What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorI See You've Called in Dead
John Kenney · 294 pages
Funny Girl
Nick Hornby · 452 pages
"From the bestselling author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down comes a highly anticipated new novel. Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingenue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest d
Loitering with Intent
Muriel Spark · 217 pages
From *Publisher's Weekly*: "Art, reality and the strange ways the two imitate one another are at the core of Muriel Spark's delightful Loitering with Intent, first published in 1981. Would-be novelist Fleur Talbot works for the snooty, irascible Sir Quentin Oliver at the Autobiographical Association, whose members are all at work on their memoirs. When her employer gets his hands on Fleur's novel-
Hotel du Lac
Anita Brookner · 184 pages
Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist and holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home after embarrassing herself and her friends. She has refused to sacrifice her ideals and remains stubbornly single. But among the pampered women and minor nobility Edith finds Mr Neville, and her chance to escape from a life of humiliating spinste
Zuckerman Bound: The Ghost Writer / Zuckerman Unbound / The Anatomy Lesson / The Prague Orgy
Philip Roth · 610 pages
A new novella, "The Prague Orgy," takes Nathan Zuckerman to Prague to rescue the stories of an unknown Yiddish writer from oblivion and also forms a startling epilogue to "The Ghost Writer," "Zuckerman Unbound," and "The Anatomy Lesson," all included in this volume.
Mary Swann
Carol Shields · 320 pages
Mary Swann is the story of four individuals who become entwined in the life of Mary Swann, a rural Canadian poet whose authentic and unique voice is discovered only hours before her husband hacks her to pieces. Who is Mary Swann? And how could she have produced these works of genius in almost complete isolation? Mysteriously, all traces of Swann's existence, her notebook, the first draft of her wo
Florence Gordon
Brian Morton · 320 pages
"Meet Florence Gordon: blunt, brilliant, cantankerous and passionate, feminist icon to young women, invisible and underappreciated by most everyone else. At seventy-five, Florence has earned her right to set down the burdens of family and work and shape her legacy at long last. But just as she is beginning to write her long-deferred memoir, her son Daniel returns to New York from Seattle with his
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...
Thinks...
David Lodge · 341 pages
"Ralph Messenger is a man who knows what he wants and generally gets it. As director of the prestigious Holt Belling Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, he is much in demand as a pundit on developments in artificial intelligence and the study of human consciousness. Known to his colleagues as a womanizer, he has reached a tacit understanding with his American wife Carrie
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
Adelle Waldman · 242 pages
"In this 21st-century literary world, wit and conversation are not at all dead. Is romance? Novelist Adelle Waldman plunges into the psyche of a modern man--who thinks of himself as beyond superficial judgment, yet constantly struggles with his own status anxiety, who is drawn to women, yet has a habit of letting them down"--Dust jacket flap.
An Object of Beauty
Steve Martin · 303 pages
"Steve Martin's latest novel examines the glamour and the subterfuge of the fine art world in New York City"--Provided by publisher.
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 258 pages
The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior
Martin Eden
Jack London · 411 pages
Jack London's Martin Eden was first published in 1909 and is the story of a young writer's quest for celebrity and love. Much loved by writers who identify with Martin's belief that when he posted a manuscript, 'there was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps,' that automatically ret
Youngblood Hawke
Herman Wouk · 783 pages
A roughhewn Kentucky egocentric wins international fame and fortune through his writing, though the other rewards of success seem to elude him.
Women
Charles Bukowski · 297 pages
Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that woul
Surrender The Pink
Carrie Fisher · 286 pages
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
The Proof of My Innocence
Jonathan Coe · 326 pages
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
George Orwell · 264 pages
Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. But he slides instead into a self-induced poverty that destroys his creativity and his spirit. Only Rosemary, ever-faithful Rosemary, has the strength to challenge his commitment to his chosen way of life. Through th
Dept. of Speculation
Jenny Offill · 185 pages
"Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that in
Summertime
J.M. Coetzee · 266 pages
A rich, funny, and deeply affecting autobiographical new novel from one of the world's greatest living writers.A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972–1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period w
The Anthologist
Nicholson Baker · 186 pages
The book is a study of how a reader engages with an author's work: partly an appreciation of John Updike, and partly a kind of self-exploration.
Yellowface
R F Kuang · 331 pages
White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But At
Wilful Disregard
Lena Andersson · 195 pages
Ester Nilsson is a sensible person in a sensible relationship. Until the day she is asked to give a lecture on famous artist Hugo Rask. The man himself sits in the audience, spellbound, and, when the two meet afterwards, he has the same effect on her. From now on Ester's existence is intrinsically linked to this conversation, and the chain of events that unravels will change Ester's life. Arbitrar

