What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorEverything 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
The Weight of Ink
Rachel Kadish · 576 pages
Martyr!
Kaveh Akbar · 352 pages
Cyrus Shams is lost. Ever since his mother’s plane was senselessly shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby, Cyrus has been grappling with her death. Now, newly sober, he is set to learn the truth of her life. When an encounter with a dying artist leads Cyrus towards the mysteries of his past - an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as an Angel of Death, a haun
Love and Other Consolation Prizes
Jamie Ford · 336 pages
A half-Chinese orphan whose mother sacrificed everything to give him a better chance is raffled off as a prize at Seattle's 1909 World's Fair, only to land in the ownership of the madam of a notorious brothel where he finds friendship and opportunities, in a story based on true events.
A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki · 432 pages
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, she plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace. Across the Pacific a novelist living on a remote island discovers artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchb
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon · 639 pages
The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar
The Golem and the Jinni
Helene Wecker · 512 pages
In The Golem and the Jinni, a chance meeting between mythical beings takes readers on a dazzling journey through cultures in turn-of-the-century New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life to by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic and dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.
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 Bonesetter's Daughter
Amy Tan · 353 pages
LuLing Young is in her eighties, and finally beginning to feel the effects of old age. Trying to hold on to the evaporating past, she begins to write down all that she can remember of her life as a girl in China. Meanwhile, her daughter Ruth, a ghostwriter for authors of self-help books, is losing the ability to speak up for herself in front of the man she lives with. LuLing can only look on, help
The Forty Rules of Love
Elif Shafak, lyf shfq · 354 pages
Inside, Outside
Herman Wouk · 644 pages
**Herman Wouk's classic novel moves on from the grand themes which have won him international acclaim - war, the fate of nations, and the indomitable spirit of man - to the quest for identity, in the clash between the Inside of faith and family and the Outside of the glittery American dream.** Inside, Outside sweeps through ***more than sixty years, from the pre-war, pre-atomic innocence of the
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz · 352 pages
Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us
The Age of Dreaming
Nina Revoyr · 323 pages
Jun Nakayama was a silent film star in the early days of Hollywood, but by 1964, he finds himself living in complete obscurity—until a young writer, Nick Bellinger, tracks him down for an interview. When Bellinger reveals that he has written a screenplay with Nakayama in mind, Jun is intrigued by the possibility of returning to the big screen. But he begins to worry that someone might delve too de
The History of Love
Nicole Krauss · 272 pages
Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness. Believing that she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man named Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the lost love who, sixty years ago in Poland, inspired him to write a
What Is the What
Dave Eggers · 475 pages
*What Is the What* is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children--the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the Un
How to Read the Air
Dinaw Mengestu · 312 pages
Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas, the son of Ethiopian immigrants, sets out to retrace his mother and father's trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to his life in the America of today.
A Replacement Life
Boris Fishman · 321 pages
"A ... story of an aspiring twenty-something Russian-Jewish writer who struggles to reconcile his immigrant roots with his fragile new American identity"--
Ilustrado
Miguel Syjuco · 320 pages
When young Miguel loses his mentor, he sets out to investigate the author's suspicious death and the strange disappearance of an unfinished manuscript - a work that had been planned not just to return the once-great author to fame but to expose the corruption behind the rich families who have ruled the Philippines for generations.
The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver · 528 pages
In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico-from a coastal
Comfort Woman
Nora Okja Keller · 224 pages
Possessing a wisdom and maturity rarely found in a first novelist, Korean-American writer Nora Okja Keller tells a heartwrenching and enthralling tale in this, her literary debut. Comfort Woman is the story of Akiko, a Korean refugee of World War II, and Beccah, her daughter by an American missionary. The two women are living on the edge of society—and sanity—in Honolulu, plagued by Akiko's period
The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections
V.S. Naipaul · 400 pages
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini · 368 pages
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacri
The Magic of Saida
M.G. Vassanji · 305 pages
Two-time Giller Prize winner Vassanji returns to the rich and haunting world of his most acclaimed, prize-winning novels, the East African coast. The haunting story of Kamal, a successful Canadian doctor who, in middle age and after decades in North America, decides to return to his homeland of East Africa to find his childhood sweetheart, Saida. Kamal's journey is motivated by a combination of gu
Paradise Reclaimed
Halldor Laxness · 254 pages