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Diary of a Bad Year

J.M. Coetzee · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Fraud

Zadie Smith · 520 pages

Truth and justice tested by a 19th-century author and his cousin, and a fraudulent pretender and his manumitted witness.

Writer ProtagonistElderly ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeDense Prose
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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 ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeDense Prose
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Soldiers of Salamis

Javier Cercas · 224 pages

"In the final moments of the Spanish Civil War, as the remnants of the Republican army retreat north into exile, fifty prominent Nationalist prisoners are taken out to be shot. Among them is Rafael Sanchez Mazas - writer, fascist and founder of the Spanish Falange." "As the machine guns begin to fire, Sanchez Mazas takes advantage of the commotion and escapes into the forest. When his hiding plac

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenDense Prose
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Our Tragic Universe

Scarlett Thomas · 384 pages

Writer ProtagonistDense ProseCharacter-DrivenNonlinear Narrative
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Tinkers

Paul Harding · 192 pages

Elderly ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenDense Prose
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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 ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenDense Prose
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Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

May Sarton · 220 pages

Sarton’s most important novel tells the story of a poet in her seventies, whose life is retold episodically during an interview with two writers from a literary magazine Hilary Stevens’s prolific career includes a provocative novel that shot her into the public consciousness years ago, and an oeuvre of poetry that more recently has consigned her to near-obscurity. Now in the twilight of her li

Elderly ProtagonistWriter ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-Driven
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Last Night in Twisted River

John Irving

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County--to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto--pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger,

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenDense Prose
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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

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenDense Prose
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The Counterlife

Philip Roth · 328 pages

Stories of people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, ranging from a quiet suburban New Jersey dentist to a genteel Englishwoman and an Israeli settlement leader.

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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My Struggle Book One

Karl Ove Knausgård

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseCharacter-Driven
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The Weight of Ink

Rachel Kadish · 576 pages

Elderly ProtagonistWriter ProtagonistDense ProseCharacter-Driven
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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

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDense ProseNonlinear Narrative
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Agaat

Marlene Van Niekerk · 581 pages

Nonlinear NarrativeElderly ProtagonistDense ProseLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseCharacter-Driven
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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 ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenDense Prose
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Starting Out in the Evening

Brian Morton · 336 pages

Elderly ProtagonistWriter ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Mitch Albom · 196 pages

The Five People You Meet In Heaven is a 2003 novel by Mitch Albom. It follows the life and death of a ride mechanic named Eddie who is killed in an amusement park accident and sent to heaven, where he encounters five people who had a significant impact on him while he was alive. It was published by Hyperion and remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 95 weeks.

Elderly ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Bartleby & Co.

Enrique Vila-Matas · 192 pages

Tells the story of a hunchback who is a failed writer that has no luck with women. He is a self-described "Bartleby", named after the Herman Melville character; someone who, when asked to reveal information about themselves, will respond that they "would prefer not to."

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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How to Paint a Dead Man

Sarah Hall · 289 pages

From Sarah Hall, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Daughters of the North and The Electric Michelangelo comes the Harper Perennial paperback original novel How to Paint a Dead Man, a daringly imaginative tale in which multiple lives are woven together through the prism of a still life painting. Moving from Italy to England, spanning nearly half a century, and bringing together the lives of fo

Nonlinear NarrativeElderly ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDense Prose
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Ravelstein

Saul Bellow · 236 pages

"Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously - and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick has suggested that he put forth a book of his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or kill it, and much to Ravelstein's surprise he does

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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The General in His Labyrinth

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 306 pages

Elderly ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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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

Elderly ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolano · 577 pages

Writer ProtagonistNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseCharacter-Driven

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