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The Finkler Question

Howard Jacobson · 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 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-PacedDry HumorDark ComedyCultural Identity
❤️

Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel · 653 pages

In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power England is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him.

Slow-PacedDry HumorReligious IdentityCharacter-Driven
❤️

The Autograph Man

Zadie Smith · 400 pages

"Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. A small blip in a huge worldwide network of desire, his business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them - all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the reinstatement of some kind of all-powerful, benevolent God-type figure, the end of religio

Religious IdentityLondonCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
❤️

The Round House

Louise Erdrich · 352 pages

A young man is upended after a violent attack on his mother, which leaves his family in turmoil. Well-written page turner that is hard to put down!

Religious IdentityCharacter-DrivenCultural IdentitySlow-Paced
❤️

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol · 548 pages

Slow-PacedDry HumorDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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Franny and Zooey

J.D. Salinger · 202 pages

Franny came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed in 1957 by Zooey. Both stories are early entries in a narrative series about the Glasses, a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York. In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her boyfriend for a football weekend, where they go to a café. The story is essentially an account of

Religious IdentitySlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Ulysses

James Joyce · 736 pages

Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge Jo

Religious IdentityCultural IdentitySlow-PacedLiterary Fiction
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A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving · 543 pages

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." So begins John Irving's new novel. In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys - best friends - are playing ina Li

Religious IdentitySlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenDark Comedy
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My Name Is Asher Lev

Chaim Potok · 352 pages

"Memorable...A book profound in its vision of humanity, of religion, and of art."THE WALL STREET JOURNALHere is the original, deeply moving story of Asher Lev, the religious boy with an overwhelming need to draw, to paint, to render the world he knows and the pain he feels, on canvas for everyone to see. A loner, Asher has an extroardinary God-given gift that possesses a spirit all its own. It is

Religious IdentityCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenSlow-Paced
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Middlemarch

George Eliot · 795 pages

Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.

Dry HumorSlow-PacedReligious IdentityCharacter-Driven
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Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe · 192 pages

Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widel

Religious IdentitySlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenCultural Identity
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The Reading List

Sara Nisha Adams · 368 pages

LondonCharacter-DrivenSlow-PacedCultural Identity
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Saint Urbains Horseman

Mordecai Richler

Religious IdentityDry HumorCultural IdentityLondon
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Black Album (Faber Classics)

Hanif Kureishi · 276 pages

Religious IdentityLondonCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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Zuckerman Bound: The Ghost Writer / Zuckerman Unbound / The Anatomy Lesson / The Prague Orgy

Philip Roth · 610 pages

A new novella, "The Prague Orgy," takes Nathan Zuckerman to Prague to rescue the stories of an unknown Yiddish writer from oblivion and also forms a startling epilogue to "The Ghost Writer," "Zuckerman Unbound," and "The Anatomy Lesson," all included in this volume.

Dry HumorReligious IdentityCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
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Sugar Street

Naguib Mahfouz · 308 pages

The New York Times Book Review called Palace Walk, the first volume of the Cairo Trilogy, "a tale told with great affection, sensitivity, and humor" and described Palace of Desire, the second volume, as "elegant and often explosive". The Nobel Prize winner now offers the climactic third volume, print.

Religious IdentitySlow-PacedCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
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The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

Religious IdentityCultural IdentitySlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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The Weight of Ink

Rachel Kadish · 576 pages

Religious IdentityLondonSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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Half a Life

V.S. Naipaul · 211 pages

One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly un-expected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago.Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste--a disast

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenCultural IdentityLiterary 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

Cultural IdentityDry HumorCharacter-DrivenDeath of a Spouse
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Bee Season

Myla Goldberg · 288 pages

"Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that

Religious IdentityCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenSlow-Paced
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The Golem and the Jinni

Helene Wecker · 512 pages

In The Golem and the Jinni, a chance meeting between mythical beings takes readers on a dazzling journey through cultures in turn-of-the-century New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life to by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic and dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.

Slow-PacedCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenReligious Identity
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Mark Haddon · 240 pages

This is Christopher's murder mystery story. There are no lies in this story because Christopher can't tell lies. Christopher does not like strangers or the colours yellow or brown or being touched. On the other hand, he knows all the countries in the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7507. When Christohper decides to find out who killed the neighbour's dog, his mystery st

Dry HumorCharacter-DrivenLondonDark Comedy
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Quartet in Autumn

Barbara Pym · 218 pages

Shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize This is the story of four people in late middle-age - Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia - whose chief point of contact is that they work in the same office and they suffer the same problem - loneliness. Lovingly, poignantly, satirically and with much humour, Pym conducts us through their small lives and the facade they erect to defend themselves against the outs

Dry HumorSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLondon

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