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The Evening Star

Larry McMurtry · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fannie Flagg · 403 pages

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Ala

Elderly ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyBittersweetCharacter-Driven
❤️

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

Elderly ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Tinkers

Paul Harding · 192 pages

Elderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenMultigenerational FamilyBittersweet
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The Rain Before it Falls

Jonathan Coe · 271 pages

What I want you to have, Imogen, above all, is a sense of your own history; a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you.'Rosamund lies dying in her remote Shropshire home. But before she does so, she has one last task: to put on tape not just her own story but the story of the young blind girl, her cousin's granddaughter, who turned up mysteriously at her party all those years

Elderly ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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The Town

Conrad Richter · 302 pages

The story of a pioneer family and the transition they have to make as urban areas begin to spread in the 1800s.

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetMultigenerational FamilyCharacter-Driven
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Emily, Alone

Stewart O'Nan · 255 pages

Newly independent widow Emily Maxwell dreams of visits by grandchildren and mourns changes in her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood before realizing an inner strength to pursue developing opportunities.

Elderly ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Walter Mosley · 277 pages

Ptolemy Grey is a 91-year-old man, suffering from dementia and living as a recluse in his Los Angeles apartment. Then Robyn Small, a 17-year-old family friend, appears and helps clean up his apartment and straighten out his life. A reinvigorated Ptolemy volunteers for an experimental medical program that restores his mind, and he uses his last days--shortened now by the medical experiment--to del

Elderly ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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Still Alice

Lisa Genova · 320 pages

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease.

Elderly ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Fire On The Mountain

Anita Desai · 145 pages

In this novel of India, Nadia Kaul's great-granddaughter is sent to spend the summer with her. Nadia is upset by having her routine disturbed but finds herself attempting to draw out and communicated with the strange and unfathomable girl who is strangely like herself.

Elderly ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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The Shell Seekers

Rosamunde Pilcher · 582 pages

The Shell Seekers is a novel of connection: of one family, and of the passions and heartbreak that have held them together for three generations. The Shell Seekers is filled with real people--mothers and daughters, husband and lovers--inspired with real values. The Shell Seekers centers on Penelope Keeling--a woman you'll always remember in world you'll never forget. The Shell Seekers is a magical

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-DrivenMultigenerational Family
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The Correspondent

Virginia Evans · 400 pages

Throughout her life Sybil Van Antwerp has used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings around half past ten Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, a

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Elderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Memory of Old Jack

Wendell Berry · 223 pages

In a rural Kentucky river town, "Old Jack" Beechum, a retired farmer, sees his life again through the shades of one burnished day in September 1952. Bringing the earthiness of America's past to mind, The Memory of Old Jack conveys the truth and integrity of the land and the people who live from it. Through the eyes of one man can be seen the values Americans strive to recapture as we arrive at the

Elderly ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Elizabeth Is Missing

Emma Healey · 274 pages

"Elizabeth is missing", reads the note in Maud's pocket in her own handwriting. Lately, Maud's been getting forgetful. She keeps buying peach slices when she has a cupboard full, forgets to drink the cups of tea she's made and writes notes to remind herself of things. But Maud is determined to discover what has happened to her friend, Elizabeth, and what it has to do with the unsolved disappearanc

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Sound of the Mountain

Yasunari Kawabata · 276 pages

"By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo's life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the sti

Elderly ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Plainsong

Kent Haruf · 301 pages

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Pigs in Heaven

Barbara Kingsolver · 363 pages

A phenomenal bestseller and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, Pigs in Heaven continues the story of Taylor and Turtle, first introduced in The Bean Trees.

Multigenerational FamilyElderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Life After Life

Jill McCorkle · 418 pages

The residents, staff, and neighbors of the Pine Haven retirement center (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie) share some of life's most profound discoveries. What they eventually learn about themselves and one another will transform them all.

Elderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

Multigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Remarkably Bright Creatures

Shelby Van Pelt · 368 pages

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night cleaner shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Ever since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat over thirty years ago keeping busy has helped her cope. One night she meets Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium who sees everything, but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his hum

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Helen Simonson · 394 pages

You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson's wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major P

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Sabrina & Corina

Kali Fajardo-Anstine · 212 pages

Multigenerational FamilyBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender · 345 pages

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t

Multigenerational FamilyBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Hotel New Hampshire

John Irving · 432 pages

The Hotel New Hampshire follows the Berry family across two continents and through three hotels. Family members attract friends who substitute lust, violence, laughter and tears for the standard bourgeois components.

Multigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenBittersweetLiterary Fiction

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