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An Unnecessary Woman

Rabih Alameddine · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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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

Elderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Weight of Ink

Rachel Kadish · 576 pages

BookishElderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-Driven
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The Reading List

Sara Nisha Adams · 368 pages

BookishElderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenSlow-Paced
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Among Others

Jo Walton · 304 pages

Seeking refuge in fantasy novel worlds throughout a youth under the shadow of a dubiously sane half-brother who dabbled in magic, Mori Phelps is forced to confront her mother in a tragic battle and gains unwanted attention when she attempts to perform spells herself.

BookishSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Bookbinder

Pip Williams · 437 pages

BookishSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Rules of Civility

Amor Towles · 352 pages

A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall Street secretary Katey Kontent into the upper echelons of New York society, where she befriends a shy multi-millionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow.

BookishSlow-PacedLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery · 325 pages

EA novel by the French professor of philosophy Muriel Barbery. The book centers on a working-class concierge of an upscale apartment building in Paris, Renee Michel. She is an auto-didact of immense learning who deliberately conceals her intelligence. Her secret is discovered by a young resident of the building named Paloma. The novel is narrated alternately by each of these two characters. Fir

BookishSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Reader

Bernhard Schlink · 224 pages

BookishCharacter-DrivenSlow-PacedLiterary Fiction
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The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro · 245 pages

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

Elderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Secret of Lost Things

Sheridan Hay · 354 pages

A missing manuscriptA young woman's voyage of discoveryAnd the curious bookshop where it all begins...In this charming novel about the eccentricities and passions of booksellers and collectors, a captivating young Australian woman takes a job at a vast, chaotic emporium of used and rare books in New York City and finds herself caught up in the search for a lost Melville manuscript.Eighteen years o

BookishSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Dublinesque

Enrique Vila-Matas · 311 pages

Samuel Riba is about to turn 60. A successful publisher in Barcelona, he has published many of his generation's most important authors. But he is increasingly prone to attacks of anxiety - about the digital revolution and its threat to books and 'high culture', and about the fact that he has yet to discover in the younger generation a writer of 'genius'. One night he has a vivid dream that takes p

BookishSlow-PacedElderly ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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A Treatise on Shelling Beans

Wieslaw Mysliwski · 376 pages

Elderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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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

Elderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Italian Shoes

Henning Mankell

Elderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Story of a New Name

Elena Ferrante · 480 pages

In 2012, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker’s James Wood described as “large, captivating, amiably peopled...a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal,” F

BookishSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Underpainter

Jane Urquhart · 340 pages

"The detached eye of the narrator never falters, though passion hums beneath the surface like some vast primeval beast beneath the ice. The mixing of paints becomes erotic, and the minute recalling of details is sensual...Characters appear like wraiths from the fog, become dazzling specks on a snowblind eye, encounter dreams and apparitions, while the cold, painted-out hero is laid before us in hi

Elderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent

Mircea Eliade · 176 pages

The short-sighted adolescent is a passionate reader who takes various cultural figures as models, trying to emulate both their lives or their works. The pupil protagonist is a poor student, who likes science and reads a lot of books, sometimes staying up all night to do so. At the age of 17, he decides to write a novel to demonstrate to his teachers that he is not as mediocre as his other classmat

BookishSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Aloft

Chang-rae Lee · 368 pages

Elderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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In One Person

John Irving · 448 pages

A New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect," a phrase first used by John Ir

BookishSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Twin

Gerbrand Bakker · 288 pages

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Caleb's Crossing

Geraldine Brooks · 369 pages

Growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans, Bethia Mayfield yearns for an education that is closed to her due to her gender. As soon as she can, she slips away to explore the island's glistening beaches and observes its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret friendship

Slow-PacedBookishLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Debut

Anita Brookner · 192 pages

Since childhood Ruth Weiss has been escaping from life into books, and from the hothouse attentions of her tyrannical and eccentric parents into the gentler warmth of lovers and friends. Now Dr. Weiss, at forty, a quiet scholar devoted to the study of Balzac, is convinced that her life has been ruined by literature, and that once again she must make a new start in life.

BookishSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

BookishSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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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

Elderly ProtagonistSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction

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