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Mr. Gwyn

Alessandro Baricco · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Master

Colm Toibin · 355 pages

In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost. In The Master Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, wh

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedLondonLyrical Prose
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The Mirror & the Light

Hilary Mantel · 759 pages

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseAtmospheric
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The Gift

Vladimir Nabokov · 361 pages

De eerste fase van het schrijverschap van een jonge, voor de revolutie gevluchte Russische dichter in Berlijn.

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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Saturday

Ian McEwan · 289 pages

From the pen of a master -- the #1 bestselling, Booker Prize--winning author of Atonement -- comes an astonishing novel that captures the fine balance of happiness and the unforeseen threats that can destroy it. A brilliant, thrilling page-turner that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented ma

LondonCharacter-DrivenSlow-PacedLyrical Prose
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Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 400 pages

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env

Writer ProtagonistLyrical ProseSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Slow-PacedLyrical ProseWriter ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf · 219 pages

Virginia Woolf’s novel chronicles a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a politician’s wife in 1920s London, as she prepares to host a party that evening. The narrative follows Clarissa’s thoughts (and sometimes those of people she meets) as she goes about her errands, and events in the day remind her of her youth and friendships from the past. As the book progresses characters from the past eme

LondonSlow-PacedLyrical ProseCharacter-Driven
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The Line of Beauty

Alan Hollinghurst · 469 pages

It is the summer of 1983, and twenty-year-old Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby--whom Nick had idolized at Oxford--and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions, who becomes both a friend to Nick and his uneasy responsibility. As

LondonSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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The Weight of Ink

Rachel Kadish · 576 pages

LondonSlow-PacedWriter ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver · 528 pages

In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico-from a coastal

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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The Distant Hours

Kate Morton · 531 pages

It started with a letter. A letter that had been lost for a long time, waiting out half a century, stifling summer after cooling winter, in a forgotten postal bag in the dim attic of a nondescript house in Bermondsey. Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long lost letter arrives one Sunday afternoon with the return address of Millderhurst Castle, Kent, printed on its enve

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedLyrical ProseAtmospheric
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Euphoria

Lily King · 272 pages

"English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husban

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseWriter Protagonist
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The Zahir

Paulo Coelho · 320 pages

Set in Paris and in the enchanting landscape of central Asia, this new novel by the author of the international bestsellers The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes follows the journey of a man obsessed with finding the wife who left him without an explanation.The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges that money and celebrity bring. His wife of te

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Chemistry of Tears

Peter Carey · 288 pages

London, 2010. Grieving the loss of her lover, Swinburne museum curator Catherine Gehrig is given a special project--bring back to life an automaton whose original owner, 19th century Englishman Henry Brandling, was also confronted with the mystery of life and death.

LondonSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Canada

Richard Ford · 420 pages

After his parents are arrested and imprisoned for robbing a bank, fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is taken in by Arthur Remlinger who, unbeknownst to Dell, is hiding a dark and violent nature that interferes with Dell's quest to find grace and peace on the prairie of Saskatchewan.

Lyrical ProseSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
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All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseWriter Protagonist
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The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

David Wroblewski · 566 pages

A tale reminiscent of "Hamlet" that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father's death.

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Sputnik Sweetheart

Haruki Murakami · 224 pages

"The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments - until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated businesswoman. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakami's surreal ye

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Diviners

Margaret Laurence · 467 pages

For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town made her a fighter, a cynic, a romantic. A failed marriage, a heartbreaking affair and solitude forced her to develop a special way of being with a life strengthened by dignity and the ability to give and receive love.

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
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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

Lyrical ProseSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Nathan Coulter: A Novel

Wendell Berry · 180 pages

This, the first title in the Port William series, introduces the rural section of Kentucky with which novelist Wendell Berry has had a lifelong fascination. When young Nathan loses his grandfather, Berry guides readers through the process of Nathan's grief, endearing the reader to the simple humanity through which Nathan views the world. Echoing Berry's own strongly held beliefs, Nathan tells us t

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseAtmospheric
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True At First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway · 319 pages

"Both revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953." (From the 1999 hardback edition dustjacket.)

Writer ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
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