What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorMemoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden · 456 pages
A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a n
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
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery · 325 pages
EA novel by the French professor of philosophy Muriel Barbery. The book centers on a working-class concierge of an upscale apartment building in Paris, Renee Michel. She is an auto-didact of immense learning who deliberately conceals her intelligence. Her secret is discovered by a young resident of the building named Paloma. The novel is narrated alternately by each of these two characters. Fir
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
The Guest Cat
Takashi Hiraide · 142 pages
The Guest Cat is a subtly moving novel that conveys deeply felt ways of being. Two writers, a young couple, enjoy their quiet cottage in a leafy part of Tokyo: they work at home as freelance editors. One day a cat invites herself into their small kitchen. She is a beautiful creature. She leaves, but comes again, and then again and again. New, small joys, radiated by the fleeting loveliness of life
The Sound of the Mountain
Yasunari Kawabata · 276 pages
"By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo's life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the sti
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Aimee Bender · 345 pages
The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t
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.
The Three-Cornered World
Soseki Natsume · 184 pages
The story of an artist who retreats to a country resort hotel and becomes involved in a series of mysterious encounters.
Foster
Claire Keegan · 108 pages
A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she will return home. In the strangers' house she finds affection she has not known before, and slowly she begins to blossom in their care. But when a secret is suddenly revealed, she realizes how fragile her idyll is.
The Garden of Evening Mists
Tan Twan Eng · 352 pages
"On a mountain above the clouds, in the central highlands of Malaya lived the man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.” Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about him, but a war would come, and a decade would pass before she travels up to the Garden of Evening Mists to see him, in 1951. A survivor of a brutal Japanese camp, she has spent the last few years
The Age of Miracles
Karen Thompson Walker · 304 pages
The coming-of-age story of young Julia, whose world is thrown into upheaval when it is discovered that the Earth's rotation has suddenly begun to slow, posing a catastrophic threat to all life.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier · 248 pages
This book "centres on Vermeer's prosperous household in Delft in the 1660s. The appointment of the quiet, perceptive heroine of the novel, the servant Griet, gradually throws the household into turmoil as Vermeer and Griet become increasingly intimate, an increasingly tense situation that culminates in her working for Vermeer as his assistant, and ultimately sitting for him as a model. Chevalier d
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel · 352 pages
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of "King Lear." Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a te
Water Moon
Samantha Sotto Yambao · 384 pages
**A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel.** On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life
Family Happiness
Leo Tolstoy · 176 pages
Short Stories. A selection of Tolstoy's greatest short works in a beautiful, new package.
The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Dominic Smith · 344 pages
The Unmaking of June Farrow
Adrienne Young · 320 pages
By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
Paulo Coelho · 210 pages
"The story of a young Spanish woman, Pilar, and her encounter with her lost love, an unnamed spiritual seeker who comes to worship the feminine face of God. Clarke's translation is, as usual, somewhat hurried and condensed as if he's impatient with Coelho's admittedly belabored and self-consciously poetical style"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
The Tie That Binds
Kent Haruf · 246 pages
Colorado, January 1977. Eighty-year-old Edith Goodnough lies in a hospital bed, IV taped to the back of her hand, police officer at her door. She is charged with murder. The clues: a sack of chicken feed slit with a knife, a milky-eyed dog tied outdoors one cold afternoon. The motives: the brutal business of farming and a family code of ethics as unforgiving as the winter prairie itself. In his c