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Elsa Morante · back to the book

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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

Omniscient NarratorWorld War IIWar and Its AftermathTragic
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Those Who Save Us

Jenna Blum · 496 pages

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald. Driven by

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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pages

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The Young Lions

Irwin Shaw · 677 pages

The Young Lions is a vivid and classic novel that portrays the experiences of ordinary soldiers fighting World War II. Told from the points of view of a perceptive young Nazi, a jaded American film producer, and a shy Jewish boy just married to the love of his life, Shaw conveys, as no other novelist has since, the scope, confusion, and complexity of war.

World War IISprawling EpicWar and Its AftermathTragic
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy · 457 pages

An intimate portrait of a woman, one of literature's most admirable and tragic heroines...Tess Durbeyfield knows what it is to work hard and expect little. But her life is about to veer from the path trod by her mother and grandmother. When her ne'er-do-well father learns that his family is the last of a long noble line, the d'Urbervilles, he sends Tess on a journey to meet her supposed kin—a jour

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Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 448 pages

> With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor fu

War and Its AftermathTragicBleakSprawling Epic
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The Naked and the Dead

Norman Mailer · 721 pages

Based on Mailer’s own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, *The Naked and the Dead* is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in the glories of the Allied victory, it altered forever the popular perception of warfare. Focusing on the experiences of a fourteen-man platoon

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All the Broken Places

John Boyne · 400 pages

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Twenty Fifth Hour

Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu

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One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 422 pages

Tells the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.

War and Its AftermathOmniscient NarratorTragicSprawling Epic
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Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell · 864 pages

Margaret Mitchell's monumental epic of the South won a Pulitzer Prize, gave rise to the most popular motion picture of our time, and inspired a sequel that became the fastest selling novel of the century. It is one of the most popular books ever written: more than 28 million copies of the book have been sold in more than 37 countries. Today, more than 60 years after its initial publication, its ac

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Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 560 pages

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision

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Schindler's List

Thomas Keneally · 429 pages

In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mer

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Bomber

Len Deighton · 493 pages

The classic novel of the Second World War that relates in devastating detail the 24-hour story of an allied bombing raid.Bomber is a novel war. There are no victors, no vanquished. There are simply those who remain alive, and those who die.Bomber follows the progress of an Allied air raid through a period of twenty-four hours in the summer of 1943. It portrays all the participants in a terrifying

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The Undertaking

Audrey Magee · 287 pages

"In a desperate bid to escape the trenches of the Eastern front, Peter Faber, an ordinary German soldier, marries Katharina Spinell, a woman he has never met, in a marriage of convenience that promises 'honeymoon' leave for him and a pension for her should he die in the war. With ten days' leave secured, Peter visits his new wife in Berlin, and both are surprised by the passion that develops betwe

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Salt to the Sea

Ruta Sepetys · 393 pages

Winter, 1945. Four teenagers. Four secrets. Each one born of a different homeland; each one hunted, and haunted, by tragedy, lies…and war. As thousands of desperate refugees flock to the coast in the midst of a Soviet advance, four paths converge, vying for passage aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship that promises safety and freedom. Yet not all promises can be kept. Inspired by the si

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The Nightingale Deluxe Edition

Kristin Hannah · 520 pages

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Les Misérables

Victor Hugo · 747 pages

In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

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Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak · 542 pages

***This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.*** One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. ***The book quickly became an international be

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Shanghai Girls

Lisa See · 417 pages

In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father's prosperous rickshaw business, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Th

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The Bronze Horseman

Paullina Simons · 637 pages

E-book exclusive: The author's tribute to her grandparents, survivors of Russia's twentieth century.An unforgettable epic of passion, betrayal, and survival set against the shimmering beauty and brutal terror of 1941 war-torn Leningrad.From the author of the international bestseller Tully comes an epic tale of passion, betrayal, and survival in World War II Russia. Leningrad, 1941: The European wa

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Barefoot Gen, Volume Two: The Day After

Keiji Nakazawa · 240 pages

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Beloved

Toni Morrison · 288 pages

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in

Single MotherTragicBleakLiterary Fiction
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The Children of Húrin

J.R.R. Tolkien · 320 pages

The ‘Great Tale’ of The Children of Húrin, set during the legendary time before The Lord of the Rings. Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwells in the vast fortress of Angband in the North; and within the shadow of the fear of Angband, and the war waged by Morgoth against the Elves, the fates of Turin and his sister Nienor will be tragically entwined. Their brief and passionate lives are dominated by

Omniscient NarratorSprawling EpicWar and Its AftermathTragic
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