What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe 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
The Good Wife
Stewart O'Nan · 312 pages
From a writer who reveals 'the plainness of everyday life with straightforward lyricism' (The New York Times Book Review), the story of one remarkable, average woman. On a clear winter night in upstate New York, two young men break in to a house they believe is empty. It isn't, and within minutes an old woman is dead and the house is in flames. Soon after, the men are caught by the police. Acro
Pigs in Heaven
Barbara Kingsolver · 363 pages
A phenomenal bestseller and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, Pigs in Heaven continues the story of Taylor and Turtle, first introduced in The Bean Trees.
The Four Winds
Kristin Hannah · 472 pages
Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman’s only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is
Gather
Kenneth M. Cadow · 325 pages
Publisher Annotation: A resourceful teenager in rural Vermont struggles to hold on to the family home while his mom recovers from addiction in this striking debut novel.
Little Children
Tom Perrotta · 160 pages
Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the Internet than
Nora Webster
Colm Toibin · 373 pages
"Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be drawn back into it. Wounded, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young
The Best Awful
Carrie Fisher · 278 pages
Reeling from her divorce with Leland, who left her for another man, Suzanne Vale isn't sure that she's the best mom for her young daughter, Honey. The 3-year-old has been a mainstay in Suzanne's life, that and the prescription drugs she takes to control her bipolar disorder. When Suzanne goes off her medication, her life spins crazily out of control, she finds herself roaming the streets of Tijuan
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Karen Joy Fowler · 336 pages
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister. . . . Until Fern's expulsion . . . she was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. . . . I loved her as a sister."
The Monk Downstairs
Tim Farrington · 284 pages
"Rebecca Martin is a single mother with an apartment to rent and a sense that she has used up her illusions. "I had the romantic thing with my first husband, thank you very much," she tells a hapless suitor. "I'm thirty-eight years old, and I've got a daughter learning to read and a job I don't quite like. I don't need the violin music." But when the new tenant in her in-law apartment turns out t
The Wedding People
Alison Espach · 384 pages
It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She’s immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to
The Last Samurai
Helen DeWitt · 530 pages
"Ludo, age six, is a prodigy. His mother, Sibylla, raises him alone and tries hard to keep his voracious intellect satisfied, while she struggles to make ends meet. With her exasperated guidance, he teaches himself Greek, so that he can read The Odyssey, before moving on to study Hebrew, Arabic, Inuit, and Japanese. And both Sibylla and Ludo share a passion for Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which they
Perfect Little World
Kevin Wilson · 336 pages
When Isabelle Poole meets Dr. Preston Grind, she's fresh out of high school, pregnant with her art teacher's baby, and totally on her own. Izzy knows she can be a good mother but without any money or relatives to help, she's left searching. Dr. Grind, an awkwardly charming child psychologist, has spent his life studying family, even after tragedy struck his own. Now, with the help of an eccentric
About a Boy
Nick Hornby · 288 pages
Nick Hornby's second bestselling novel is about sex, manliness and fatherhood. Will is thirty-six, comfortable and child-free. And he's discovered a brilliant new way of meeting women - through single-parent groups. Marcus is twelve and a little bitnerdish: he's got the kind of mother who made him listen to Joni Mitchell rather than Nirvana. Perhaps they can help each other out a little bit, and b
Empire Falls
Richard Russo · 483 pages
"Dexter County, Maine, and specifically the town of Empire Falls, has seen better days, and for decades, in fact, only a succession from bad to worse. One by one, its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan (presided over by the last scion's widow) now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. The working classes, meanwhile, continue to eke o
Corelli's Mandolin
Louis de Bernieres · 437 pages
The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical, heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an i
A Prayer for Owen Meany
John Irving · 543 pages
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." So begins John Irving's new novel. In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys - best friends - are playing ina Li
The Pilot's Wife
Anita Shreve · 304 pages
Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time. As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to
'Scuse Me While I Kill This Guy
Leslie Langtry · 283 pages
Is This Tomorrow
Caroline Leavitt · 435 pages
In 1956, Ava Lark rents a house with her twelve-year-old son, Lewis, in a desirable Boston suburb. Ava is beautiful, divorced, Jewish, and a working mom. She finds her neighbors less than welcoming. Lewis yearns for his absent father, befriending the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood--in the throes of Cold War paranoia--seizes the oppor
So Big
Edna Ferber · 283 pages
So Big - winner of the Pulitzer Prize - the unforgettable story of Selina Peake Dejong, her marriage, widowhood, eventual success as a truck farmer, and of her son, Dirk. In So Big, Ferber simultaneously created a vivid picture of turn-of-the-century Chicago and dealt with the contemporary issues of poverty, Americanization, family tensions, sexism, and success.