What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorBalthazar
Lawrence Durrell · 250 pages
The second instalment of the Alexandria Quartet, begins with the narrator from Justine living on a Greek island with the illegitimate daughter of his former lover, Melissa. The reader soon learns that many of the details from the first novel are unreliable and a very different version of events is gradually untangled.
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
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf · 219 pages
Virginia Woolf’s novel chronicles a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a politician’s wife in 1920s London, as she prepares to host a party that evening. The narrative follows Clarissa’s thoughts (and sometimes those of people she meets) as she goes about her errands, and events in the day remind her of her youth and friendships from the past. As the book progresses characters from the past eme
Reading in the Dark
Seamus Deane · 238 pages
Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain unti
Veronica
Mary Gaitskill · 256 pages
When I was young, my mother read me a story about a wicked little girl. She read it to me and my two sisters. We sat curled against her on the couch and she read from the book on her lap. The lamp shone on us and there was a blanket over us. The girl in the story was beautiful and cruel. Because her mother was poor, she sent her daughter to work for rich people, who spoiled and petted her. The ric
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 349 pages
A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.
The 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
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
Dreams of My Russian Summers
Andrei Makine · 241 pages
A Frenchwoman's account of Russia before and after the 1917 revolution. She is Charlotte who came as a nurse in World War I and married a Russian lawyer. The story is told by her grandson who listened to her tales, fascinated by her power of observation.
The Spear Cuts Through Water
Simon Jimenez · 525 pages
The General in His Labyrinth
Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 306 pages
The Orchard Keeper
Cormac McCarthy · 246 pages
*The Orchard Keeper* tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
Jon McGregor · 281 pages
On a street in an unnamed town in the north of England, perfectly ordinary people are doing totally ordinary things - but then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening and no one who witnesses it will be quite the same again.
Always Coming Home
Ursula K. Le Guin · 544 pages
A master builder of faraway, fantastic worlds, Ursula K. Le Guin, at mid-career, found in her native California the inspiration for what was to be her greatest literary construction: nothing less than an entire ethnography of a future society, the Kesh, living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley. This Library of America edition of her 1985 classic Always Coming Home, prepared in close consultation w
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 189 pages
Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R
M Train
Patti Smith · 288 pages
M Train is a journey through eighteen "stations." It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafâe where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. We then travel across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin
The End of Days
Jenny Erpenbeck · 256 pages
Consists essentially of five "books," each of which leads to a different death for an unnamed woman protagonist. How could it all have gone differently? the narrator asks in the intermezzos between. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna, but her strange relationship with a boy leads to
The Starless Sea
Erin Morgenstern · 512 pages
**FAR BENEATH** the surface of the earth, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories. The entryways that lead to this sanctuary are often hidden, sometimes on forest floors, sometimes in private homes, sometimes in plain sight. But those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them. Zachary Ezra Rawlins is searc
Jazz
Toni Morrison · 229 pages
It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one... At last, at last, everything's ahead... Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff." But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among
Radiance
Catherynne M. Valente · 432 pages
Severin Unck's father is a famous director of Gothic romances in an alternate 1986 in which talking movies are still a daring innovation due to the patent-hoarding Edison family. Rebelling against her father's films of passion, intrigue, and spirits from beyond, Severin starts making documentaries, traveling through space and investigating the levitator cults of Neptune and the lawless saloons of
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel · 352 pages
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of "King Lear." Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a te