What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows · 278 pages
"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers." January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she's never met, a native of the island of Guernsey,
Empire Falls
Richard Russo · 483 pages
"Dexter County, Maine, and specifically the town of Empire Falls, has seen better days, and for decades, in fact, only a succession from bad to worse. One by one, its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan (presided over by the last scion's widow) now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. The working classes, meanwhile, continue to eke o
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Fannie Flagg · 403 pages
Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Ala
The Tea House On Mulberry Street
Sharon Owens · 323 pages
Cranford
Elizabeth Gaskell · 255 pages
Cranford was first serialized in Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The structureless nature of the stories, and the fact that Gaskell was busy writing her novel Ruth at the time the Cranford shorts were being published, suggests that she didn’t initially plan for Cranford to be a cohesive novel. The short vignettes follow the activities of the society in the fict
The Brightest Star in the Sky
Marian Keyes · 474 pages
At 66, Star Street in Dublin, someone is watching over the lives of the people living in its flats. But no one is aware of it – yet...One of them is ready to take the plunge and fall in love; another is torn between two very different lovers. For some, secrets they want to stay buried will come to light and for others, the unveiling of those secrets will have tragic consequences.Fate is on its way
The Casual Vacancy
J.K. Rowling · 512 pages
When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is no
South of Broad
Pat Conroy · 646 pages
The publishing event of the season: The one and only Pat Conroy returns, with a big, sprawling novel that is at once a love letter to Charleston and to lifelong friendship.Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local
A Wedding In December
Anita Shreve · 325 pages
Gathering to attend a wedding in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, seven former classmates find the reunion marked by the death of a spouse, a traumatic past event, a shocking secret, and health issues.
The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan · 332 pages
Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve
In the Unlikely Event
Judy Blume · 512 pages
In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and
All Change
Elizabeth Jane Howard · 572 pages
It is the 1950s and as the Cazalets' beloved matriarch, the Duchy, passes away, she takes with her the last remnants of a world of great houses and servants, of class and tradition in which the Cazalets have thrived. Louise, now divorced, becomes entangled in a painful affair; while Polly and Clary must balance marriage and motherhood with their own ideas and ambitions. Hugh and Edward, now in the
Cannery Row
John Steinbeck · 183 pages
Cannery Row is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, published in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California, on a street lined with sardine canneries that is known as Cannery Row. The story revolves around the people living there. Steinbeck revisited these characters and this milieu nine years later in his novel Sweet Thursday.
A Spool of Blue Thread
Anne Tyler · 384 pages
"From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author--now in the fiftieth year of her remarkable career--a brilliantly observed, joyful and wrenching, funny and true new novel that reveals, as only she can, the very nature of a family's life. "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July
Driftless
David Rhodes · 429 pages
The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties th
The Leftovers
Tom Perrotta · 355 pages
What if—whoosh, right now, with no explanation—a number of us simply vanished? Would some of us collapse? Would others of us go on, one foot in front of the other, as we did before the world turned upside down? That’s what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, who lost many of their neighbors, friends and lovers in the event known as the Sudden Departure, have to figure out. Because nothing has
Mink River
Brian Doyle · 319 pages
" ... Brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people"--Publisher description.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
James McBride · 614 pages
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared amb
The Jane Austen Book Club
Karen Joy Fowler · 296 pages
"In California's Central Valley, five women and one man join together to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens." "Dedicated Austen readers will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through this novel, but many readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, desp
The House on Willow Street
Cathy Kelly · 510 pages
"Tess used to be happy with her lot: she lives in the idyllic Irish coastal village, Avalon, with her teenage son, Zach and nine-year-old Kitty, and works in the local antiques shop. Her only regret in life is that everything went so horribly wrong with her first love. Then her marriage falls apart and her first love returns to Avalon. Suki, Tess's sister, fled Ireland years ago to marry politicia
The Rumor
Elin Hilderbrand · 374 pages
Madeline King and Grace Pancik are best friends and the envy of Nantucket for their perfect marriages, their beautiful kids, their Sunday night double dates with their devoted husbands. But this summer, something's changed, and if there's anything Nantucket likes better than cocktails on the beach at sunset, it's a good rumor. And rumor has it... that Madeline, a novelist, is battling writer's blo
Nineteen Minutes
Jodi Picoult · 586 pages
The startling and poignant story of the aftermath of a tragic high school shooting, from the bestselling author of My Sister's Keeper and The Pact.'Picoult makes us ponder the ambiguous relationships between love and lying, legality and morality; the strange ways repressed memories leak into the present.' Los Angeles TimesIntricately textured and rich with psychological and social insight, Jodi Pi