AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

The Woman on the Stairs

Bernhard Schlink · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

The Twin

Gerbrand Bakker · 288 pages

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorElderly Protagonist
❤️

The Horse's Mouth

Joyce Cary · 311 pages

Painter hero, the charming and larcenous Gulley Jimson, has an insatiable genius for creation and a no less remarkable appetite for destruction. Is he a great artist? a has-been? or an exhausted, drunken ne'er-do-well? He is without doubt a visionary, and as he criss-crosses London in search of money and inspiration the world as seen though his eyes appears with a newly outrageous and terrible bea

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorElderly Protagonist
❤️

The Song of Hartgrove Hall

Natasha Solomons · 400 pages

"A captivating novel that evokes the author's New York Times bestseller The House at Tyneford Natasha Solomons's breathtaking new novel has it all: a love triangle, family obligations, and rediscovering joy in the face of grief, all set against the alluring backdrop of an English country estate perfect for fans of Downton Abbey It's a terrible thing to covet your brother's girl New Year's Eve, Dor

Character-DrivenFirst Person NarratorLiterary FictionElderly Protagonist
❤️

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenSparse ProseFirst Person Narrator
❤️

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

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorElderly Protagonist
❤️

Exit Ghost

Philip Roth · 304 pages

After eleven years of solitude working on his New England mountain as a writer, Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York to confront a turbulent city in the wake of September 11, as well as the aging Amy Bellette, one-time muse to his first literary hero, E.I. Lonoff.

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorSparse Prose
❤️

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

James Baldwin · 406 pages

At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorArtist Protagonist
❤️

An Artist of the Floating World

Kazuo Ishiguro · 208 pages

As Japan rebuilds her cities after the calamity of World War II, the celebrated painter Masuji Ono should be enjoying a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to a life and career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism, a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity.

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorElderly Protagonist
❤️
Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorSparse Prose
❤️

Wildlife

Richard Ford · 169 pages

The story of Joe, a sixteen-year-old boy and his family who moved to Montana, in 1960. There their lives changed in ways they could not have anticipated.

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorSparse Prose
❤️

Tirra Lirra by the River

Jessica Anderson · 160 pages

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionFirst Person NarratorArtist Protagonist
❤️
Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenLove TriangleFirst Person Narrator
❤️

Sputnik Sweetheart

Haruki Murakami · 224 pages

"The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitments - until she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated businesswoman. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakami's surreal ye

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenSparse ProseFirst Person Narrator
❤️

The Gun

Fuminori Nakamura

"On a nighttime walk along a Tokyo riverbank, a young man named Nishikawa stumbles on a dead body, besides which is lying a gun. From the moment Nishikawa makes the decision to take the gun, the world around him blurs. Knowing he possesses the gun brings an intoxicating sense of purpose to his dull university life. But Nishikawa's personal entanglements are becoming unexpectedly complicated: he fi

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorSparse Prose
❤️

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway · 251 pages

Hemingway's profile of the Lost Generation captures life among the expatriates on Paris' Left Bank during the 1920s, the brutality of bullfighting in Spain, and the moral and spiritual dissolution of a generation.

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
❤️

The Cunning Man

Robertson Davies · 469 pages

Dr. Jonathan Hullah, a former police surgeon with "a high degree of cunning," is shocked when St. Aidan's Father Hobbes drops dead during church services. What made the good--and perfectly healthy--clergyman die so suddenly? To solve the mystery, Dr. Hullah whisks us on a fascinating tour of his own rich and highly observant life.

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorElderly Protagonist
❤️

The Good Doctor

Damon Galgut · 219 pages

A taut, intense tale of the dashed hopes of the post-apartheid era and the small betrayals that doom a friendship, The Good Doctor is an extraordinary parable of the corruption of the flesh and spirit. It assures Damon Galgut's place as a major international talent. When Laurence Waters arrives at his new post at a deserted rural hospital, staff physician Frank Eloff is instantly suspicious. Laure

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorSparse Prose
❤️

In Love

Alfred Hayes · 213 pages

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorSparse Prose
❤️

In the Wake

Per Petterson · 208 pages

Following an accident that ended the lives of his family, a novelist struggles with survivor's guilt and writer's block while limiting his human contacts to a Kurdish neighbor and a woman he glimpses in a flat across the road.

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
❤️

Ghachar Ghochar

Vivek Shanbhag

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorSparse Prose
❤️

The Lake

Banana Yoshimoto · 188 pages

While *The Lake* shows off many of the features that have made Banana Yoshimoto famous—a cast of vivid and quirky characters, simple yet nuanced prose, a tight plot with an upbeat pace—it’s also one of the most darkly mysterious books she’s ever written. It tells the tale of a young woman who moves to Tokyo after the death of her mother, hoping to get over her grief and start a career as a grap

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorSparse Prose
❤️

I Loved You More

Tom Spanbauer · 466 pages

Tom Spanbauer’s first novel in seven years is a love story triangle akin to The Marriage Plot and Freedom, only with a gay main character who charms gays and straights alike. I Loved You More is a rich, expansive tale of love, sex, and heartbreak, covering twenty-five years in the life of a striving, emotionally wounded writer. In New York, Ben forms a bond of love with his macho friend and foil,

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionFirst Person NarratorMale Lead
❤️

Last Evenings on Earth

Roberto Bolano · 224 pages

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionFirst Person NarratorSparse Prose
❤️

Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

Shehan Karunatilaka · 416 pages

Retired sportswriter W.G. Karunasena is dying. He will spend his final months drinking arrack, making his wife unhappy, ignoring his son, and tracking down Pradeep S. Mathew, a spin bowler who has mysteriously disappeared.

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorElderly Protagonist

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.