lethem · 511 pages

This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most si

RacismSprawling EpicCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Sky Is Everywhere

Jandy Nelson · 275 pages

In the months after her sister dies, seventeen-year-old Lennie falls into a love triangle and discovers the strength to follow her dream of becoming a musician.

Death of a SiblingMusicianCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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A Home at the End of the World

Michael Cunningham · 352 pages

Presents two decades of American life - Bobby and gay Jonathan, growing up together in a small town in the 1970s; Jonathan's mother Alice; and, unconventional Clare, with whom the two grown-up men form a family.

Sexual OrientationLiterary FictionLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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The Last of the Wine

Mary Renault · 386 pages

The Last of the Wine is Mary Renault's first novel set in ancient Greece, the setting that would become her most important arena. The novel was published in 1956 and is the second of her works to feature male homosexuality as a major theme. It was a bestseller within the gay community.

Sexual OrientationCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Amrita

Banana Yoshimoto · 366 pages

A celebrated actress who has died in mysterious and shocking circumstances leaves behind an unconventional extended family that includes an older sister, a woman in her twenties through whose eyes the story unfolds; a young brother who possesses mystical powers; and a fiancé who is writing a novel with uncanny parallels to his own story.

Death of a SiblingCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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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.

Sexual OrientationCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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Under The Visible Life

Kim Echlin · 348 pages

Fatherless Katherine carries the stigma of her mixed-race background through an era that is hostile to her and all she represents. It is only through music that she finds the freedom to temporarily escape and dream of a better life for herself, nurturing this hard-won refuge throughout the vagaries of unexpected motherhood and an absent husband, and relying on her talent to build a future for her

MusicianRacismLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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Alexis

Marguerite Yourcenar · 105 pages

Sexual OrientationLyrical ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Sodom and Gomorrah

Marcel Proust · 384 pages

"John Sturrock's new translation of Sodom and Gomorrah will introduce a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. the fourth volume in this edition of In Search of Lost Time - the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s - brings us a more comic and lucid prose than English readers have previously been able to enjoy." "Sodom and Gom

Sexual OrientationCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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South of Broad

Pat Conroy · 646 pages

The publishing event of the season: The one and only Pat Conroy returns, with a big, sprawling novel that is at once a love letter to Charleston and to lifelong friendship.Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local

RacismSexual OrientationCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann · 349 pages

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly in

Death of a SiblingRacismLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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A Boy's Own Story

Edmund White · 218 pages

Edmund White is a patriarch of gay American literature. *A Boy's Own Story* is the first of his trio of autobiographical novels (followed by *The Beautiful Room Is Empty* and *The Farewell Symphony*). It begins with experiments and realizations of adolescence and proceeds through his firsthand account of the Stonewall uprising.

Sexual OrientationCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction

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