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The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

Wayne Johnston · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

David Mitchell · 479 pages

The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, decei

IslandSprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueLiterary Fiction
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All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

Writer ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
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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

Sprawling EpicIslandLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver · 528 pages

In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico-from a coastal

Writer ProtagonistSprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueLiterary Fiction
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A Place of Greater Safety

Hilary Mantel · 816 pages

A spellbinding, epic novel which recounts the events between the fall of the Ancient Regime and the peak of the Terror, as seen through the eyes of the French Revolution's three protagonists – Georges-Jacques Danton, Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, men whose mix of ambition, idealism, and ego helped unleash the darker side of the Revolution's ideals and brought them eventually to th

Sprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Green Dolphin Street

Elizabeth Goudge · 507 pages

IslandSprawling EpicHistorical FictionMultiple POV
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Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak · 542 pages

***This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.*** One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. ***The book quickly became an international be

Sprawling EpicLiterary FictionHistorical FictionMultiple POV
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Bosnian Chronicle

Ivo Andric · 438 pages

Political IntrigueSprawling EpicLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Exodus

Leon Uris · 626 pages

The lives of many people were involved in the long-dreamed-of birth of the new Israeli nation. A novel of Israel.

Sprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueIslandHistorical Fiction
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon · 639 pages

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar

Sprawling EpicWriter ProtagonistLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Sprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Euphoria

Lily King · 272 pages

"English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husban

Writer ProtagonistIslandLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Children of the Arbat

Anatoli Rybakov · 685 pages

Sprawling EpicLiterary FictionHistorical FictionMultiple POV
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Sprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionMultiple POV
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War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy · 716 pages

War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. The novel begins in the year 1805 during the reign of Tsar Alexander I and leads up to the 1812 French invasion of Russia by Napoleon. The era of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), when t

Sprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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The System of the World

Neal Stephenson · 892 pages

'Tis done.The world is a most confused and unsteady place -- especially London, center of finance, innovation, and conspiracy -- in the year 1714, when Daniel Waterhouse makes his less-than-triumphant return to England's shores. Aging Puritan and Natural Philosopher, confidant of the high and mighty and contemporary of the most brilliant minds of the age, he has braved the merciless sea and an ass

Sprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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Be Careful What You Wish For

Jeffrey Archer · 400 pages

"Be Careful What You Wish For opens with Harry Clifton and his wife Emma rushing to learn the fate of their son Sebastian, who has been in a fatal car accident. But who died, Sebastian or his best friend? When Ross Buchanan is forced to resign as chairman of the Barrington Shipping Company, Emma Clifton wants to replace him. But Don Pedro Martinez intends to install his puppet, Alex Fisher, in ord

Sprawling EpicWriter ProtagonistPolitical IntrigueHistorical Fiction
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Felix Holt: The Radical

George Eliot · 440 pages

Two men vying for the hand of Esther, a young woman of charm and virtue, are Felix Holt, an idealistic young artisan, and Harold Transome, the intelligent heir to an estate. She is drawn to Holt yet has dreams of marrying into a life of refinement.

Sprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Q

Luther Blissett, Wu Ming · 653 pages

In 1517, Martin Luther nails his ninety-five theses demanding reform of the Catholic Church to the door of Wittenburg Cathedral, setting off a period of upheaval, war, civil war and violence we now know as the Reformation. In this age devastated by wars of religion, a young theology student adopts the cause of the heretics and the disinherited. Across the chessboard of Europe, from the German p

Sprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueHistorical FictionMultiple POV
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Creation

Gore Vidal · 574 pages

"The hero-narrator, Cyrus Spitama, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster, is brought up in a fifth-century B.C. Persian court and educated with his closest friend, Xerxes, who is destined to become master of the empire that stretches from India to the Mediterranean. As an ambassador for Xerxes, Cyrus embarks on journeys far beyond the boundaries of the known world, seeking wealth and trade routes.".

Sprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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The Godfather

Mario Puzo · 447 pages

The Godfather is a crime novel by American author Mario Puzo. Originally published in 1969 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, the novel details the story of a fictional Mafia family in New York City (and Long Beach, New York), headed by Vito Corleone. Puzo's dedication for The Godfather is "For Anthony Cleri". The novel's epigraph is by the French author Honoré de Balzac: "Behind every great fortune there is

Sprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueMultiple POVHistorical Fiction
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The Labyrinth of the Spirits

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Sprawling EpicWriter ProtagonistHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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The Children's Book

A.S. Byatt · 620 pages

Shortlisted for the Man Booker PrizeA spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, from the Booker Prize--winning author of Possession, that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children's book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.When Olive Wellwood's oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip ske

Sprawling EpicWriter ProtagonistLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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A Division of the Spoils

Paul Scott · 608 pages

Sprawling EpicPolitical IntrigueLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

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