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Nectar in a Sieve

Kamala Markandaya · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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IndiaWorking-Class ProtagonistRural FarmBleak
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Now in November

Josephine Winslow Johnson · 288 pages

Rural FarmBleakWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistRural FarmBittersweetBleak
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The Time of the Doves

Merce Rodoreda · 204 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck · 118 pages

Rural FarmWorking-Class ProtagonistBleakLiterary Fiction
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Voyage In The Dark

Jean Rhys · 188 pages

"Often considered Jean Rhys's most autobiographical novel, this masterful and moving work follows a chorus girl, Anna, who struggles to adjust to cold and inhospitable England after a childhood in the West Indies. When an affair that at first feels like salvation comes to a disastrous end, Anna begins to unravel"--

BleakWorking-Class ProtagonistBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Untouchable

Mulk Raj Anand · 160 pages

With precision, vitality, and a fury that earned him praise as India's Charles Dickens, Mulk Raj Anand recreates in" Untouchable" what it was like to live on the fringes of society in pre-independence India. Bakha, an attractive, proud, and strong young man, is also an Untouchable, the lowest of the low in India's caste system. A sweeper and a toilet-cleaner, he must warn others on the street of h

IndiaWorking-Class ProtagonistBleakLiterary Fiction
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy · 457 pages

An intimate portrait of a woman, one of literature's most admirable and tragic heroines...Tess Durbeyfield knows what it is to work hard and expect little. But her life is about to veer from the path trod by her mother and grandmother. When her ne'er-do-well father learns that his family is the last of a long noble line, the d'Urbervilles, he sends Tess on a journey to meet her supposed kin—a jour

Rural FarmWorking-Class ProtagonistBleakLiterary Fiction
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My Ántonia

Willa Cather · 246 pages

My Antonia, first published 1918, is one of Willa Cather's greatest works. It is the last novel in the Prairie trilogy, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.My Antonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Antonia. The book'

Rural FarmBittersweetWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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The Dollmaker

Harriette Simpson Arnow · 624 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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A Virtuous Woman

Kaye Gibbons · 176 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistRural FarmBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Big Rock Candy Mountain

Wallace Stegner · 563 pages

Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune—in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest.Stegner portrays more than thirty years in the life of the Mason fami

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetBleakLiterary Fiction
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The Space Between Us

Thrity Umrigar · 328 pages

Each morning, Bhima, a domestic servant in contemporary Bombay, leaves her own small shanty in the slums to tend to another woman's house. In Sera Dubash's home, Bhima scrubs the floors of a house in which she remains an outsider. She cleans furniture she is not permitted to sit on. She washes glasses from which she is not allowed to drink. Yet despite being separated from each other by blood and

IndiaWorking-Class ProtagonistBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Salvage the Bones

Jesmyn Ward · 274 pages

They heard it on the radio. A hurricane is coming, threatening the town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Esch's hard-drinking father can feel it in his bones. Esch and her brothers are trying to help prepare, but there are other worries too. Skeetah is watching his prized pit bull, helpless as her new litter dies one by one. Randall, when not preoccupied with basketball, is busy looking after the you

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakRural FarmLiterary Fiction
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Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

Cyrus Mistry · 247 pages

IndiaWorking-Class ProtagonistBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistRural FarmBleakLiterary Fiction
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The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

Breece D'J Pancake · 192 pages

Rural FarmWorking-Class ProtagonistBleakLiterary Fiction
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My Brilliant Career

Miles Franklin · 254 pages

The fierce, irreverent novel of aspiration and rebellion that is both a cornerstone of Australian literature and a feminist classic Miles Franklin began the candid, passionate, and contrary My Brilliant Career when she was only sixteen, intending it to be the Australian answer to Jane Eyre. But the book she produced-a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about a young girl hungering for life an

Rural FarmWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner · 250 pages

Written in stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators, the story follows a journey wherein the family of a dead woman try to transport her body to her birthplace in Mississippi in accordance with her wishes. When a ford across a river is flooded they are forced to take a roundabout route and it becomes a desperate race to complete their mission before the body begins to decompose.

Rural FarmWorking-Class ProtagonistBleakLiterary Fiction
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The Earth

Emile Zola · 430 pages

"Set in a village in the Beauce, in northern France, it depicts the harshness of the peasants' world and their visceral attachment to the land. Jean Macquart, a veteran of the battle of Solferino and now an itinerant farm labourer, is drawn into the affairs of the Fouan family when he starts courting young Franc̦oise. He becomes involved in a bitter dispute over the property of Papa Fouan when the

Rural FarmBleakWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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The house by the medlar tree

Giovanni Verga · 272 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistRural FarmBleakLiterary Fiction
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A Painted House

John Grisham · 465 pages

Using his own childhood for inspiration (and leaving the lawyers behind), bestselling author John Grisham sets A Painted House in 1950s rural Arkansas. During harvest time, together with hired Mexicans and hill people, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's rented 80 acres. But racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder cause Luke to grow up before he's ready.

Working-Class ProtagonistRural FarmBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The End of Eddy

Edouard Louis · 200 pages

"An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy. "Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again. Today I'm really gonna be a tough guy." Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different -- "girlish,

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakRural FarmLiterary Fiction
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My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout · 200 pages

"Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her and a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all--the one between mother and daughter"--

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetLiterary FictionRural Farm

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