What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorDouble Indemnity
James M. Cain · 144 pages
Walter Huff was an insurance salesman with an unfailing instinct for clients who might be in trouble, and his instinct led him to Phyllis Nirdlinger. Phyllis wanted to buy an accident policy on her husband. Then she wanted her husband to have an accident. Walter wanted Phyllis. To get her, he would arrange the perfect murder and betray everything he had ever lived for.
To Live
Yu Hua · 250 pages
An award-winning, internationally acclaimed Chinese bestseller, originally banned in China but recently named one of the last decade's ten most influential books there," "To Live tells the epic story of one man's transformation from the spoiled son of a rich landlord to an honorable and kindhearted peasant. After squandering his family's fortune in gambling dens and brothels, the young, deeply pen
Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee · 220 pages
At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless, shunned by his friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife. He retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding, where a brief visit becomes an extended stay as he tries to find meaning from the one remaining relationship. David attempts to relate to Lu
The Pearl
John Steinbeck · 118 pages
Based on a Mexican folktale, this is the story of a great pearl found by a poor fisherman, the sorrow it brought to his family, and how it was lost again.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy · 356 pages
Like many of Hardy’s novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge is set in the fictional county of Wessex in the mid 1800s. It begins with Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, drunk on rum, auctioning off his wife and baby daughter at a village fair. The next day, overcome with remorse, Henchard resolves to turn his life around. When we meet Henchard eighteen years later, temperance and hard work have mad
The Financier
Theodore Dreiser · 508 pages
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.
Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara · 301 pages
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian English is a man who squanders what fate gave him. He lives on the right side of the tracks, with a country
Wake in Fright
Kenneth Cook · 197 pages
The controller stood back. 'Right, ' he said. 'Spin 'em!' The man flipped the piece of wood and the coins spun up into the air above his head and dropped down on to the carpet. There was silence. Wake in Fright tells the tale of John Grant's journey into an alcoholic, sexual and spiritual nightmare.
The Drinker
Hans Fallada · 304 pages
An autobiographical novel written during the Second World War in Germany in 1944 during the author's confinement in a medical asylum. It is a self-portrait of an alcoholic and the effect of his behaviour on his surroundings, especially on his deteriorating marriage.
The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck · 316 pages
This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought
Cesar Birotteau
Honore de Balzac · 320 pages
The Vicar of Wakefield
Oliver Goldsmith · 214 pages
Though published in 1766, The Vicar of Wakefield was one of the most popular and widely-read books of the Victorian era. References to Vicar in Victorian literature abound: George Eliot, Austen, Dickens, Mary Shelly, Charlotte Brontë, Alcott, Goethe, and many more famous writers all mention Vicar in their books. The plot concerns the titular vicar, Charles Primrose, a mild-mannered and forgiving m
Cosmopolis
Don DeLillo · 224 pages
"Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town.". "His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a preside
Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction
Edith Wharton · 256 pages
Contains: [Ethan Frome](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL98501W/Ethan_Frome) The touchstone ; The last asset ; Xingu ; The other two.
Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Herman Melville · 420 pages
A classic of the sea, telling of the pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who defied capture.
House of Sand and Fog
Andre Dubus III · 365 pages
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.
The Long Way Home
Mariah Stewart · 426 pages
When her wealthy father's Ponzi scheme is exposed, Ellie Chapman loses everything--including her fiance e--but learns valuable lessons in both life and love when she comes to St. Dennis, Maryland to sell her late mother's house.
Lean On Pete
Willy Vlautin · 304 pages
Fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson wants a home, food on the table, and a high school he can attend for more than part of a year. But as the son of a single father working in warehouses across the Pacific Northwest, Charley's been pretty much on his own. When tragic events leave him homeless weeks after their move to Portland, Oregon, Charley seeks refuge in the tack room of a run-down horse track.