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Barabbas

Par Lagerkvist · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Silence

Shusaku Endo · 294 pages

An historical novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo telling the story of a young Portuguese missionary in 17th Century Japan. After being smuggled into the country a Jesuit missionary fresh from the seminary finds the Christian population have been forced underground by a government eager to stamp out foreign interference and values. Consequently he quickly finds himself a fugitive in a strange an

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse · 130 pages

Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha after he traveled to India in the 1910s. It tells the story of a young boy who travels the country in a quest for spiritual enlightenment in the time of Guatama Buddha. It is a compact, lyrical work, which reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom.

Sparse ProseFaith CrisisReligious IdentityNovella
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The Plague

Albert Camus · 278 pages

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

Faith CrisisSparse ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Night

Elie Wiesel · 126 pages

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The Spire

William Golding · 224 pages

Told in a stream-of-consciousness narrative, this is a story of obsession. Against the advice of his builder, the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, slowly dying from tuberculosis, plans the construction of a towering spire atop the cathedral as the culmination of his life’s work but becomes increasingly deranged as the construction faces constant problems due to the sheer grandiosity of the work.

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Father Sergius

Leo Tolstoy · 88 pages

Vers l'annee 1840, St-Petersbourg fut bouleverse par un evenement dont tous resterent stupefaits: le beau prince Kassatski, chef de l'escadron d'elite du regiment des cuirassiers, futur aide de camp de l'empereur Nicolas 1er, etait alors fiance a une haute dame de la cour, non seulement celebre pour sa beaute, mais encore en grande faveur aupres de l'Imperatrice. Soudain, un mois avant le mariage,

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityNovellaCharacter-Driven
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Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy · 440 pages

Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityClassicsLiterary Fiction
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Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe · 192 pages

Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widel

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene · 306 pages

Focusing on a British police officer in an unnamed West African colony, this novel attempts to show, along with the socially restricted lives of colonists in Africa, the effects of sin on a devout catholic. After sending his unhappy wife to South Africa at her request the officer begins an affair with a young woman, a survivor of a shipwreck and now widowed but is unable to end the relationship wh

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityCharacter-DrivenClassics
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Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr

Miguel de Unamuno · 116 pages

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Wise Blood

Flannery O'Connor · 232 pages

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture o

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityClassicsCharacter-Driven
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 174 pages

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Iv

Sparse ProseNovellaCharacter-DrivenClassics
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The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityLiterary FictionClassics
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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

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityClassicsLiterary Fiction
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Franny and Zooey

J.D. Salinger · 202 pages

Franny came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed in 1957 by Zooey. Both stories are early entries in a narrative series about the Glasses, a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York. In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her boyfriend for a football weekend, where they go to a café. The story is essentially an account of

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityNovellaClassics
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A Clergyman's Daughter

George Orwell · 317 pages

One of Orwell’s earlier novels this relates the strange story of a young unmarried woman who is seemingly content to keep house for her father, a village rector. After a dinner with a local bachelor she wakes eight days later in the Old Kent Road in London’s East End with amnesia and no idea how she came to be there. Being without funds she accompanies some vagrants to Kent for hop-picking and the

Faith CrisisSparse ProseReligious IdentityClassics
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Strait is the Gate

Andre Gide · 231 pages

Two cousins who have loved each other since infancy find the devotion of the years ripening into a love whose mysterious force leaves them embarrased in each other's presence.

Sparse ProseReligious IdentityCharacter-DrivenClassics
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As a Driven Leaf

Milton Steinberg, Chaim Potok · 755 pages

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityLiterary FictionAncient Rome
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A Short Stay in Hell

Steven L. Peck · 104 pages

An ordinary family man, geologist, and Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he’ll be reunited with his loved ones in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life. In this haunting existenti

Faith CrisisSparse ProseReligious IdentityNovella
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The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Reader

Bernhard Schlink · 224 pages

Sparse ProseNovellaCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pages

Religious IdentityCharacter-DrivenFaith CrisisLiterary Fiction
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Glittering Images

Susan Howatch · 504 pages

Charged by Canterbury with the spiritual monitoring of a wayward bishop, Dr. Charles Ashworth, a young, driven Anglican minister, encounters a genteel world whose deeply embedded apostasy forces him to confront his own inner demons.

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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