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Godric

Frederick Buechner · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Gilead

Marilynne Robinson · 256 pages

**WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION** In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civi

Elderly ProtagonistReligious IdentityBittersweetLyrical Prose
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Lyrical ProseReligious IdentityBittersweetLiterary Fiction
❤️

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 ProtagonistLyrical ProseBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Secret Scripture

Sebastian Barry · 300 pages

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges

Elderly ProtagonistLyrical ProseReligious IdentityBittersweet
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Peace Like a River

Leif Enger · 313 pages

"Raised on tales of cowboys and pirates, eleven-year-old Reuben Land has little doubt that miracles happen all around us, and that it's up to us to "make of it what we will." Reuben was born with no air in his lungs, and it was only when his father, Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that his lungs filled. Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma from then on, making him a boy

Religious IdentityLyrical ProseBittersweetFirst Person Narrator
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The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro · 245 pages

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

Elderly ProtagonistLyrical ProseBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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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

Elderly ProtagonistLyrical ProseBittersweetFirst Person Narrator
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All the Little Live Things

Wallace Stegner · 345 pages

An Eastern couple retire to California in search of peace after the death of their wayward son, only to have their paradise shattered by painful reminders of the past.

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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A Soldier of the Great War

Mark Helprin · 792 pages

A Roman student is torn from his carefree life when World War I breaks out, and fifty years later, recounts the triumphs and tragedies of his existence to an illiterate factory worker.

Elderly ProtagonistLyrical ProseBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Frances and Bernard

Carlene Bauer · 209 pages

In the summer of 1957, Frances and Bernard meet at an artists' colony. She finds him faintly ridiculous, but talented. He sees her as aloof, but intriguing. Afterward, he writes her a letter. Soon they are immersed in the kind of fast, deep friendship that can take over-- and change the course of-- lives. They find their way to New York and, for a few whirling years, each other. Can we love anothe

Religious IdentityBittersweetLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Ancient Light

John Banville · 256 pages

An actor in the twilight of his career reflects on a poignant first love affair at the age of fifteen with his best friend's mother and inexplicably lands a role opposite a famous but fragile actress who helps him come to an astonishing realization.

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetLyrical ProseFirst Person Narrator
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The General in His Labyrinth

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 306 pages

Elderly ProtagonistLyrical ProseBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J

BittersweetLyrical ProseReligious IdentityLiterary Fiction
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Someone

Alice McDermott · 232 pages

"The story of a Brooklyn-born woman's life - her family, her neighborhood, her daily trials and triumphs - from childhood to old age"--Provided by the publisher.

Lyrical ProseBittersweetReligious IdentityLiterary Fiction
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Monsignor Quixote

Graham Greene · 232 pages

"A direct descendant of his famous namesake, Father Quixote is a humble parish priest. By chance he is advanced to Monsignor, resulting in furor in the bishopric. Quixote and his friend Sancho Zancas, the Communist ex-mayor of the village, leave for a pilgrimage across Spain."--Audio cassette container.

Elderly ProtagonistReligious IdentityBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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A Year of Marvellous Ways

Sarah Winman · 326 pages

Cornwall, 1947. Marvellous Ways is a ninety-year-old woman who's lived alone in a remote creek for nearly all her life. Recently she's taken to spending her days sitting on a mooring stone by the river with a telescope. She's waiting for something - she's not sure what, but she'll know it when she sees it. Drake is a young soldier left reeling by the war. He's agreed to fulfil a dying man's last w

Elderly ProtagonistLyrical ProseBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Girl with a Pearl Earring

Tracy Chevalier · 248 pages

This book "centres on Vermeer's prosperous household in Delft in the 1660s. The appointment of the quiet, perceptive heroine of the novel, the servant Griet, gradually throws the household into turmoil as Vermeer and Griet become increasingly intimate, an increasingly tense situation that culminates in her working for Vermeer as his assistant, and ultimately sitting for him as a model. Chevalier d

Lyrical ProseReligious IdentityBittersweetHistorical Fiction
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Viper's Tangle

Francois Mauriac · 289 pages

Elderly ProtagonistReligious IdentityFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 256 pages

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semi-autobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the

Lyrical ProseBittersweetReligious IdentityLiterary Fiction
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Earthly Powers

Anthony Burgess · 656 pages

Anthony Burgess has long been regarded as one of the most original and daring writers of our time. In Earthly Powers, Burgess has writtena book rich with astonishing powers and surprising events.

Elderly ProtagonistReligious IdentityFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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The Dead Don't Dance

Charles Martin · 317 pages

Lyrical ProseBittersweetReligious IdentityFirst Person Narrator
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Aloft

Chang-rae Lee · 368 pages

Elderly ProtagonistBittersweetLyrical ProseFirst Person Narrator
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The Madonnas of Leningrad

Debra Dean · 231 pages

One of the most talked about books of the year . . . Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. And while the elderly Russian woman cannot hold on to fresh memories -- the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild -- her distant past is preserved: vivid images that rise unbidden of her youth in war-torn Leningrad.In the fall of

Elderly ProtagonistLyrical ProseBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Tinkers

Paul Harding · 192 pages

Elderly ProtagonistLyrical ProseBittersweetLiterary Fiction

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