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Coming Through Slaughter

Michael Ondaatje · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison · 338 pages

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s ori

Nonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 349 pages

A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.

AsylumNonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Guests on Earth

Lee Smith · 516 pages

It is 1936 when orphaned thirteen-year-old Evalina Toussaint is admitted to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, a mental institution known for its innovative treatments for nervous disorders and addictions. Taken under the wing of the hospital's most notable patient, Zelda Fitzgerald, Evalina witnesses the cascading events leading up to the tragic fire of 1948 that killed nine women in

MusicianAsylumCharacter-DrivenAmerican South
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The Lost Get-Back Boogie

James Lee Burke · 256 pages

Iry Paret's done his time -- two years for manslaughter in Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary. Now the war vet and blues singer is headed to Montana, where he hopes to live clean working on a ranch owned by the father of his prison pal, Buddy Riordan. In prison, Iry tinkered with a song -- "The Lost Get-Back Boogie" -- that never came out quite right. Now, the Riordan family's problems hand him

MusicianLyrical ProseAmerican SouthCharacter-Driven
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The Memory of Old Jack

Wendell Berry · 223 pages

In a rural Kentucky river town, "Old Jack" Beechum, a retired farmer, sees his life again through the shades of one burnished day in September 1952. Bringing the earthiness of America's past to mind, The Memory of Old Jack conveys the truth and integrity of the land and the people who live from it. Through the eyes of one man can be seen the values Americans strive to recapture as we arrive at the

Nonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseAmerican SouthCharacter-Driven
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Music & Silence

Rose Tremain · 488 pages

MusicianLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Tinkers

Paul Harding · 192 pages

Nonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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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

AsylumLyrical ProseNonlinear NarrativeLiterary Fiction
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The Orchard Keeper

Cormac McCarthy · 246 pages

*The Orchard Keeper* tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.

Lyrical ProseNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Night Watch

Jayne Anne Phillips · 276 pages

AsylumLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Cry to Heaven

Anne Rice · 544 pages

In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voi

MusicianLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam

Bao Ninh · 228 pages

The Sorrow of War - by turns bleak and poetic, pellucid and cunning - opens with Kien, an infantry cadre from Hanoi, engaged in the grim business of retrieving and burying the dead at the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. From here, the novel ranges back to Kien's youth and the pains of adolescent love, and moves forward to his attempts, as a struggling writer in postwar Hanoi, to

Nonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

MusicianCharacter-DrivenLyrical ProseAmerican South
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Ravel

Jean Echenoz · 115 pages

MusicianLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The piano man's daughter

Timothy Findley · 490 pages

Narrated by Charlie Kilworth, whose birth is an echo of his mother's own illegitimate beginnings, The Piano Man's Daughter is the lyrical, multilayered tale of Charlie's mother, Lily, his grandmother Ede, and their family. Lily is a woman pursued by her own demons, "making off with the matches just when the fires caught hold," "a beautiful, mad genius, first introduced to us singing in her mother'

Lyrical ProseMusicianCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Time of Our Singing

Richard Powers · 640 pages

"Tout commence en 1939, lorsque Delia Daley et David Strom se rencontrent à un concert de Marian Anderson. Peut-on alors imaginer qu'une jeune femme noire épouse un juif allemand fuyant le nazisme? Et pourtant ... Leur passion pour la musique l'emporte sur les conventions et offre à leur amour un sanctuaire de paix où, loin des hurlements du monde et de ses vicissitudes, ils élèvent leurs trois en

MusicianNonlinear NarrativeLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

MusicianLyrical ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Known World

Edward P. Jones · 400 pages

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for *Paradise Lost* and an unusual mentor -- William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to

Nonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionAmerican South
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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

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Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 400 pages

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env

Nonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Gertrude

Hermann Hesse, Hilda Rosner · 237 pages

In this fictional memoir, the renowned composer Kuhn recounts his tangled relationships with two artists--his friend Heinrich Muoth, a brooding, self-destructive opera singer, and the gentle, self-assured Gertrude Imthor. Kuhn is drawn to Gertrude upon their first meeting, but Gertrude falls in love with Heinrich, to whom she is introduced when Kuhn auditions them for the leads in his new opera. H

MusicianLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Netherland

Joseph O'Neill · 256 pages

In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans--a banker originally from the Netherlands--finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his l

Nonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Jacob's Room

Virginia Woolf · 176 pages

"First published in 1922, Jacob's Room was Virginia Woolf's third novel and the first in her more experimental mode. Set in the years leading up to the First World War, the work is an elegy, not just for an individual character, but for a generation lost in and affected by the war." "This Shakespeare Head Press edition restores the text to its original form, notably recreating the space breaks on

Nonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Yellow Birds

Kevin Powers · 240 pages

In this haunting fictional account, an Iraq war veteran contemplates the lives, including his own, devasated by the random violence of war.

Nonlinear NarrativeLyrical ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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