What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorReading 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
Everything in This Country Must
Colum McCann · 150 pages
The Master Butchers Singing Club
Louise Erdrich · 416 pages
What happens when a trained killer discovers, in the aftermath of war, that his true vocation is love? From the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of Love Medicine comes an enchanting, richly imagined world "where butchers sing like angels."
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.
The Lie
Helen Dunmore · 293 pages
"Cornwall, 1920, early spring. A young man stands on a headland, looking out to sea. He is back from the war, homeless and without family. Behind him lie the mud, barbed-wire entanglements and terror of the trenches. Behind him is also the most intense relationship of his life. Daniel has survived, but the horror and passion of the past seem more real than the quiet fields around him. He is about
Snow Hunters
Paul Yoon · 196 pages
It is 1954 and the story traces the extraordinary journey of Yohan, who defects from his country at the end of the Korean War, leaving his friends and family behind to seek a new life on the coast of Brazil. Throughout his years there, four people slip in and out of his life: Kiyoshi, the Japanese tailor for whom he works; Peixe, the groundskeeper at the town church; and two vagrant children named
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Anthony Marra · 416 pages
In a rural village in December 2004 Chechnya, a failed doctor Akhmed harbors the traumatized 8-year-old daughter of a father abducted by Russian forces and treats a series of wounded rebels and refugees while exploring the shared past that binds him to the child. "In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle
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
Ghost Moth
Michele Forbes · 252 pages
Northern Ireland, 1949. Katherine must choose between George Bedford - solid, reliable, devoted George - and Tom McKinley, who makes her feel alive. The reverberations of that summer - of the passions that were spilled, the lies that were told and the bargains that were made - still clamour to be heard in 1969. Northern Ireland has become a tinderbox but tragedy also lurks closer to home. As Kathe
As It Is in Heaven
Niall Williams · 310 pages
"Stephen Griffin is a shy and lonely schoolteacher in the West of Ireland, and his father Philip is a tailor whose wife and daughter died tragically in a car crash fifteen years ago. While Stephen yearns for love and an escape from the monotony of the classroom, his father's only desire is to be reunited with his family in heaven. The appearance of Gabriella Castoldi, a spellbinding musician, turn
The Time of the Doves
Merce Rodoreda · 204 pages
Araby
James Joyce
A young boy in love with his friend’s sister promises to bring her back a gift from the Araby bazaar when he learns she cannot go. It is only later that night that the boy is able to make it to the bazaar and by the time he arrives, most of the stalls are closed and only late night activities are taking place between young women and men.
Painter of Silence
Georgina Harding · 312 pages
The Evening Chorus
Helen Humphreys · 294 pages
The story of James, a pilot struggling to survive in a German POW camp, his young war-bride, Rose, back in England trying to make sense of her life, and his sister, whose own story is also rewritten by the tragedies of WWII.
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.
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
W.B. Yeats
A Pigeon and a Boy
Meir Shalev · 311 pages
During the 1948 War of Independence--a time when pigeons are still used to deliver battlefield messages--a gifted young pigeon handler is mortally wounded. In the moments before his death, he dispatches one last pigeon, carrying his extraordinary gift to the girl he has loved since adolescence. Intertwined with this story is the contemporary tale of Yair Mendelsohn, who has his own legacy from the
The Story of Lucy Gault
William Trevor · 227 pages
"Captain Gault had seen off the three intruders easily enough. They had come in the night with the intention of firing the house, but a single shot had sent them scuttling back into the darkness. One, though, had been wounded and for that the Gaults were not forgiven: sooner or later there would be trouble again. Other big-house families had been driven out - the Morells from Clashmore, the Gouver
The Stone Carvers
Jane Urquhart · 396 pages
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
Return to Killybegs
Sorj Chalandon · 276 pages
Tyrone Meehan, a man vilified as an informer, ekes out his days in Donegal, waiting for his killers to come.
All Our Names
Dinaw Mengestu · 268 pages
Amongst Women
John McGahern · 192 pages
Moran is an old Republican, a veteran of the Irish Civil War. His old age, its rhythm and shape, is dominated by his three daughters. It is they who revive the custom of celebrating Monaghan Day and it through their lives that we discover the story of his life.
The Thing About December
Donal Ryan · 207 pages
Contemporary fiction. He heard Daddy one time saying he was a grand quiet boy to Mother when he thought Johnsey couldn't hear them talking. Mother must have been giving out about him being a gom and Daddy was defending him. Set over the course of one year of Johnsey's life, this is a tale of a lonely man struggling to make sense of a world moving faster than he is.