What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Three-Cornered World
Soseki Natsume · 184 pages
The story of an artist who retreats to a country resort hotel and becomes involved in a series of mysterious encounters.
Strange Weather in Tokyo
Hiromi Kawakami · 179 pages
"Tsukiko, thirty-eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, "Sensei" in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him "Sensei" ("Teacher"). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship-traced by Kawakami's gentle hints at the changing seasons-develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of
The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield · 424 pages
Sometimes, when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny. Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long.
The Garden of Evening Mists
Tan Twan Eng · 352 pages
"On a mountain above the clouds, in the central highlands of Malaya lived the man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.” Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about him, but a war would come, and a decade would pass before she travels up to the Garden of Evening Mists to see him, in 1951. A survivor of a brutal Japanese camp, she has spent the last few years
1Q84
Haruki Murakami · 925 pages
The novel is a sub-melodramatic sentimental metafictional love story in a ficticious world with two moons in the sky, a thriller packed with cults, assassinations and grotesque sex (newyorkobserver). The title is a play on the Japanese pronunciation of the year 1984 of George Orwell. The novel was longlisted for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize and placed No. 2 in Amazon.com's top books of the y
The Guest Cat
Takashi Hiraide · 142 pages
The Guest Cat is a subtly moving novel that conveys deeply felt ways of being. Two writers, a young couple, enjoy their quiet cottage in a leafy part of Tokyo: they work at home as freelance editors. One day a cat invites herself into their small kitchen. She is a beautiful creature. She leaves, but comes again, and then again and again. New, small joys, radiated by the fleeting loveliness of life
The Samurai's Garden
Gail Tsukiyama · 211 pages
On the eve of the Second World War, a young Chinese man is sent to his family's summer home in Japan to recover from tuberculosis. He will rest, swim in the salubrious sea, and paint in the brilliant shoreside light. It will be quiet and solitary. But he meets four local residents - a lovely young Japanese girl and three older people. What then ensues is a tale that readers will find at once clas
The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende · 433 pages
"The unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world's most gifted and imaginative storytellers. The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a
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.
The Great Glass Sea
Josh Weil · 474 pages
Twin brothers Yarik and Dima have been inseparable since childhood. Living on their uncle's farm after the death of their father, the boys once spent their days in collective fields, their nights spellbound by their uncle's mythic tales. A breathtakingly ambitious novel of love, loss, and light, set amid a spellbinding vision of an alternative Russia as stirring as it is profound.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 189 pages
Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf · 219 pages
Virginia Woolf’s novel chronicles a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a politician’s wife in 1920s London, as she prepares to host a party that evening. The narrative follows Clarissa’s thoughts (and sometimes those of people she meets) as she goes about her errands, and events in the day remind her of her youth and friendships from the past. As the book progresses characters from the past eme
Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell · 365 pages
England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on. A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and
The Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern · 514 pages
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, wh
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
Shadows on the Rock
Willa Cather · 199 pages
Set in 18th century Quebec City, this is ostensibly the narration of a year in the life of a widowed apothecary and his young daughter. A gentle tale, full of the small joys and daily struggles of a colonist's life in a harsh and unforgiving New World. Cather explores the links between the protagonists' past lives and their current existence through a series of different portraits - the apothecar
Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Herman Melville · 420 pages
A classic of the sea, telling of the pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who defied capture.
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
Balthazar
Lawrence Durrell · 250 pages
The second instalment of the Alexandria Quartet, begins with the narrator from Justine living on a Greek island with the illegitimate daughter of his former lover, Melissa. The reader soon learns that many of the details from the first novel are unreliable and a very different version of events is gradually untangled.