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 authorBoy, Snow, Bird
Helen Oyeyemi · 308 pages
This novel is a reimagining of the fairy tale Snow White recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity set in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty, the opposite of the life she has left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother
Until She Comes Home
Lori Roy · 338 pages
"In 1958 Detroit, on Alder Avenue, neighbors struggle to care for neighbors amid a city ripe with conflicts that threaten their peaceful street. Grace, Alder's only expectant mother, eagerly awaits her first born. Best friend Julia prepares to welcome twin nieces. And Malina sets the tone with her stylish dresses, tasteful home, and ironfisted stewardship of St. Alban's bake sale. Life erupts when
A Wild Sheep Chase
Haruki Murakami · 299 pages
It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn't realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum
Maud Martha
Gwendolyn Brooks · 180 pages
September 2003 marked the 50th anniversary of Maud Martha, the only novel published by esteemed poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Initially entitled "American Family Brown" the work would eventually come to symbolize some of Brooks' most provocative writing. In a novel that captures the essence of Black life, Brooks recognizes the beauty and strength that lies within each of us.
The Story of a Marriage
Andrew Sean Greer · 266 pages
A Today Show Summer Reads Pick A Washington Post Book of the Year "We think we know the ones we love." So Pearlie Cook begins her indirect, and devastating exploration of the mystery at the heart of every relationship--how we can ever truly know another person. It is 1953 and Pearlie, a dutiful young housewife, finds herself living in the Sunset District in San Francisco, caring not only
A Treacherous Paradise
Henning Mankell · 395 pages
Cold and poverty define Hanna Renstrom's childhood in remote northern Sweden, and in 1905, at nineteen, she boards a ship for Australia in hope of a better life. But none of her hopes--or fears--prepares her for the life she will lead. After two brief marriages, she finds herself a widow twice over, and the owner of a bordello in Portuguese East Africa, a world where colonialism and white supremac
Mudbound
Hillary Jordan · 335 pages
"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld
The Obelisk Gate
N.K. Jemisin · 440 pages
""Intricate and extraordinary."--New York Times on The Fifth Season (A New York Times Notable Book of 2015) The second novel in a new fantasy trilogy by Hugo, Nebula & World Fantasy Award nominated author N.K. Jemisin. THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS ... FOR THE LAST TIME. The season of endings grows darker, as civilization fades into the long cold night. Essun -- once Damaya, once Syenite, now ave
Caleb's Crossing
Geraldine Brooks · 369 pages
Growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans, Bethia Mayfield yearns for an education that is closed to her due to her gender. As soon as she can, she slips away to explore the island's glistening beaches and observes its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret friendship
Age of Iron
J.M. Coetzee · 198 pages
Mrs. Cullen, the narrator in this novel, is an elderly white woman dying of cancer in a country afflicted with its own mortal sickness. "In Cape Town, South Africa, an old woman is dying of cancer. A classics professor, Mrs. Curren has been opposed to the lies and brutality of apartheid all her life, but has lived insulated from its true horrors. Now she is suddenly forced to come to terms with
Snow Falling on Cedars
David Guterson · 424 pages
On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th
The Awakening
Kate Chopin · 190 pages
The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that
Jazz
Toni Morrison · 229 pages
It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one... At last, at last, everything's ahead... Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff." But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among
Child of All Nations
Pramoedya Ananta Toer · 318 pages
"Coming to grips with the oppression and injustice of the European regime in his country, Minke, [the Dutch-educated javaese writer] struggles to assert his voice and the voices of his people - but he is met at every turn by the corruption of those he trusted and by the tragedies that befall those he loves most."--Back cover.
Goodbye to Berlin
Christopher Isherwood · 256 pages
The sequel to Mr. Norris Changes Trains, this is another semi-autobiographical account of Isherwood’s experiences in pre-war Berlin. The author leads the reader on a thoroughly entertaining tour through the seedier side of a particularly decadent time in that city’s history.
I Have Some Questions for You
Rebecca Makkai · 465 pages
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named a Best Book of 2023 by The Washington Post, People, USA Today, NPR, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, The Boston Globe, CrimeReads and more “A twisty, immersive whodunit perfect for fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” —People "Spellbinding." —The New York Times Book Review "[An] irresistible literary page-turner." —The Boston Globe The riveting new n