What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorAll the Little Live Things
Wallace Stegner · 345 pages
An Eastern couple retire to California in search of peace after the death of their wayward son, only to have their paradise shattered by painful reminders of the past.
Native Speaker
Chang-rae Lee · 349 pages
Korean-American Henry Park is a "surreptitious, B+ student of life, illegal alien, emotional alien, yellow peril: neo-American, stranger, follower, traitor, spy ..." or so says his wife, in the list she writes upon leaving him. Henry is forever uncertain of his place, a perpetual outsider looking at American culture from a distance. As a man of two worlds, he is beginning to fear that he has betra
Us Conductors
Sean Michaels · 347 pages
"In a finely woven series of flashbacks and correspondence, Lev Termen, the Russian scientist, inventor, and spy, tells the story of his life to his "one true love, " Clara Rockmore, the finest theremin player in the world. In the first half of the book, we learn of Termen's early days as a scientist in Leningrad during the Bolshevik Revolution, the acclaim he receives as the inventor of the there
A Widow for One Year
John Irving · 537 pages
Rabbit, Run
John Updike · 307 pages
*Rabbit, Run* is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in
The Snow Child
Eowyn Ivey · 389 pages
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-hai
Hikikomori and the Rental Sister
Jeff Backhaus · 246 pages
Estranged from the husband who cloistered himself in his bedroom three years earlier after a devastating tragedy, Silke hires a young Japanese woman to draw him back into the world by establishing a deeply intimate relationship with him.
The River Is Waiting
Wally Lamb · 451 pages
Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that's before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness
Sonata for Miriam
Linda Olsson · 279 pages
A haunting novel of loss, love, and human connection from the author of Astrid & VeronikaLinda Olsson's first novel, Astrid & Veronika, introduced readers to her gorgeous prose, and her extraordinary understanding of human relationships. With her second novel, she once again charts that terrain in a novel that also explores the significant impact of history on individual lives. In Sonata for Miria
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Rachel Joyce · 355 pages
Harold Fry has recently retired and now, he doesn't do very much. Even mowing the lawn, like his wife Maureen tells him to do, seems too much work for him. When, one day, he recieves a lettre in a pink envelope, this lazyness changes. In it, his collegue from long time ago, Queenie Hennessy, tells him she is going to die soon from a cancer in a hospice at the other end of England. Harold, at first
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 182 pages
Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate – a marvelous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period – which reveals a hero like no other – one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts. "There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to
The One-in-a-Million Boy
Monica Wood · 336 pages
Guitarist Quinn Porter chases gigs on the road, largely absent to his twice-ex-wife Belle and their odd, Guinness recordsobsessed son. When the boy dies suddenly, Quinn seeks forgiveness by completing the requirements for his son's unfinished Boy Scout badge. For seven Saturdays he does yard work for Ona Vitkus, the wily 104-year-old Lithuanian immigrant the boy had visited weekly. Despite himself
A Change Of Climate
Hilary Mantel · 342 pages
Set in Norfolk in 1980 but with flashbacks to South Africa and Bechuanaland of the 1960s. Ralph and Anna are "do-gooders". They run a trust for young people and take offenders into their home. But they harbour a secret: in Africa, years before, their son had been abducted, his body never found.
Ancient Light
John Banville · 256 pages
An actor in the twilight of his career reflects on a poignant first love affair at the age of fifteen with his best friend's mother and inexplicably lands a role opposite a famous but fragile actress who helps him come to an astonishing realization.
Lush Life
Richard Price · 464 pages
'So, what do you do?' Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter... But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he
The Snow Queen
Michael Cunningham · 272 pages
A heartbroken man turns to religion after seeing a vision in the sky above Central Park while his musician brother takes drugs he thinks will help him compose a ballad for his seriously ill wife.
The Weight of Him
Ethel Rohan · 326 pages
"At four hundred pounds, Billy Brennan can always count on food. From his earliest memories, he has loved food's colors, textures and tastes. The way flavors go off in his mouth. How food keeps his mind still and his bad feelings quiet. Food has always made everything better, until the day Billy's beloved son Michael takes his own life. Billy determines to make a difference in Michael's memory and
How High We Go in the Dark
Sequoia Nagamatsu · 296 pages
The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise
Julia Stuart · 312 pages
When Balthazar Jones is tasked with setting up an elaborate menagerie within the Tower of London's walls to house the many exotic animals gifted to the Queen, life at the Tower gets all the more interesting. Penguins escape, giraffes are stolen, and the Komodo dragon sends innocent people running for their lives. Balthazar is in charge and things are not exactly running smoothly. Then his wife Heb
The Paper House
Anna Spargo-Ryan · 304 pages
*And then I was pregnant, and we realised we had no space for a baby. We looked at all kinds of houses: big, new ones with columns and render; little cottages with beaten weatherboard; a yellow brick monstrosity with a paved yard where there should have been grass. But we were drawn to the rolling water. And our heart stayed behind when we left. Heather and Dave have found the perfect place to r
Everything I Never Told You
Celeste Ng · 300 pages
"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl
How to Read the Air
Dinaw Mengestu · 312 pages
Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas, the son of Ethiopian immigrants, sets out to retrace his mother and father's trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to his life in the America of today.
Say Nice Things About Detroit
Scott Lasser · 280 pages
The Planet of Junior Brown
Virginia Hamilton · 210 pages
Junior Brown, an overprotected three-hundred pound musical prodigy who's prone to having fantasies, and Buddy Clark, a loner who lives by his wits because he has no family whatsoever, have been on the hook from their eighth-grade classroom all semester. Most of the time they have been in the school building -- in a secret cellar room behind a false wall, where Mr. Pool, the janitor, has made a