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The Shootist

Glendon Swarthout · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Untouchable

John Banville · 410 pages

(From the Hardcover edition) Twenty years after his "retirement," ex-spy Victor Maskell attempts to come to terms with what has happened to his life by embarking on his memoirs. This is the plot which fuels Banville's stunning new novel--a story that goes beyond the mere facts of espionage to penetrate the intricate heart of the spy.

Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistAnti-HeroHistorical Fiction
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The General in His Labyrinth

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 306 pages

Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistBittersweetHistorical Fiction
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Tinkers

Paul Harding · 192 pages

Terminal IllnessBittersweetElderly ProtagonistMale Lead
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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

Terminal IllnessBittersweetElderly ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
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All the Little Live Things

Wallace Stegner · 345 pages

An Eastern couple retire to California in search of peace after the death of their wayward son, only to have their paradise shattered by painful reminders of the past.

Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistBittersweetMale Lead
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Italian Shoes

Henning Mankell

Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistBittersweetMale Lead
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The Summer Guest

Justin Cronin · 369 pages

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for his radiant novel in stories, Mary and O'Neil, Justin Cronin has already been hailed as a writer of astonishing gifts. Now Cronin's new novel, The Summer Guest, fulfills that promise--and more. With a rare combination of emotional insight, narrative power, and lyrical grace, Cronin transforms the simple story of a dying man's last wish into a rich tapestry of

Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistBittersweetMale Lead
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Aloft

Chang-rae Lee · 368 pages

Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistBittersweetMale Lead
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This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz · 240 pages

This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

Terminal IllnessAnti-HeroBittersweetMale Lead
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A Far Better Thing

H.G. Parry · 416 pages

Anti-HeroBittersweetHistorical FictionMale Lead
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The Death of Ivan Ilych

Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1828-1910 Gra, Leo Leo Tolstoy · 62 pages

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, considered one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s. "Usually classed among the best examples of the novella", The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of a high-court judge, and his sufferings and death from a terminal illness in 19th-century Russia.

Terminal IllnessBittersweetTragicMale Lead
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The Brooklyn Follies

Paul Auster · 320 pages

Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore - a far cry from the brilliant academic career he'd begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the

Elderly ProtagonistTerminal IllnessBittersweetMale Lead
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Moloka'i

Alan Brennert · 389 pages

Seven-year-old Rachel is forcibly removed from her family's 1890s Honolulu home when she contracts leprosy and is placed in a settlement, where she loses a series of new friends before new medical discoveries enable her to reenter the world.

Terminal IllnessBittersweetHistorical FictionTragic
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Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Three Comrades

Erich Maria Remarque

Terminal IllnessBittersweetHistorical FictionMale Lead
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The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Peter Ackroyd · 185 pages

Lively and witty; absolutely believable description of last months of Oscar Wilde which sometimes makes you forget that Wilde himself never wrote it.

Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistBittersweetHistorical Fiction
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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rachel Joyce · 355 pages

Harold Fry has recently retired and now, he doesn't do very much. Even mowing the lawn, like his wife Maureen tells him to do, seems too much work for him. When, one day, he recieves a lettre in a pink envelope, this lazyness changes. In it, his collegue from long time ago, Queenie Hennessy, tells him she is going to die soon from a cancer in a hospice at the other end of England. Harold, at first

Terminal IllnessBittersweetElderly ProtagonistMale Lead
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When David Lost His Voice

Judith Vanistendael · 267 pages

"The moment his granddaughter Louise is born, David learns that he has cancer. He would rather keep quiet about his illness, the pain and the end that awaits him-- much to the frustration of the women in his life. They wait, powerless, for the silent but inexorable end"--Page 4 of cover.

Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistBittersweet
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Streets of Laredo

Larry McMurtry · 568 pages

Pits legendary Texas Ranger Woodrow Call against his deadliest adversary ever.

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetHistorical FictionMale Lead
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The Time Keeper

Mitch Albom · 232 pages

In The Time Keeper, the inventor of the world's first clock is punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift. He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years.

Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistBittersweetSparse Prose
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The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko

Scott Stambach · 336 pages

"The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is comic and staggeringly tragic, often both in a single sentence ... A grittier, Eastern European, more grown-up The Fault in Our Stars."--Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child. Seventeen-year-old Ivan Isaenko is a life-long resident of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus. Born deformed, yet mentally keen with a frighteningly sharp wit, strong

Terminal IllnessBittersweetMale LeadTragic
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The Devil's Advocate

Morris West · 319 pages

*The Devil's Advocate*, Morris West's best-selling novel, is a deft exploration of the meaning of faith. In an impoverished village in southern Italy, the life and death of Giacomo Nerone has inspired talk of saint­hood. Father Blaise Meredith, a dying English priest, is sent from the Vatican to investigate—and to try to untangle the web of facts, rumors, and outright lies that surround Nerone's l

Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistHistorical FictionMale Lead
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Runaway

Peter May · 424 pages

Glasgow, 2015. Jack Mackay dares not look back on a life of failure and mediocrity. The heavy-hearted sixty-seven-year-old is still haunted by what might have been. His recollections of the terrible events that befell him and his friends some fifty years earlier, and how he did not act when it mattered most is a memory he has tried to escape his entire adult life. London, 2015. A man lies dead in

Terminal IllnessElderly ProtagonistBittersweetMale Lead
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The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Ron Hansen · 304 pages

Friendship becomes rivalry and the quest for fame becomes obsession.

Anti-HeroHistorical FictionTragicCowboys

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