What’s in it
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
Include books by the same authorThe 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
The Regeneration Trilogy
Pat Barker · 608 pages
Regeneration: When Dr William Rivers treats a patient at a mental hospital who has spoken out against World War I, the relationship that develops between them makes them debate the logic of their respective positions. Thus the doctor questions the sanity of the war which is his duty to return his patients to. The eye in the door: Drawing of the history of the Pemberton Billing libel trial in wh
A Place Called Winter
Patrick Gale · 368 pages
"A privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step. Even the beginnings of an illicit, dangerous affair do little to shake the foundations of his muted existence - until the shock of discovery and the threat of arrest cost him everything. Forced to abandon his wife and child, Harry signs up for emigration to the newly colonized Canadian prairies. Remote
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Evelyn Waugh · 370 pages
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway · 332 pages
A Farewell to Arms is about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of A Farewell to Arms cemented Hemingway's stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier
The Boy I Love
Marion Husband · 276 pages
Set in the socially tempestuous aftermath of World War I, and full of early twentieth-century taboos, love and betrayal, Marion Husband's award-winning debut novel is a passionately written and thought-provoking affair. Protagonist Paul Harris, a homosexual soldier fated to marry the fiancee of his dead brother through loyalty, is a deeply tender character drifting into a world he cannot love. For
An Indecent Obsession
Colleen McCullough · 314 pages
To the battle-broken soldiers in her care, nurse Honour Langtry is a precious, adored reminder of the world before war. Then Michael Wilson arrives under a cloud of mystery and shame to change everything. A damaged and decorated hero, a man of secrets and silent pain, soon he alone possesses Honour's selfless heart-inciting tense and volatile passions that can only lead to lealousy, violence, and
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
Call Me by Your Name
Andre Aciman · 256 pages
It's the summer of 1983, and precocious 17-year-old Elio Perlman is spending the days with his family at their 17th-century villa in Lombardy, Italy. He soon meets Oliver, a handsome doctoral student who's working as an intern for Elio's father. Amid the sun-drenched splendor of their surroundings, Elio and Oliver discover the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will
Almost Life
Kiran Millwood Hargrave · 384 pages
Postcards from No Man's Land
Aidan Chambers · 312 pages
Alternates between two stories--contemporarily, seventeen-year-old Jacob visits a daunting Amsterdam at the request of his English grandmother--and historically, nineteen-year-old Geertrui relates her experience of British soldiers's attempts to liberate Holland from its German occupation.
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin · 224 pages
Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.
The Night Watch
Sarah Waters · 506 pages
A novel of relationships set in 1940s London that brims with vivid historical detail, thrilling coincidences, and psychological complexity, by the author of the Booker Prize finalist Fingersmith. Sarah Waters, whose works set in Victorian England have awards and acclaim and have reinvigorated the genres of both historical and lesbian fiction, returns with novel that marks a departure from ninetee
Maurice
E.M. Forster · 256 pages
Maurice is a novel by E. M. Forster. A tale of homosexual love in early 20th-century England, it follows Maurice Hall from his schooldays through university and beyond. It was written in 1913–1914, and revised in 1932 and 1959–1960.
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
The Untouchable
John Banville · 410 pages
(From the Hardcover edition) Twenty years after his "retirement," ex-spy Victor Maskell attempts to come to terms with what has happened to his life by embarking on his memoirs. This is the plot which fuels Banville's stunning new novel--a story that goes beyond the mere facts of espionage to penetrate the intricate heart of the spy.
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
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Taylor Jenkins Reid · 400 pages
Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of w
Learned by Heart
Emma Donoghue · 338 pages
The Price of Salt
Claire Morgan, Patricia Highsmith · 256 pages
THE PRICE OF SALT is the famous lesbian love story by Patricia Highsmith, written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. The author became notorious due to the story's latent lesbian content and happy ending, the latter having been unprecedented in homosexual fiction. Highsmith recalled that the novel was inspired by a mysterious woman she happened across in a shop and briefly stalked. Because of the
Into Deep Waters
Kaje Harper · 176 pages
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong · 256 pages
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once
A God in Ruins
Kate Atkinson · 468 pages
Ursula Todd's brother Teddy is an old man trying to come to grips with his post-War life and with a modern world and family. Switching back and forth in time between memories of his childhood and his present, Teddy is an oblivious husband, a rueful father. He never quite got over the War and part of him never adjusted to having a future. Would-be poet, heroic pilot, husband, father, and grandfathe
At Swim, Two Boys
Jamie O'Neill · 609 pages
Set during the year preceding the Easter Uprising of 1916—Ireland’s brave but fractured revolt against British rule—*At Swim, Two Boys* is a tender, tragic love story and a brilliant depiction of people caught in the tide of history. Powerful and artful, and ten years in the writing, it is a masterwork from Jamie O’Neill. Jim Mack is a naïve young scholar and the son of a foolish, aspiring shop