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The Light and the Dark

Mikhail Shishkin · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Corelli's Mandolin

Louis de Bernieres · 437 pages

The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical, heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an i

BittersweetNonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseEpistolary Format
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Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J

Epistolary FormatNonlinear NarrativeBittersweetLyrical Prose
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This Is How You Lose the Time War

Amal El-Mohtar · 209 pages

Epistolary FormatLong-Distance RomanceLyrical ProseBittersweet
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Code Name Verity

Elizabeth Wein · 347 pages

In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage, and great courage as she relates what she must to survive while keeping secret all that she can.

Epistolary FormatNonlinear NarrativeBittersweetLyrical Prose
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Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson · 424 pages

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th

BittersweetLyrical ProseNonlinear NarrativeLiterary Fiction
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The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · 332 pages

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve

Nonlinear NarrativeBittersweetLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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From A to X: A Story in Letters

John Berger · 197 pages

"In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A'ida. Her insurgent husband Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A'ida's letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But Suse is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of

Epistolary FormatLong-Distance RomanceLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong · 256 pages

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once

Epistolary FormatNonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Anthony Marra · 416 pages

In a rural village in December 2004 Chechnya, a failed doctor Akhmed harbors the traumatized 8-year-old daughter of a father abducted by Russian forces and treats a series of wounded rebels and refugees while exploring the shared past that binds him to the child. "In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle

Lyrical ProseBittersweetNonlinear NarrativeLiterary Fiction
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The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende · 433 pages

"The unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world's most gifted and imaginative storytellers. The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a

Lyrical ProseLiterary FictionNonlinear NarrativeEpistolary Format
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The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje · 307 pages

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of

Lyrical ProseNonlinear NarrativeLiterary FictionBittersweet
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A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan · 352 pages

Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many

BittersweetLiterary FictionNonlinear NarrativeEpistolary Format
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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

Nonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseLiterary FictionBittersweet
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All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr · 544 pages

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are t

Nonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Love, Rosie

Cecelia Ahern · 475 pages

From the author of PS, I LOVE YOU, a simultaneously funny and tender novel about what happens when two people who are destined to be together can never seem to get it right.Rosie and Alex are destined for one another, and everyone but them seems to realize it. Rosie’s best friend since childhood, Alex never did live down the fact that he didn’t invite her to his all-boys 10th birthday party. But t

Epistolary FormatLong-Distance RomanceBittersweetMultiple POV
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March

Geraldine Brooks · 304 pages

Epistolary FormatLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMultiple POV
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Lyrical ProseNonlinear NarrativeBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Piano Cemetery

Jose Luis Peixoto · 288 pages

Lyrical ProseNonlinear NarrativeLiterary FictionBittersweet
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Memoirs of Hadrian

Marguerite Yourcenar · 300 pages

Memoirs of Hadrian (French: Mémoires d'Hadrien) is a novel by the Belgian-born French writer Marguerite Yourcenar about the life and death of Roman Emperor Hadrian. First published in France in French in 1951 as Mémoires d'Hadrien, the book was an immediate success, meeting with enormous critical acclaim. Although the historical Hadrian wrote an autobiography, it has been lost. The book takes t

Epistolary FormatLyrical ProseBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Gilead

Marilynne Robinson · 256 pages

**WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION** In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civi

Epistolary FormatBittersweetLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Love Virtually

Daniel Glattauer, Katharina Bielenberg, Jamie Bulloch

Epistolary FormatLong-Distance RomanceBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera · 314 pages

A young woman obsessed with a man torn between his love for her and his womanizing; one of his mistresses and her faithful lover--these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel.

Nonlinear NarrativeBittersweetLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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Ruthless Vows

Rebecca Ross · 818 pages

Iris has returned home bruised and heartbroken from the front, but the war is far from over. Roman is gone, lost behind enemy lines, with no memory of his past, or Iris. Hoping his memories return, Roman begins to write again – but this time for the enemy. When a strange letter arrives beneath his wardrobe door, he strikes up with its mysterious yet hauntingly familiar author. Iris and Roman

Epistolary FormatLyrical ProseBittersweetMultiple POV
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And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini · 446 pages

Presents a story inspired by human love, how people take care of one another, and how choices resonate through subsequent generations. Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pari, as beaut

Nonlinear NarrativeBittersweetLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction

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