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Fire On The Mountain

Anita Desai · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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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.

IndiaLyrical ProseLiterary FictionBittersweet
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The Sound of the Mountain

Yasunari Kawabata · 276 pages

"By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo's life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the sti

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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

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
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The Hero's Walk

Anita Rau Badami · 359 pages

"In a small, dusty Indian town near the Bay of Bengal, a middle-aged man lives in his crumbling ancestral home, uncomfortably aware of the encroaching modern world. Sripathi Rao's life hasn't turned out the way he thought it would: his job as a copywriter is unrewarding; his old widowed mother nags him; his unmarried forty-one-year-old sister is on the verge of sexual combustion; his only son r

IndiaElderly ProtagonistAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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The Snow Child

Eowyn Ivey · 389 pages

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-hai

BittersweetLyrical ProseAtmosphericLiterary Fiction
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Family Matters

Rohinton Mistry · 478 pages

"The setting is Bombay, mid-1990s. Nariman Vakeel, suffering from Parkinson's disease, is the elderly patriarch of a small, discordant family. In a building called Chateau Felicity, he and his two middle-aged stepchildren - Coomy, bitter and domineering, and her just-younger brother, Jal, mild mannered and acquiescent - occupy a once-elegant apartment whose ruin is progressing as rapidly as Narima

IndiaElderly ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender · 345 pages

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t

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Annie Dunne

Sebastian Barry · 240 pages

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The Covenant of Water

Abraham Verghese · 715 pages

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Tinkers

Paul Harding · 192 pages

Elderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Summer Guest

Justin Cronin · 369 pages

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for his radiant novel in stories, Mary and O'Neil, Justin Cronin has already been hailed as a writer of astonishing gifts. Now Cronin's new novel, The Summer Guest, fulfills that promise--and more. With a rare combination of emotional insight, narrative power, and lyrical grace, Cronin transforms the simple story of a dying man's last wish into a rich tapestry of

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Aloft

Chang-rae Lee · 368 pages

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The Awakening

Kate Chopin · 190 pages

The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that

BittersweetLyrical ProseLiterary FictionAtmospheric
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The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood · 638 pages

More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...

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Mistress

Anita Nair · 428 pages

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All Passion Spent

Vita Sackville-West · 296 pages

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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

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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

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An Atlas of Impossible Longing

Anuradha Roy · 320 pages

"Roy's impressive American debut covers multiple generations of an Indian family from the turn of the 20th century to India's partition. Three distinct sections revolve around Amulya, who runs an herbal medicine and fragrance business; his mentally ill wife, Kananbala, who spies on the goings-on of her English neighbors from the room Amulya keeps her locked in; their sons, Kamal and Nirmal; their

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Miss Garnet's Angel

Salley Vickers · 365 pages

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Last Man in Tower

Aravind Adiga · 421 pages

Every building tells a story, but in the jungles of Mumbai, one building - and one man- stand on the borderline between India's past and its future. Ask any Bombaywallah about Vishram Society - Tower A of the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society - and you will be told that it has been pucca for some fifty years despite its location under the flight path and border of slums. But Bombay has changed

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Midwinter Break

Bernard MacLaverty · 242 pages

Gerry, once an architect, is forgetful and set in his ways. Stella is tired of his lifestyle, worried about their marriage, and angry at his constant undermining of her religious faith. Things are not helped by memories that have begun to resurface of a troubled time in their native Ireland. As their midwinter break comes to an end, we understand how far apart they are--and can only watch as they

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The Winter Vault

Anne Michaels · 341 pages

Award-winning poet and novelist Anne Michaels gives us a love story of extraordinary depth and complexity, a mesmerizing tale that juxtaposes historical events with the most intimate moments of individual lives.In 1964, a newly married Canadian couple settles into a Nile River houseboat moored below the towering figures of Abu Simbel. Avery is one of the engineers responsible for the dismantling a

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Autumn Laing

Alex Miller · 452 pages

Autumn Laing has long outlived the legendary circle of artists she cultivated in the 1930s. Now 'old and skeleton gaunt', she reflects on her tumultuous relationship with the abundantly talented Pat Donlon and the effect it had on her husband, on Pat's wife and the body of work which launched Pat's career. A brilliantly alive and insistently energetic story of love, loyalty and creativity.

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose

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