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 Ballad of a Small Player

Lawrence Osborne · 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
❤️

Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 349 pages

A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.

AddictionAtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
❤️

A Far Better Thing

H.G. Parry · 416 pages

AddictionAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Gather

Kenneth M. Cadow · 325 pages

Publisher Annotation: A resourceful teenager in rural Vermont struggles to hold on to the family home while his mom recovers from addiction in this striking debut novel.

AddictionAtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
❤️

Shantaram

Gregory David Roberts · 936 pages

Un prófugo de una prisión de alta seguridad en Australia y llega a Bombay dejando tras de sí toda su vida anterior: una ex - esposa y una hija de la cual ha perdido su custodia. Su nombre es Lin, pero pronto será conocido como Shantaram, el hombre de la paz de Dios. En Bombay conoce a Prabaker, su guía hindú, poseedor de una eterna sonrisa que le hace ganarse a todo el mundo. Prabaker le enseña a

AddictionAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Long Goodbye

Raymond Chandler · 324 pages

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

AddictionAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenAnti-Hero
❤️

Sabrina & Corina

Kali Fajardo-Anstine · 212 pages

AddictionLiterary FictionAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
❤️

The Silver Book

Olivia Laing · 256 pages

AtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFall From Grace
🙂

The Demon

Hubert Selby Jr. · 312 pages

AddictionLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFall From Grace
🙂

Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel · 432 pages

The sequel to Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenAtmosphericFall From Grace
🙂

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver · 159 pages

In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.

AddictionLiterary FictionAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
🙂

The Gambler

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 162 pages

In the fictional town of Roulettenberg, Germany, a Russian tutor to the children of a seemingly wealthy general is enticed to play roulette at the local casino. First playing for others (including his beloved Polina Alexandrovna), he soon gets a taste for the experience himself, which can lead in only one direction. Dostoevsky wrote this story based at least partially on personal experience. Aft

AddictionCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionFall From Grace
🙂

Women

Charles Bukowski · 297 pages

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that woul

AddictionLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenAnti-Hero
🙂

Titus Groan

Mervyn Peake · 512 pages

Literary FictionAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenFall From Grace
🙂

Bad News

Edward St. Aubyn · 216 pages

AddictionLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenAnti-Hero
🙂

Grendel

John Gardner · 174 pages

The first and most terrifying monster in English literature, from the great early epic Beowulf, tells his own side of the story in this frequently banned book. This classic and much lauded retelling of Beowulf follows the monster Grendel as he learns about humans and fights the war at the center of the Anglo Saxon classic epic. This is the book William Gass called "one of the finest of our contem

AtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenAnti-Hero
🙂

The Power of the Dog

Thomas Savage · 283 pages

First published in 1967, Thomas Savage's western novel about two brothers and the competition between them when one marries now includes an afterword by Annie Proulx.

AtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenAnti-Hero
🙂

Where All Light Tends to Go

David Joy · 289 pages

"Set in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves"--

AddictionAtmosphericLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
🙂

The Vampire Armand

Anne Rice · 452 pages

The previous volume of the Vampire Chronicles, Memnoch the Devil, was called 'a modern Paradise Lost' by the Washington Post. Taking the Vampire Lestat from fiction into legend, it left him lying in a New Orleans convent, at the edge of death. Magnificent and electrifying, this new volume in the Vampire Chronicles returns to the glittering story of Armand, mesmerizing leader of the vampire coven a

AtmosphericCharacter-DrivenAnti-HeroFall From Grace
🙂

The Temporary Gentleman

Sebastian Barry · 310 pages

"In this highly anticipated new novel, Irishman Jack McNulty is a "temporary gentleman"--An Irishman whose commission in the British army in World War II was never permanent. Sitting in his lodgings in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, he's writing the story of his life with desperate urgency. He cannot take one step further without examining all the extraordinary events that he has seen. A lifetime of war a

AddictionLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMale Lead
🙂

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

村上春樹 · 416 pages

AtmosphericLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMale Lead
🙂

Rabbit, Run

John Updike · 307 pages

*Rabbit, Run* is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenFall From GraceAnti-Hero
🙂

Fourth of July Creek

Smith Henderson · 480 pages

"After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral eleven-year-old boy living in the Montana wilderness, social worker Pete Snow comes face-to-face with the boy's profoundly disturbed father, Jeremiah. With courage and caution, Pete slowly earns a measure of trust from this paranoid survivalist itching for a final conflict that will signal the coming End Times. But as Pete's own

AddictionAtmosphericLiterary FictionMale Lead
🙂

Eyrie

Tim Winton · 439 pages

"An exhilarating new book from Australia's most acclaimed writer Tim Winton is Australia's most decorated and beloved literary novelist. Short-listed twice for the Booker Prize and the winner of a record four Miles Franklin Awards for Best Australian Novel, he has a gift for language virtually unrivaled among English-language novelists. His work is both tough and tender, primordial and new--always

Literary FictionAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenFall From Grace
🙂

Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi · 320 pages

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the

AddictionLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose

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.