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The Fraud

Zadie Smith · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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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

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedLiterary FictionVictorian Era
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The Luminaries

Eleanor Catton · 834 pages

This novel is a murder mystery set in a remote gold-mining frontier town in 19th-century New Zealand. Arriving in New Zealand in 1866 a weary Englishman, Walter Moody, lands in a gold-mining frontier town on the coast of New Zealand to make his fortune and forever leave behind his family's shame. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to investi

Con ArtistsVictorian EraLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood · 638 pages

More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...

Writer ProtagonistElderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Possession

A.S. Byatt · 555 pages

Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, *Possession* is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist

Writer ProtagonistVictorian EraLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Bleak House

Charles Dickens · 815 pages

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, t

Courtroom DramaVictorian EraCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol · 548 pages

Con ArtistsSlavery DepictedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Weight of Ink

Rachel Kadish · 576 pages

Elderly ProtagonistWriter ProtagonistHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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Charlotte and Emily: a novel of the Brontes

Jude Morgan

From an obscure country parsonage came three extraordinary sisters, who defied the outward bleakness of their lives to create the most brilliant literary works of their time. Now, in an astonishingly daring novel by the acclaimed Jude Morgan, the genius of the haunted Brontës is revealed and the sisters are brought to full, resplendent life: Emily, who turned from the world to the greater temptati

Writer ProtagonistVictorian EraCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Cambridge

Caryl Phillips · 187 pages

Dramatic and challenging novel about freedom and prejudice by one of the most important authors of his generationCambridge is a powerful and haunting novel set in that uneasy time between the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves. It is the story of Emily Cambridge, a young woman sent from England to visit her father's West Indian plantation, and Cambridge, a plantation s

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz · 352 pages

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us

CaribbeanWriter ProtagonistLiterary FictionMultiple POV
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Arthur & George

Julian Barnes · 445 pages

Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George remains in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brou

Victorian EraCourtroom DramaLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Polished Hoe

Austin Clarke · 480 pages

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Nix

Nathan Hill · 640 pages

"An epic novel about a son, the mother who left him as a child, and how his search to uncover the secrets of her life leads him to reclaim his own"--

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
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Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson · 424 pages

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th

Courtroom DramaLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Explosion in a Cathedral

Alejo Carpentier

Historical novel set in Cuba at the time of the French Revolution. A story of three Creole orphans caught up in the immense changes sweeping the Caribbean at the turn of the 19th century.

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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The Salt Roads

Nalo Hopkinson · 405 pages

CaribbeanSlavery DepictedHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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Middlemarch

George Eliot · 795 pages

Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.

Victorian EraLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Diary of a Bad Year

J.M. Coetzee · 240 pages

An utterly contemporary and deeply thought-provoking novel which addresses the profound unease of countless people in modern democracies around the world. An eminent, seventy-two-year-old Australian writer is invited to contribute to a book entitled Strong Opinions. It is a chance to air some urgent concerns. He writes short essays on the origins of the state, on Machiavelli, on anarchism, on A

Writer ProtagonistElderly ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Texaco

Patrick Chamoiseau · 401 pages

Of black Martinican provenance, Patrick Chamoiseau gives us Texaco (winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize), an international literary achievement, tracing one hundred and fifty years of post-slavery Caribbean history: a novel that is as much about self-affirmation engendered by memory as it is about a quest for the adequacy of its own form. In a narrative composed

CaribbeanElderly ProtagonistLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Fingersmith

Sarah Waters · 560 pages

Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home. One day, the most beloved thief of all arrive

Con ArtistsVictorian EraLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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The House Girl

Tara Conklin · 372 pages

A novel of love, family, and justice follows Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in a Manhattan law firm, as she searches for the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.

Courtroom DramaSlavery DepictedHistorical FictionCharacter-Driven
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Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 588 pages

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented li

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
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The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Fowles · 445 pages

By the author of *The Collector* and *The Magus*, a haunting love story of the Victorian era. Over one year on the N.Y. Times Bestseller List and an international bestseller. "Filled with enchanting mysteries, charged with erotic possibilities . . —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, N.Y. Times

Victorian EraLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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The Stranger's Child

Alan Hollinghurst · 448 pages

In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate--a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance--to his family's modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in D

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction

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