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🧲 Books like this

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Dai Sijie · 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
❤️

The Story of a New Name

Elena Ferrante · 480 pages

In 2012, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker’s James Wood described as “large, captivating, amiably peopled...a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal,” F

BildungsromanComing of AgeBookishLiterary Fiction
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The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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In One Person

John Irving · 448 pages

A New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect," a phrase first used by John Ir

BildungsromanComing of AgeBookishLiterary Fiction
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Tipping the Velvet

Sarah Waters · 480 pages

Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-h

BildungsromanComing of AgeHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain · 330 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith · 443 pages

The beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchant

BildungsromanComing of AgeBookishHistorical Fiction
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The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver · 528 pages

In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico-from a coastal

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Looking for Alaska

John Green · 262 pages

Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Ala

BildungsromanComing of AgeBookishRebellion Against Authority
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Demian

Hermann Hesse · 166 pages

A young man awakens to selfhood and to a world of possibilities beyond the conventions of his upbringing in Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s beloved novel Demian. Emil Sinclair is a quiet boy drawn into a forbidden yet seductive realm of petty crime and defiance. His guide is his precocious, mysterious classmate Max Demian, who provokes in Emil a search for self-discovery and spiritual fulfillme

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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A Separate Peace

John Knowles · 196 pages

Gene Forrester looks back fifteen years to a World War II year in which he and his best friend were roommates in a New hampshire boarding school.

Coming of AgeBildungsromanLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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David Copperfield

Charles Dickens · 742 pages

Coming of AgeBildungsromanLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Summer of '42

Herman Raucher · 251 pages

One summer in the life of a 15-year old boy.

BildungsromanComing of AgeFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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Anne of Green Gables

L.M. Montgomery · 308 pages

Anne, an eleven-year-old orphan, is sent by mistake to live with a lonely, middle-aged brother and sister on a Prince Edward Island farm and proceeds to make an indelible impression on everyone around her.

BildungsromanComing of AgeBookishHistorical Fiction
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky · 216 pages

Charlie writes letters to an unknown mail recipient, detailing his struggles with high school, family, and finding his place in the world. Full of beautiful quotes and written with such sincerity, this is a book that makes the reader reflect on their purpose in life, while simultaneously reminding us about the power music, friendships, and "feeling infinite" can have on our life. Read this book.

BildungsromanComing of AgeBookishFirst Person Narrator
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An Unfinished Season

Ward Just · 256 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Life: An Exploded Diagram

Mal Peet · 400 pages

In 1960s Norfolk, England, seventeen-year-old Clem Ackroyd lives with his mother and grandmother in a tiny cottage, but his life is transformed when he falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy farmer in this tale that flashes back through the stories of three generations.

BildungsromanComing of AgeHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss · 667 pages

My name is Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as "quothe." Names are important as they tell you a great deal about a person. I've had more names than anyone has a right to. The Adem call me Maedre. Which, depending on how it's spoken, can mean The Flame, The Thunder, or The Broken Tree. "The Flame" is obvious if you've ever seen me. I have red hair, bright. If I had been born a couple of hundr

BildungsromanComing of AgeBookishFirst Person Narrator
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Metroland

Julian Barnes · 224 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Tom's Crossing

Mark Z. Danielewski · 1,232 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Memoirs 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

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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The Reader

Bernhard Schlink · 224 pages

BookishComing of AgeLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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The Catcher in the Rye

Jerome David Salinger · 277 pages

With the author's recent passing, the classic novel about young Holden Caulfield's disillusionment with the adult world and its phoniness will only rise in popularity--and controversy, since it is a favorite target of censors, who often cite profan

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionRebellion Against Authority
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Deep Rivers

Jose Maria Arguedas · 264 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Viper in the fist

Herve Bazin · 183 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator

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