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🧲 Books like this

Butcher's Crossing

John Williams · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Canada

Richard Ford · 420 pages

After his parents are arrested and imprisoned for robbing a bank, fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is taken in by Arthur Remlinger who, unbeknownst to Dell, is hiding a dark and violent nature that interferes with Dell's quest to find grace and peace on the prairie of Saskatchewan.

Loss of InnocenceBleakSparse ProseSnow and Ice
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 174 pages

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Iv

BleakSurvival StorySnow and IceSparse Prose
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White Hunger

Aki Ollikainen · 136 pages

"1867: a year of devastating famine in Finland. Marja, a farmer's wife from the north, sets off on foot through the snow with her two young children. Their goal: St Petersburg, where people say there is bread. Others are also heading south, just as desperate to survive. Ruuni, a boy she meets, seems trustworthy. But can anyone really help?"--Back cover.

BleakSparse ProseSnow and IceSurvival Story
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For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway · 471 pages

High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco's rebels.

Loss of InnocenceBleakSparse ProseSurvival Story
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I Who Have Never Known Men

Jacqueline Harpman · 207 pages

A work of fantasy, I Who Have Never Known Men is the haunting and unforgettable account of a near future on a barren earth where women are kept in underground cages guarded by uniformed groups of men. It is narrated by the youngest of the women, the only one with no memory of what the world was like before the cages, who must teach herself, without books or sexual contact, the essential human emot

BleakSparse ProseSurvival StoryLoss of Innocence
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The Book of Aron

Jim Shepard · 272 pages

Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar young boy whose family is driven from the countryside into the Warsaw Ghetto. As his family is slowly stripped away from him, Aron and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives, smuggling and trading things through the "quarantine walls" to keep their people alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police (not t

Loss of InnocenceBleakSurvival StoryLiterary Fiction
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All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque · 236 pages

This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. These young men become enthusiastic soldiers, but their world of duty, culture, and progress breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the hatred that meaninglessly pits young men of the s

Loss of InnocenceBleakSparse ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Homesman

Glendon Swarthout

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All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy · 301 pages

*All the Pretty Horses* is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Along with *The Crossing* (1994), and C*ities of the Plain* (19

Loss of InnocenceBleakSurvival StoryLiterary Fiction
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To Build a Fire

Jack London · 48 pages

A man travels across the Yukon with only a dog as his companion. He believes he has all the skill and preparations ready to survive it.

BleakSparse ProseSurvival StorySnow and Ice
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A Meal In Winter

Hubert Mingarelli · 138 pages

In the Polish countryside, during the war, three German soldiers are ordered to track down Jews for execution. Having time to contemplate the mission, their differing sympathies begin to splinter the group.

BleakSparse ProseSnow and IceLiterary Fiction
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The North Water

Ian McGuire · 336 pages

The Volunteer, a nineteenth-century Yorkshire whaling ship, becomes the stage for a confrontation between brutal harpooner Henry Drax and ex-army surgeon Patrick Sumner, the ship's medic, during a violent, ill-fated voyage to the Arctic.

BleakSurvival StorySnow and IceLiterary Fiction
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A Childhood

Jona Oberski · 116 pages

A rediscovered masterpiece: an unblinking view of the Holocaust through a child's eyes. Told from the perspective of a child slowly awakening to the atrocities surrounding him, Childhood is a searing story of the Holocaust that no reader will soon forget. As five-year-old Jona waits with his mother and father to emigrate from Nazi-occupied Amsterdam to Palestine, they are awakened at night, put on

Loss of InnocenceSparse ProseBleakLiterary Fiction
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Out of the Dust

Karen Hesse · 235 pages

"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ." A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands. To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. Wh

BleakLoss of InnocenceSurvival StorySparse Prose
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To Live

Yu Hua · 250 pages

An award-winning, internationally acclaimed Chinese bestseller, originally banned in China but recently named one of the last decade's ten most influential books there," "To Live tells the epic story of one man's transformation from the spoiled son of a rich landlord to an honorable and kindhearted peasant. After squandering his family's fortune in gambling dens and brothels, the young, deeply pen

BleakSurvival StorySparse ProseLiterary Fiction
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Kolyma Tales

Varlam Shalamov · 222 pages

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Almost Transparent Blue

Ryu Murakami · 128 pages

Almost Transparent Blue (限りなく透明に近いブルー Kagirinaku Tōmei ni Chikai Burū, "Almost Infinitely Transparent Blue") is a 1976 novel, written by Japanese author Ryū Murakami, that features a portrait of narrator Ryū and his friends trapped in a cycle of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll during the 1970s.

Loss of InnocenceBleakSparse ProseLiterary Fiction
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Lord of the Flies

William Golding · 243 pages

Lord of the Flies is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize–winning British author William Golding. The book focuses on a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. The novel has been generally well r

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The Birthday Boys

Beryl Bainbridge · 189 pages

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Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak · 542 pages

***This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.*** One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. ***The book quickly became an international be

Snow and IceBleakSurvival StoryLiterary Fiction
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Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis · 208 pages

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope. Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless

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Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

Kenzaburo Oe · 189 pages

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The Painted Bird

Jerzy Kosinski · 251 pages

Loss of InnocenceBleakSurvival StoryLiterary Fiction
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Giants in the Earth

O.E. Rolvaag · 560 pages

BleakSurvival StorySnow and IceLiterary Fiction

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