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The Street of a Thousand Blossoms

Gail Tsukiyama · back to the book

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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

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❤️

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

JapanWorld War IIBittersweetBrothers
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Memoirs of a Geisha

Arthur Golden · 456 pages

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a n

JapanBittersweetWorld War IICharacter-Driven
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The Other Side of the Bridge

Mary Lawson · 296 pages

BrothersBittersweetCharacter-DrivenWorld War II
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The Lowland

Jhumpa Lahiri · 406 pages

Brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue vastly different lives--Udayan in rebellion-torn Calcutta, Subhash in a quiet corner of America--until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds.

BrothersBittersweetCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Tuesday Nights in 1980

Molly Prentiss · 296 pages

Welcome to SoHo at the onset of the eighties: a gritty, not-yet-gentrified playground for artists and writers looking to make it in the big city. Among them: James Bennett, a synesthetic art critic for The New York Times whose unlikely condition enables him to describe art in profound, magical ways, and Raul Engales, an exiled Argentinian painter running from his past and the Dirty War that has en

BrothersBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Khan al-Khalili

Naguib Mahfouz, njyb mHfwZ · 306 pages

"The completion of Khan al-Khalili in 1945 marked a turning point in Naguib Mahfouz's career. Departing from the traditional themes drawn from Egyptian antiquity that characterize the author's earlier works, Khan al-Khalili reflects instead a deep concern with the lives and problems of contemporary Egyptians. The time is 1942, the Second World War is at its height, and the Africa Campaign is ragin

BrothersWorld War IIBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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The Scorpio Races

Maggie Stiefvater · 435 pages

It happens at the start of every November: the Scorpio Races. Riders attempt to keep hold of their water horses long enough to make it to the finish line. Some riders live. Others die. At age nineteen, Sean Kendrick is the returning champion. He is a young man of few words, and if he has any fears, he keeps them buried deep, where no one else can see them. Puck Connolly is different. She

AthleteOrphansBittersweetBrothers
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Mother of Pearl

Melinda Haynes · 466 pages

OrphansBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Sarah's Key

Tatiana de Rosnay · 342 pages

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking th

BrothersBittersweetCharacter-DrivenWorld War II
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Beyond That, the Sea

Laura Spence-Ash · 351 pages

World War IIBittersweetCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
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The Shell Seekers

Rosamunde Pilcher · 582 pages

The Shell Seekers is a novel of connection: of one family, and of the passions and heartbreak that have held them together for three generations. The Shell Seekers is filled with real people--mothers and daughters, husband and lovers--inspired with real values. The Shell Seekers centers on Penelope Keeling--a woman you'll always remember in world you'll never forget. The Shell Seekers is a magical

World War IIBittersweetCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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A Separate Peace

John Knowles · 196 pages

Gene Forrester looks back fifteen years to a World War II year in which he and his best friend were roommates in a New hampshire boarding school.

World War IIBittersweetCharacter-DrivenAthlete
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The Moon and the Bonfire

Cesare Pavese · 190 pages

OrphansWorld War IICharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini · 416 pages

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an

OrphansBittersweetCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

AthleteBittersweetWorld War IICharacter-Driven
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The Evening Chorus

Helen Humphreys · 294 pages

The story of James, a pilot struggling to survive in a German POW camp, his young war-bride, Rose, back in England trying to make sense of her life, and his sister, whose own story is also rewritten by the tragedies of WWII.

World War IIBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Beet Queen

Louise Erdrich · 338 pages

On a spring morning in 1932, young Karl and Mary Adare arrive by boxcar in Argus, North Dakota. Orphaned in a most peculiar way, Karl and Mary look for refuge in their mother's sister, Fritzie, who runs a butcher shop with her husband.

OrphansBrothersCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese · 670 pages

Cutting for Stone (2009) is a novel written by Ethiopian-born Indian-American medical doctor and author Abraham Verghese. It is a saga of twin brothers, orphaned by their mother's death at their births and forsaken by their father. The book includes both a deep description of medical procedures and an exploration of the human side of medical practices. When first published, the novel was on The

BrothersBittersweetCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje · 307 pages

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of

World War IICharacter-DrivenHistorical FictionBittersweet
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Mudbound

Hillary Jordan · 335 pages

"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld

BrothersWorld War IICharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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World War IIBittersweetHistorical FictionBrothers
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Rich Man, Poor Man

Irwin Shaw · 666 pages

A novel of two brothers from the end of World War II to the 1960's. The story of Rudolph, Gretchen, and Thomas Jordache, children of an embittered German immigrant. Nurtured on traditional views of American success, each pursues the illusion of happiness in his own way, determined to achieve his "birthright."

BrothersWorld War IICharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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The Power of One

Bryce Courtenay · 518 pages

Follows Peekay, a white British boy in South Africa during World War II, between the ages of five and eleven, as he survives an abusive boarding school and goes on to succeed in life and the boxing ring, with help from a chicken, a boxer, a pianist, black African prisoners, and many others.

AthleteWorld War IIOrphansHistorical Fiction
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Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson · 424 pages

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th

World War IIBittersweetCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction




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