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 Sound of Things Falling

Juan Gabriel Vasquez · 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
❤️

These Silent Woods

Kimi Cunningham Grant · 288 pages

A father and daughter living in the remote Appalachian mountains must reckon with the ghosts of their past in Kimi Cunningham Grant's These Silent Woods, a mesmerizing novel of suspense. No electricity, no family, no connection to the outside world. For eight years, Cooper and his young daughter, Finch, have lived in isolation in a remote cabin in the northern Appalachian woods. And that's exactly

Secret PastAtmosphericFamily SecretsFirst Person Narrator
❤️

The Pilot's Wife

Anita Shreve · 304 pages

Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time. As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to

Secret PastAviationAtmosphericFamily Secrets
❤️

After the Circus

Patrick Modiano · 197 pages

One of the hallmarks of French author Patrick Modiano's writing is a singular ability to revisit particular motifs and episodes, infusing each telling with new detail and emotional nuance. In this evocative novel the internationally acclaimed author takes up one of his most compelling themes: a love affair with a woman who disappears, and a narrator grappling with the mystery of a relationship sto

Secret PastAtmosphericLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
❤️

The Hired Man

Aminatta Forna · 293 pages

Gost is surrounded by mountains and fields of wild flowers. The summer sun burns. The winter brings freezing winds. Beyond the boundaries of the town an old house which has lain empty for years is showing signs of life. One of the windows, glass darkened with dirt, today stands open, and the lively chatter of English voices carries across the fallow fields. Laura and her teenage children have arri

AtmosphericFamily SecretsLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
❤️

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

Anton DiSclafani · 420 pages

Exiled to an equestrian boarding school in the South at the height of the Great Depression for her role in a family tragedy, strong-willed teen Thea Atwell grapples with painful memories while acclimating to the school's strict environment.

Secret PastFamily SecretsAtmosphericFirst Person Narrator
❤️

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte · 474 pages

The novel is set somewhere in the north of England. Jane's childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she acquires friends and role models but also suffers privations and oppression; her time as the governess of Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester; her ti

Secret PastFamily SecretsLiterary FictionAtmospheric
❤️

While I Was Gone

Sue Miller · 291 pages

Secret PastFamily SecretsLiterary FictionAtmospheric
❤️

Life Among Giants

Bill Roorbach · 346 pages

"David "Lizard" Hochmeyer is a star quarterback set on Princeton until the mysterious murder of his parents. As he and sister Kate struggle to cope, they find their lives crossing with prima ballerina Sylphide and her rock star husband, who inhabit the mansion across the pond from their Connecticut home.

AtmosphericFamily SecretsLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
❤️

The Hoarder

Jess Kidd · 352 pages

Secret PastFamily SecretsAtmosphericFirst Person Narrator
❤️

Broken Country

Clare Leslie Hall · 307 pages

*“The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”* Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel W

Secret PastFamily SecretsAtmosphericFirst Person Narrator
❤️

The Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafon · 486 pages

Barcelona, 1945—just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book

Secret PastFamily SecretsLiterary FictionAtmospheric
❤️

The Reader

Bernhard Schlink · 224 pages

Secret PastLiterary FictionFirst Person NarratorAtmospheric
🙂

Five Quarters of the Orange

Joanne Harris · 307 pages

When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy during the German occupation years ago. But the past and present are inextricably entwined, particularly in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise has inherited from her mother. And soon Framboise will reali

Secret PastAtmosphericFirst Person NarratorFamily Secrets
🙂

The Blithedale Romance

Nathaniel Hawthorne · 218 pages

A superb depiction of a utopian community that cannot survive the individual passions of its members. In language that is suggestive and often erotic, Nathaniel Hawthorne tells a tale of failed possibilities and multiple personal betrayals as he explores the contrasts between what his characters espouse and what they actually experience in an 'ideal' community. A theme of unrealized sexual possibi

Secret PastAtmosphericLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Fire in the Blood

Irene Nemirovsky · 156 pages

Secret PastFamily SecretsLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

The Other Story

Tatiana de Rosnay · 307 pages

"Vacationing at a luxurious Tuscan island resort, Nicolas Duhamel is hopeful that the ghosts of his past have finally been put to rest ... Now a bestselling author, when he was twenty-four years old, he stumbled upon a troubling secret about his family - a secret that was carefully concealed. In shock, Nicholas embarked on a journey to uncover the truth that took him from the Basque coast to St. P

Secret PastAtmosphericLiterary FictionFamily Secrets
🙂

Cimarron Rose

James Lee Burke · 347 pages

Former Texas Ranger Billy Holland, now a lawyer, is hired to defend a teenage boy accused of killing his girlfriend. It is a family affair of sorts, the man who hired Holland being the boy's stepfather. The real father is Holland.

Secret PastAtmosphericFamily SecretsFirst Person Narrator
🙂

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

Literary FictionAtmosphericFirst Person NarratorFamily Secrets
🙂

The Light Between Oceans

M.L. Stedman · 345 pages

"A novel set on a remote Australian island, where a childless couple live quietly running a lighthouse, until a boat carrying a baby washes ashore"--

Secret PastFamily SecretsAtmosphericLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Thirteenth Tale

Diane Setterfield · 424 pages

Sometimes, when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny. Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long.

Secret PastFirst Person NarratorAtmosphericLiterary Fiction
🙂

A Heart So White

Javier Marias · 279 pages

"A Heart So White chronicles with insistence the relentless power of the past. Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; each has always seemed comfortable with their friendly but distant orbits. Only when Juan marries (and his new wife begins to find much to talk about with Ranz) does his son consider the past anew, and begin to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy

Secret PastLiterary FictionFamily SecretsFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Season of Migration to the North

Tayeb Salih · 169 pages

"When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger -- the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the disturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven

Secret PastAtmosphericLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy · 320 pages

In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of his famed *Border Trilogy.* The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in th

Organized CrimeAtmosphericLiterary FictionWar Trauma
🙂

The Singer's Gun

Emily St. John Mandel · 287 pages

Everyone Anton Waker grew up with is corrupt. His parents deal in stolen goods and his first career is a partnership venture with his cousin Aria selling forged passports and social security cards to illegal aliens. Anton longs for a less questionable way of living in the world and by his late twenties has reinvented himself as a successful middle manager. Then a routine security check suggests th

Secret PastAtmosphericLiterary FictionNonlinear Narrative

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.