AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

The Death of Ivan Ilych

Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1828-1910 Gra, Leo Leo Tolstoy · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man

Leo Tolstoy · 162 pages

This new edition combines Tolstoy’s most famous short tale, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, with a less well known but equally brilliant gem, Master and Man, both newly translated by Ann Pasternak Slater. Both stories confront death and the process of dying: In Ivan Ilyich, a bureaucrat looks back over his life, which suddenly seems meaningless and wasteful, while in Master and Man, a landowner and serv

Terminal IllnessNovellaClassicsLiterary Fiction
❤️

Diary of a Superfluous Man

Ivan Turgenev · 325 pages

Terminal IllnessNovellaClassicsLiterary Fiction
❤️

No One Writes to the Colonel

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 170 pages

NovellaLiterary FictionClassicsCharacter-Driven
🙂

Benediction

Kent Haruf · 343 pages

A terminally ill cancer patient is attended throughout his final days by his wife and daughter while the trio contemplates their relationships with an estranged son, a situation that stirs up painful memories for a new next-door neighbor who has recently lost her mother.

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway · 127 pages

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements.

NovellaClassicsLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

One True Thing

Anna Quindlen · 320 pages

A New York psychiatrist recounts her mother's death for which she was arrested. At the time, Dr. Ellen Gulden was accused of killing her mother with an overdose of morphine, a charge in part based on a high school essay in which she advocated euthanasia. By the author of Object Lessons.

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

At Risk

Alice Hoffman · 272 pages

In a novel the Village Voice calls "memorable" and "striking," Alice Hoffman vividly portrays a family shattered by tragedy when eleven-year-old Amanda is diagnosed with AIDS...

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

Tinkers

Paul Harding · 192 pages

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

Sons and Lovers

D.H. Lawrence · 447 pages

Sons and Lovers, a story of working-class England, is D. H. Lawrence’s third novel. It went through various drafts, and was titled “Paul Morel” until the final draft, before being published and met with an indifferent reaction from contemporary critics. Modern critics now consider it to be D. H. Lawrence’s masterpiece, with the Modern Library placing it ninth in its “100 Best English-Language Nove

Terminal IllnessClassicsLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

Oxygen

Andrew Miller · 336 pages

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

Inside the O'Briens

Lisa Genova · 343 pages

Patrol officer Joe O'Brien is third-generation Irish in Charlestown. A tough cop with a soft interior, a loving wife and four adult children, Joe is diagnosed with Huntington's disease. As Joe's symptoms worsen and he's eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while his daughter Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a l

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Wings of the Dove

Henry James · 510 pages

Beautiful Kate Croy may have been left penniless by her relatives, but her bold, ambitious nature ensures she will not succumb meekly to a life of poverty. If the financial circumstances of Merton Densher, the man she is passionately in love with, are not sufficient to secure her future, perhaps her cunning will. So when Milly Theale arrives in Europe from America, laden with wealth but also grave

Terminal IllnessClassicsLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens · 114 pages

A reprinting of the 1843 first edition, complete with the original illustrations, is supplemented by over eighty related sketches and annotations on and analyses of the text and historical notes on the writing of "The Christmas Carol."

NovellaClassicsCharacter-DrivenFinding Purpose
🙂

The Quarry

Iain Banks · 326 pages

Kit doesn't know who his mother is. What he does know, however, is that his father, Guy, is dying of cancer. Feeling his death is imminent, Guy gathers around him his oldest friends - or at least the friends with the most to lose by his death. Paul - the rising star in the Labour party who dreads the day a tape they all made at university might come to light; Alison and Robbie, corporate bunnies w

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessLiterary FictionBittersweet
🙂

Before I Die

Jenny Downham · 332 pages

A terminally ill teenaged girl makes and carries out a list of things to do before she dies.

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessCharacter-DrivenFinding Purpose
🙂

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Truman Capote · 160 pages

Published with three short stories this novella cemented Capote’s position at the forefront of American literature. It is the story of a friendship between New York neighbours, good time girl Holly Golightly and the unnamed male narrator.

NovellaClassicsLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

Socrates In Love

Kyoichi Katayama · 208 pages

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessLiterary FictionMale Lead
🙂

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

Leo Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1828-1910 Gra · 142 pages

Terminal IllnessClassicsLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann · 728 pages

Hans Castorp - on the verge of an intense flirtation with Clavdia Chauchat, a married woman and feverish fellow patient - is perched high above the world, dozing in his splendid lounge chair at the International Sanatorium Berghof, swaddled in blankets against the Alpine chill. To his surprise and secret delight, he will remain on this "magic mountain" for seven years - removed from the "real" wo

Terminal IllnessClassicsLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

The Awakening

Kate Chopin · 190 pages

The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that

NovellaClassicsLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

Herve Guibert · 272 pages

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessLiterary FictionMale Lead
🙂

Bartleby the Scrivener

Herman Melville · 60 pages

"Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by Herman Melville. The story first appeared, anonymously, in Putnam's Magazine in two parts. The first part appeared in November 1853, with the conclusion published in December 1853. It was reprinted in Melville's The Piazza Tales in 1856 with minor textual alterations. The work is said to have been inspired, in part, by Melville's

NovellaClassicsLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
🙂

Dream of Ding Village

Yan Lianke · 326 pages

Long IllnessTerminal IllnessLiterary FictionTragic
🙂

The Overcoat

Nikolai Gogol · 52 pages

NovellaClassicsLiterary FictionTragic

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.