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Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, The

Jonathan Coe · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk · 208 pages

A man who struggles with insomnia meets a colorful extremist, and they create a secret organization together. Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the base

DepressionDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Therapy

David Lodge · 320 pages

To all appearances, Laurence Passmore is sitting pretty. True, he's almost bald and his nickname is "Tubby," but the TV sitcom he writes keeps the money coming in, he has an exclusive house in Rummidge, a state-of-the-art car, a vigorous sex life with his wife of thirty years, a flat in London, and a platonic mistress to talk shop with on his regular business trips. What his money can't buy, and

Midlife CrisisDepressionDry 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

Midlife CrisisDry HumorDepressionFirst Person Narrator
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A Spot of Bother

Mark Haddon · 368 pages

George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not at quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood, or manly bonhomie. He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. "The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely." Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored.At 61, George is settling down t

Midlife CrisisDepressionDry HumorCharacter-Driven
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Open House

Elizabeth Berg · 241 pages

Midlife CrisisDepressionDry HumorCharacter-Driven
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The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach · 512 pages

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry’s fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love

Midlife CrisisDry HumorDepressionCharacter-Driven
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High Fidelity

Nick Hornby · 256 pages

Nick Hornby's first novel, an international bestseller and instantly recognized by critics and readers alike as a classic, helps to explain men to women, and men to men. Rob is good on music: he owns a small record shop and has strong views on what's decent and what isn't. But he's much less good on relationships. In fact, he's not at all sure that he wants to commit himself to anyone. So it's har

Midlife CrisisDry HumorFirst Person NarratorCharacter-Driven
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Solar

Ian McEwan · 296 pages

Michael Beard ist Physiker und Frauenheld. Er hat den Nobelpreis erhalten, doch ist er alles andere als nobel: Im Beruf ruht er sich auf seinen Lorbeeren aus, privat hält es ihn auf Dauer bei keiner Frau. Bis die geniale Idee eines Rivalen für Zündstoff in seinem Leben sorgt. In Solar geht es nicht nur um Sonnen-, sondern auch um kriminelle Energie.

Midlife CrisisDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Naïve. Super

Erlend Loe · 208 pages

DepressionDry HumorCharacter-DrivenFirst Person Narrator
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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

Midlife CrisisDepressionDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Throwback Special

Chris Bachelder · 213 pages

The Throwback Special is the story of twenty-two ordinary guys who gather each fall to reenact what ESPN has called the most shocking play in NFL history: the November 1985 play in which Joe Theismann of the Washington Redskins had his leg horribly broken by Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants on Monday Night Football. (The play was known by the Redskins as the Throwback Special.) Over the cour

Midlife CrisisDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

Peter Cameron · 234 pages

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him–including the expectation that he will go to

DepressionDry HumorLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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I See You've Called in Dead

John Kenney · 294 pages

Midlife CrisisDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Straight Man

Richard Russo · 391 pages

William Henry Devereaux, Jr., spiritually suited to playing left field but forced by a bad hamstring to try first base, is the unlikely chairman of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania University. Over the course of a single convoluted week, he threatens to execute a goose, has his nose slashed by a feminist poet, discovers that his secretary writes better fiction than he does, s

Midlife CrisisDry HumorCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen · 576 pages

The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of

Midlife CrisisDepressionCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Independence Day

Richard Ford · 464 pages

Midlife CrisisFirst Person NarratorCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates · 346 pages

Midlife CrisisDepressionLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Us

David Nicholls · 416 pages

"David Nicholls brings the wit and intelligence that graced his enormously popular New York Times bestseller, One Day, to a compellingly human, deftly funny new novel about what holds marriages and families together--and what happens, and what we learn about ourselves, when everything threatens to fall apart. Douglas Petersen may be mild-mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that,

Midlife CrisisCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorContemporary Fiction
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The Wishbones

Tom Perrotta · 290 pages

A wacky novel on a New Jersey band whose players are unusual characters. The hero is Dave, a courier during the week and a guitarist on weekends. After proposing marriage to his high school sweetheart of 15 years, Dave promptly falls for another woman. Another player is writing a musical on the JFK assassination. By the author of *Bad Haircut*.

Midlife CrisisDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Land of Steady Habits

Ted Thompson · 272 pages

Newly retired, with his sons fully grown and graduated from college, Anders Hill leaves his wife of more than forty years, buys a condo, and seeks freedom, but discovers that the world he left behind may be what he was seeking all along.

Midlife CrisisDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Women

Charles Bukowski · 297 pages

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that woul

Midlife CrisisDry HumorCharacter-DrivenFirst Person Narrator
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Aloft

Chang-rae Lee · 368 pages

Midlife CrisisDry HumorFirst Person NarratorCharacter-Driven
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Wreck

Catherine Newman · 224 pages

Midlife CrisisDry HumorFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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Nothing But Blue Skies

Thomas McGuane · 349 pages

Midlife CrisisDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction

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