What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Pearl
John Steinbeck · 118 pages
Based on a Mexican folktale, this is the story of a great pearl found by a poor fisherman, the sorrow it brought to his family, and how it was lost again.
The Push Man and Other Stories
Yoshihiro Tatsumi · 224 pages
"Over four decades ago, Yoshihiro Tatsumi expanded the horizons of comics story-telling by using the visual language of manga to tell gritty, literary short stories about the private lives of everyday people. He has been called "the grandfather of Japanese alternative comics" and has influenced generations of cartoonists, but, until now, the majority of his work has remained unavailable outside of
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
The Samurai
Shusaku Endo · 272 pages
In 1613 Father Pedro Velasco's dream came true. He set sail with a small group of Japanese Samurai for Mexico, Spain and Rome. Velasco knew Japanese, and his zealous hope was to become primate over a converted, Catholic Japan. His mission, with the Samurai, was to bargain for a Catholic crusade through Japan in exchange for Japanese trading rights with the West. It was a journey of incredible dang
The Dykemaster
Theodor Storm · 156 pages
The Dykemaster is the tale of a visionary young north Friesian Deichgraf of the 18th century, creator of a new form of dyke. The short-sighted and self-seeking community with which he is at odds turns him into a phantom, seen riding his grey along the dyke whenever the sea threatens to break through. The rationalistic storyteller, in a highly sophisticated narrative structure, belongs to a later a
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee · 560 pages
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision
The Pearl Diver
Jeff Talarigo · 248 pages
A nineteen-year-old Japanese pearl diver encounters prejudice and isolation when she is forced to live the remainder of her life at a leprosarium on the island of Nagashima even though medication has put her disease in remission.
The Outsiders
S.E. Hinton · 192 pages
According to Ponyboy, there are two kinds of people in the world: greasers and socs. A soc (short for "social") has money, can get away with just about anything, and has an attitude longer than a limousine. A greaser, on the other hand, always lives on the outside and needs to watch his back. Ponyboy is a greaser, and he's always been proud of it, even willing to rumble against a gang of socs f
The Family of Pascual Duarte
Camilo Jose Cela, Anthony Kerrigan · 198 pages
On Chesil Beach
Ian McEwan · 176 pages
A novel of remarkable depth and poignancy from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and
The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck · 316 pages
This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought
To Have and Have Not
Ernest Hemingway · 262 pages
This 1936 novel tells the story of an American fishing boat skipper who dabbles in a little smuggling to make ends meet. In need of money for his family the captain reluctantly becomes agrees to smuggle a group of Chinese immigrants from Cuba to Florida. This is Hemingway’s only novel to be set in the United States.
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka · 95 pages
Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella written by Franz Kafka which was first published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (German: ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. "monstrous vermin") and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition.
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy · 440 pages
Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv
The Corpse Washer
Sinan Antoon · 185 pages
"Born to a traditional Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, Jawad decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, in defiance of his father's wishes and determined to forge his own path. But the circumstances of history dictate otherwise. Sa
The Hunting Gun
Yasushi Inoue · 74 pages
The Hunting Gun follows the consequences of a tragic love affair. Told from the viewpoints of three different women, this is a story of the psychological impact of illicit love. First viewed through the eyes of Shoko, who learns of the affair through reading her mother's diary, then through the eyes of Midori, who had long known about the affair of her husband with Saiko, and finally through the e
The Colour of Milk
Nell Leyshon · 173 pages
"The year is eighteen-hundred-and-thirty-one when fifteen-year-old Mary begins the difficult task of telling her story. A scrap of a thing with a sharp tongue and hair the colour of milk, Mary leads a harsh life working on her father's farm alongside her three sisters. In the summer she is sent to work for the local vicar's invalid wife, where the reasons why she must record the truth of what happ
Where All Light Tends to Go
David Joy · 289 pages
"Set in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves"--
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 174 pages
First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Iv
Lean On Pete
Willy Vlautin · 304 pages
Fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson wants a home, food on the table, and a high school he can attend for more than part of a year. But as the son of a single father working in warehouses across the Pacific Northwest, Charley's been pretty much on his own. When tragic events leave him homeless weeks after their move to Portland, Oregon, Charley seeks refuge in the tack room of a run-down horse track.
Third Life Of Grange Copeland
Alice Walker · 302 pages
"Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third and final cha
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell · 479 pages
The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, decei