What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorJeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Geoff Dyer · 296 pages
A wildly original novel of erotic fulfillment and spiritual yearning. Every two years the international art world descends on Venice for the opening of the Biennale. Among them is Jeff Atman--a jaded and dissolute journalist--whose dedication to the cause of Bellini-fuelled partygoing is only intermittently disturbed by the obligation to file a story. When he meets the spellbinding Laura, he is re
Ladies Coupé: A Novel in Parts
Anita Nair · 306 pages
One day Akhila gets a one way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. The characters she meets on her journey reveal how the dilemmas that women face in their relationships with husbands, mothers, friends, employers and children are the same the world over.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
Cherise Wolas · 534 pages
""A stunning debut...Reminds me of my most favorite authors: J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Joan Didion." --A.M. Homes I viewed the consumptive nature of love as a threat to serious women. But the wonderful man I just married believes as I do--work is paramount, absolutely no children--and now love seems to me quite marvelous. These words are spoken to a rapturous audience by Joan
Difficult Daughters
Manju Kapur · 267 pages
"Set around the time of Partition, Difficult Daughters is the story of a woman torn between family duty, the desire for education, and illicit love. Virmati, a young woman born in Amritsar into an austere and high-minded household, falls in love with a neighbour, the Professor - a man who is already married. That the Professor eventually marries Virmati, installs her in his home (along-side his fu
The Home and the World
Rabindranath Tagore, Sourindro Mohun Tagore
I mother, today there comes back to mind the vermilion mark at the parting of your hair, the sari which you used to wear, with its wide red border, and those wonderful eyes of yours, full of depth and peace. They came at the start of my life's journey, like the first streak of dawn, giving me golden provision to carry me on my way.
English, August: An Indian Story
Upamanyu Chatterjee · 326 pages
Agastya Sen, nicknamed August by his school friends, is a young civil servant who has been posted as the assistant commissioner under training in a small provincial town called Madna. Born in Calcutta to a hindu father and Christian mother, he lives a metropolitan life till he joins the Indian Administrative Services. It becomes clear right in the first two pages itself that he is not a person who
Women
Chloe Caldwell · 144 pages
WOMEN is a novella about falling in love with a woman, about loving women, about being a woman. It is a novella about a mother and a daughter. A novella about female friendships that blur the line of romance. A novella about a woman who, after having her first sexual relationship with a woman, goes on a series of (comical) OK Cupid dates with other women. A novella about a woman in her twenties wh
Phases of Gravity
Dan Simmons · 307 pages
Richard Braedecker thought his greatest challenge was walking on the moon, but that was until he meets a mysterious woman who shows him his past. Join Braedecker as he comes to grips with the son and wife he lost in his passion for space exploration, his forgotten childhood and the loss he experienced during the death-flight of the Challenger. The most difficult exploration of his life is not th
The Razor's Edge
W. Somerset Maugham · 314 pages
This novel, supposedly based on the life of an acquaintance of Maugham, follows the fortunes of an American pilot who, traumatized by war, rejects his former conventional life to search for a more meaningful existence. After studying in Paris for two years he decides to travel, taking various menial jobs. Although being influenced by some of the people he meets it is not until he reaches India tha
Shanghai Baby
Zhou Weihui · 260 pages
"Publicly burned in China for its sensual nature and irreverent style, this novel is the semi-autobiographical story of Coco, a cafe waitress, who is full of enthusiasm and impatience for life. She meets a young man, Tian Tian, for whom she feels tenderness and love, but he is reclusive, impotent and an increasing user of drugs. Despite parental objections, Coco moves in with him, leaves her job a
The Romantics
Pankaj Mishra · 288 pages
Set in contemporary India, "The Romantics" tells the story of Samar, a young, uprooted Brahmin intellectual still deeply committed to his uncertain society and its fracturing caste system, but who is no less powerfully drawn to the West and its literature of self-discovery.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Rebecca Miller · 239 pages
Pippa seems to have everything in life. But suddenly she finds her world beginning to unravel. Amid the buzzing lawnmowers and suburban coffee mornings, she starts to wonder how she came to be in this place. The answer is a story of wild youth, unexpected encounters, affairs and betrayals, and the dangerous security of marriage. It brilliantly reveals the challenges of modern life - and all the po
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri · 304 pages
"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, c
Waiting for the Mahatma
R.K. Narayan · 256 pages
Sweetbitter
Stephanie Danler · 356 pages
A lush, raw, thrilling novel of the senses about a year in the life of a uniquely beguiling young woman, set in the wild, alluring world of a famous downtown New York restaurant.
Valencia
Michelle Tea · 216 pages
The rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco's radical lesbian underground is laid bare in this action-packed novel, which follows a young gay woman down into the often dangerous world inhabited by the city's "dyke" community.
Oleander Girl
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni · 289 pages
Enjoying a sheltered childhood with adoring grandparents but troubled by the silence surrounding her parents' deaths, 17-year-old Korobi is prompted by a love note among her mother's possessions and a fiance's shattering revelation to travel from India to post-September 11 America in search of her true identity.
The Sixteen Pleasures
Robert Hellenga · 368 pages
The Italians called them "Mud Angels," the young foreigners who came to Florence in 1966 to save the city's treasured art from the Arno's flooded banks. American volunteer Margot Harrington was one of them, finding her niche in the waterlogged library of a Carmelite convent. Within its walls she discovered a priceless Renaissance masterwork: a sensuous volume of sixteen erotic poems and drawings.
Bear
Marian Engel · 141 pages
Lou is a lonely librarian who spends her days in the dusty archives of the Historical Institute. When an unusual field assignment comes her way, she jumps at the chance to travel to a remote island in northern Ontario, where she will spend the summer cataloguing a library that belonged to an eccentric 19th-century colonel. Eager to investigate the estate's curious history, she is shocked to discov
A Spy in the House of Love
Anais Nin · 136 pages
Beautiful, bored and bourgeoise, Sabina leads a double life inspired by her relentless desire for brief encounters with near-strangers. Fired into faithlessness by a desperate longing for sexual fulfilment, she weaves a sensual web of deceit across New York. But when the secrecy of her affairs becomes too much to bear, Sabina makes a late night phone-call to a stranger from a bar, and begins a con
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse · 130 pages
Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha after he traveled to India in the 1910s. It tells the story of a young boy who travels the country in a quest for spiritual enlightenment in the time of Guatama Buddha. It is a compact, lyrical work, which reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom.
Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction
Elissa Schappell · 304 pages
"From the acclaimed author of Use Me, eight provocative and darkly funny linked stories that explore the commonly shared, but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers, mapping America's shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day"--