What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands
Sarah Brooks · 310 pages
King Solomon's Carpet
Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell · 368 pages
Eccentric Jarvis lives in a cumbling schoolhouse overlooking the tube line, compiling his obsessive history of the Underground. A group of misfits are also drawn towards his strange house: Alice, who has run away from her husband and baby; Tom, the busker who rescues her; truant Jasper who finds his terrifying thrills on the tube; and enigmatic Axel, whose deadly secret casts a shadow over all the
The Lincoln Highway
Amor Towles · 576 pages
"The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Haruki Murakami · 336 pages
Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning 'red pine', and Oumi, 'blue sea', while the girls' names were Shirane, 'white root', and Kurono, 'black field'. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it. One day Tsukuru Tazaki's friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, eve
All That Is Solid Melts into Air
Darragh McKeon · 418 pages
In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster the Soviet Union begins to collapse changing forever the lives of a nine-year old child prodigy, his aunt, a leading surgeon, and a teenage boy in a rural village. Russia, 1986. In a run-down apartment block in Moscow, a nine-year-old piano prodigy practices silently for fear of disturbing the neighbours. In a factory on the outskirts of the city, his aunt mak
The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years
Chingiz Aitmatov · 352 pages
Girl Through Glass
Sari Wilson · 289 pages
Interweaving narratives that move between past and present follow a young ballerina whose life is upended when she falls in love with her much-older mentor, and a professor of dance at a Midwestern college who has a risky affair with a student. 1977. Young Mira is a student in the highly competitive world of New York City ballet. The rigorous hours of practice and obsessive perfectionism offer he
Wolf Totem
Jiang Rong · 533 pages
Chen Zhen volunteers to live in a remote settlement on the border of Inner and Outer Mongolia. There, he discovers life of apparent idyllic simplicity based on an eternal struggle between the wolves and the humans in their fight to survive. Chen learns about the spiritual relationship which exists between these adversaries.
Visitation
Jenny Erpenbeck · 184 pages
A forested property on a Brandenburg lake outside of Berlin lies at the heart of this novel. This novel offers us the stories of twelve individuals who make their homes here.
Tuesday Nights in 1980
Molly Prentiss · 296 pages
Welcome to SoHo at the onset of the eighties: a gritty, not-yet-gentrified playground for artists and writers looking to make it in the big city. Among them: James Bennett, a synesthetic art critic for The New York Times whose unlikely condition enables him to describe art in profound, magical ways, and Raul Engales, an exiled Argentinian painter running from his past and the Dirty War that has en
Ladies Coupé: A Novel in Parts
Anita Nair · 306 pages
One day Akhila gets a one way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. The characters she meets on her journey reveal how the dilemmas that women face in their relationships with husbands, mothers, friends, employers and children are the same the world over.
Our Game
John le Carre · 376 pages
Tim Cranmer, retired secret servant and Larry Pettifer, bored radical don, philanderer and for 20 years Tim's mercurial double agent against the now vanished Communist threat, have an unresolved rivalry that dates back decades. They follow each other to Moscow and then Southern Russia.
Democracy
Joan Didion · 234 pages
This tale of love and murder revolves around Inez Christian Victor, the wife of a man who wants to be President of the United States.
Inherent Vice
Thomas Pynchon · 384 pages
Doc Sportello is bewildered when an ex-girlfriend returns to recruit him in a plot to kidnap a wealthy construction executive. Soon, Sportello finds himself in the midst of a thrilling conspiracy with an undercover cop and a group of dentists who are swindling the IRS.
The Witch's Kind
Louisa Morgan · 440 pages
Night Train to Lisbon
Pascal Mercier · 496 pages
Former Latin teacher Raimund Gregorius boards the night train to Lisbon, carrying with him a book by Amadeu de Prado, with whose work he becomes obsessed, and journeys all over the city in search of the truth about the author.
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on
Trains and Lovers
Alexander McCall Smith · 224 pages
In the words of Alexander McCall Smith: 'You feel the rocking of the train, you hear the sound of its wheels on the rails; you are in the world rather than suspended somewhere above it. And sometimes there are conversations to be had, which is what the overarching story in this collection is all about. It is a simple device: people brought together entertain one another with tales of what happened
Train Dreams
Denis Johnson · 116 pages
Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. Robert Grainer is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss
Is This Tomorrow
Caroline Leavitt · 435 pages
In 1956, Ava Lark rents a house with her twelve-year-old son, Lewis, in a desirable Boston suburb. Ava is beautiful, divorced, Jewish, and a working mom. She finds her neighbors less than welcoming. Lewis yearns for his absent father, befriending the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood--in the throes of Cold War paranoia--seizes the oppor
The Line
Olga Grushin · 322 pages
The line begins to form on the whispered rumor that a famous exiled composer is returning to Moscow to conduct his last symphony. Tickets will be limited. Nameless faces join the line, jostling for preferred position. But as time passes and the seasons change and the ticket kiosk remains shuttered, these anonymous souls take on individual shape. Unlikely friendships are forged, long-buried memorie
The Little Communist Who Never Smiled
Lola Lafon · 280 pages
"An award-winning novel powerfully re-imagines a childhood in the spotlight of history, politics, and destiny. Montreal 1976. A fourteen-year-old girl steps out onto the floor of the Montreal Forum and into history. Twenty seconds on uneven bars is all it takes for Nadia Comaneci, the slight, unsmiling child from Communist Romania, to etch herself into the collective memory. The electronic scorebo