What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Sound of the Mountain
Yasunari Kawabata · 276 pages
"By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo's life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the sti
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
La tregua
Mario Benedetti · 184 pages
'Perhaps that moment had been exceptional, but still, I felt alive. That pressure on my chest means being alive.' Forty-nine, with a kind face, no serious ailments (apart from varicose veins on his ankles), a good salary and three moody children, widowed accountant Martin Santome is about to retire. He assumes he'll take up gardening, or the guitar, or whatever retired people do. What he least exp
The Spectator Bird
Wallace Stegner · 214 pages
Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "just killing time until time gets around to killing me." His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. His job, trafficking the talent of others, had not been his choice. He passes through life as a spectator. A postcard from a friend causes Allston to return to
An Artist of the Floating World
Kazuo Ishiguro · 208 pages
As Japan rebuilds her cities after the calamity of World War II, the celebrated painter Masuji Ono should be enjoying a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to a life and career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism, a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity.
The Decay of the Angel
Yukio Mishima · 240 pages
The Underground Man
Mick Jackson · 266 pages
William John Cavendish Bentinck-Scott was a singularly eccentric man. What sets him apart from other eccentrics is the fact that he had the wealth to indulge his mania to the fullest. Mick Jackson became fascinated by the stories that surrounded his memory--the Duke died in 1879--and began to embroider them with fictional ideas of Jacksons own, and with the tales that local people had passed on to
The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If The Old Could
Doris Lessing · 510 pages
Jane Somers, a widowed, middle-aged journalist, describes the development of a chance friendship with an elderly woman and an improbable romance with a man Jane meets on the street
Diary of a Superfluous Man
Ivan Turgenev · 325 pages
Mr. Sammler's Planet
Saul Bellow · 313 pages
"Sammler, a New Yorker in his seventies, a refugee from Nazism, a thinker of complex thoughts, a touchstone around whom a heterogeneous group revolves, is not simply the protagonist but the prime mover of a many-sided novel held together by the centripetal force of his presence. The counterpoint of personalities, subplots, and incidents constitutes a tragi-comic commentary on twentieth-century urb
No One Writes to the Colonel
Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 170 pages
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa · 283 pages
The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa's greatest literary achievement. An "autobiography" or "diary" containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions. Now, for the first time the texts are presented chronologically, in a complete English edition by master translator Margaret Jull Co
Malone Dies
Samuel Beckett · 176 pages
The Reason You're Alive
Matthew Quick · 226 pages
Sixty-eight-year-old David has a brain tumor that he attributes to Agent Orange exposure. He wakes up from surgery repeating the name of a Native American soldier whom he was once ordered to discipline, and decides to return something precious he long ago stole from that man.
The Diary of a Country Priest
Georges Bernanos · 255 pages
In this classic Catholic novel, Bernanos movingly recounts the life of a young French country priest who grows to understand his provincial parish while learning spiritual humility himself.
Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre · 238 pages
Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist, holds a position of singular eminence in the world of letters. Among readers and critics familiar with the whole of Sartre's work, it is generally recognized that his earliest novel, La Nausée (first published in 1938), is his finest and most significant. It is unquestionably a key
Silence
Shusaku Endo · 294 pages
An historical novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo telling the story of a young Portuguese missionary in 17th Century Japan. After being smuggled into the country a Jesuit missionary fresh from the seminary finds the Christian population have been forced underground by a government eager to stamp out foreign interference and values. Consequently he quickly finds himself a fugitive in a strange an
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes · 248 pages
Until he was thirty-two, Charlie Gordon --gentle, amiable, oddly engaging-- had lived in a kind of mental twilight. He knew knowledge was important and had learned to read and write after a fashion, but he also knew he wasn't nearly as bright as most of the people around him. There was even a white mouse named Algernon who outpaced Charlie in some ways. But a remarkable operation had been performe
The Secret Scripture
Sebastian Barry · 300 pages
Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges