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Let Me Be Frank With You

Richard Ford · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

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 ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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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.

Elderly ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Aloft

Chang-rae Lee · 368 pages

Elderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionDry Humor
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The Spectator Bird

Wallace Stegner · 214 pages

Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "just killing time until time gets around to killing me." His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. His job, trafficking the talent of others, had not been his choice. He passes through life as a spectator. A postcard from a friend causes Allston to return to

Elderly ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro · 245 pages

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

Elderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

Elderly ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Elderly ProtagonistShort StoriesDry HumorCharacter-Driven
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The Ancient Minstrel

Jim Harrison · 272 pages

Elderly ProtagonistDry HumorShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
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Italian Shoes

Henning Mankell

Elderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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An Unnecessary Woman

Rabih Alameddine · 320 pages

"Aaliya Sohbi lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family's 'unnecessary appendage.' Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have never been read-- by anyone. After overhearing her neighbors, 'the

Elderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Epicure's Lament

Kate Christensen · 351 pages

For ten years, Hugo Whittier, upper-class scion, former gigolo, failed belle-lettrist has been living a hermit's existence at Waverly, his family's crumbling mansion overlooking the Hudson. He passes the time reading Montaigne and M.F.K. Fisher, cooking himself delicious meals, smoking an endless number of cigarettes, and nursing a grudge against the world. But his older brother, Dennis, has ret

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Noah's Compass

Anne Tyler · 283 pages

From the incomparable Anne Tyler, a wise, gently humorous, and deeply compassionate novel about a schoolteacher, who has been forced to retire at sixty-one, coming to terms with the final phase of his life.Liam Pennywell, who set out to be a philosopher and ended up teaching fifth grade, never much liked the job at that run-down private school, so early retirement doesn't bother him. But he is tro

Elderly ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am

Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold · 147 pages

Elderly ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

Shehan Karunatilaka · 416 pages

Retired sportswriter W.G. Karunasena is dying. He will spend his final months drinking arrack, making his wife unhappy, ignoring his son, and tracking down Pradeep S. Mathew, a spin bowler who has mysteriously disappeared.

Elderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Slow Man

J.M. Coetzee · 265 pages

A masterful new novel from one of the greatest writers alive. Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. T

Elderly ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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A Man Called Ove

Fredrik Backman · 337 pages

A grumpy yet loveable man finds his solitary world turned on its head when a boisterous young family moves in next door. Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon, the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him the bitter neighbor from hell, but must Ove be bitter just b

Elderly ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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All That Man Is

David Szalay · 402 pages

Szalay (London and the South-East) delivers a kaleidoscopic portrayal of nine men at various stages in their lives, each in the throes of extraordinary change. Despite their diverse circumstances, they are all somehow connected, engaged in a search for relevance and-dare they even consider it-meaning. English teenagers Simon and Ferdinand arrive in Berlin with competing ideas of how best to enjoy

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
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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.

Character-DrivenShort StoriesLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Snapper

Brian Kimberling · 227 pages

Working as a birdwatching guide to scrape together enough money to survive, Nathan Lochmueller performs nature research in backwater Indiana, where he falls in love with a heartbreaking free spirit named Lola and confronts the accidental turns of his life.

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
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About Schmidt

Louis Begley · 304 pages

Elderly ProtagonistDry HumorLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Melissa Bank · 274 pages

After following the advice from a manual called "How to Meet and Marry Mr Right", Jane learns that in love there is neither pattern nor promise. This is a funny collection of connected stories and a portrait of Jane, a woman manoeuvring her way through love, sex and relationships.

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenShort StoriesFirst Person Narrator
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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

Elderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard's Story

Sergei Dovlatov · 176 pages

Dry HumorLiterary FictionShort StoriesCharacter-Driven
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Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

Bohumil Hrabal · 122 pages

An old man, a shoemaker who once wore a pince-nez and carried a stick with a silver mounting because he wanted to look like a composer, tells the story of his life to six young, beautiful women basking in the sun. One drunken thought triggers another. Amorous conquests alternate with sundry mishaps and in the haphazard telling acquire the same weight and substance as earth-shattering events. To s

Elderly ProtagonistDry HumorLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator

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