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The Master

Colm Toibin · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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Mr. Gwyn

Alessandro Baricco · 184 pages

Romancier britannique dans la fleur de l'âge, Jasper Gwyn a à son actif trois romans qui lui ont valu un honnête succès public et critique. Pourtant, il publie dans The Guardian un article dans lequel il dresse la liste des cinquante-deux choses qu'il ne fera plus, la dernière étant : écrire un roman. Son agent, Tom Bruce Shepperd, prend cette déclaration pour une provocation, mais, lorsqu'il appe

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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The Gift

Vladimir Nabokov · 361 pages

De eerste fase van het schrijverschap van een jonge, voor de revolutie gevluchte Russische dichter in Berlijn.

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseWriter Protagonist
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Character-DrivenSlow-PacedLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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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

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 400 pages

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseSlow-Paced
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In One Person

John Irving · 448 pages

A New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect," a phrase first used by John Ir

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Zahir

Paulo Coelho · 320 pages

Set in Paris and in the enchanting landscape of central Asia, this new novel by the author of the international bestsellers The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes follows the journey of a man obsessed with finding the wife who left him without an explanation.The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges that money and celebrity bring. His wife of te

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Line of Beauty

Alan Hollinghurst · 469 pages

It is the summer of 1983, and twenty-year-old Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby--whom Nick had idolized at Oxford--and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions, who becomes both a friend to Nick and his uneasy responsibility. As

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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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.

Character-DrivenSlow-PacedLyrical ProseLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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The Diviners

Margaret Laurence · 467 pages

For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town made her a fighter, a cynic, a romantic. A failed marriage, a heartbreaking affair and solitude forced her to develop a special way of being with a life strengthened by dignity and the ability to give and receive love.

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenSlow-PacedLyrical Prose
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The Forty Rules of Love

Elif Shafak, lyf shfq · 354 pages

Writer ProtagonistLyrical ProseSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Slow-PacedLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenWriter Protagonist
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The Mirror & the Light

Hilary Mantel · 759 pages

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout · 200 pages

"Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her and a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all--the one between mother and daughter"--

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Euphoria

Lily King · 272 pages

"English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husban

Character-DrivenSlow-PacedLyrical ProseWriter Protagonist
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Sputnik Sweetheart

Haruki Murakami · 224 pages

"The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments - until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated businesswoman. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakami's surreal ye

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Menewood

Nicola Griffith · 720 pages

Slow-PacedLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Jose Saramago · 384 pages

Writer ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood · 158 pages

Classic fiction. The best prose writer in English' Gore Vidal Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Christopher Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Little Paris Bookshop

Nina George · 392 pages

“There are books that are suitable for a million people, others for only a hundred. There are even remedies—I mean books—that were written for one person only…A book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that’s how I sell books.” Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floa

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseWriter Protagonist
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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

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseSlow-Paced
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