What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorUlysses
James Joyce · 736 pages
Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge Jo
Franny and Zooey
J.D. Salinger · 202 pages
Franny came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed in 1957 by Zooey. Both stories are early entries in a narrative series about the Glasses, a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York. In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her boyfriend for a football weekend, where they go to a café. The story is essentially an account of
The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie · 560 pages
One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic
Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann · 349 pages
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly in
The Recognitions
William Gaddis · 956 pages
Obsessed with seventeenth-century Flemish masterpieces, Wyatt Gwyon forges original artwork amazingly faithful to the spirit and techniques of the time.
Omensetter's Luck
William H. Gass · 304 pages
Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of pretern
The Chosen
Chaim Potok · 284 pages
It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends
Free Fall
William Golding · 253 pages
Somehow, somewhere, Sammy Mountjoy lost his freedom, the faculty of free will 'that cannot be debated but only experienced, like a colour or the taste of potatoes'.
A History of Loneliness
John Boyne · 380 pages
"The riveting narrative of an honorable Irish priest who finds the church collapsing around him at a pivotal moment in its history. Propelled into the priesthood by a family tragedy, Odran Yates is full of hope and ambition. When he arrives at Clonliffe Seminary in the 1970s, it is a time in Ireland when priests are highly respected, and Odran believes that he is pledging his life to "the good."
A Visitation of Spirits
Randall Kenan · 257 pages
From Publishers Weekly As its title suggests, a powerful strain of mysticism runs through this story of personal awakening in a black North Carolina family, but first-time novelist Kenan has a rare gift for naturalism as well, capturing the texture of farm life with vivid detail. The novel follows Horace Cross, a brilliant, tormented teenager who is his family's greatest hope, through a night whe
What Happened to Sophie Wilder
Christopher R. Beha · 253 pages
Charlie is living in New York, on Washington Square, struggling to write his second novel, when his college love, Sophie, returns. She tells Charlie the story of her life since then, particularly the days she spent taking care of a dying man with his own terrible past.
A Perfectly Good Man
Patrick Gale · 416 pages
When 20-year-old Lenny Barnes, paralysed in a rugby accident, commits suicide in the presence of Barnaby Johnson, the much-loved priest of a West Cornwall parish, the tragedy's reverberations open up the fault lines between Barnaby and his nearest and dearest. Their personal stories illuminate Barnaby's ostensibly happy life, and the gulfs of unspoken sadness that separate them all. Across this we
The Sunset Limited
Cormac McCarthy · 160 pages
The End of the Affair
Graham Greene · 217 pages
"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, of which he is the narrator. And it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous love affair with Sarah Miles - a hate bred of a passion that ultimately lost out to God. Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exor
The Temptation of St. Antony
Gustave Flaubert · 170 pages
The Book of Jonah
Joshua Max Feldman · 352 pages
A modern retelling of the biblical story of Jonah featuring Manhattan lawyer Jonah Jacobstein. Jonah is a wildly successful hunk with two women at his beck and call when he has a biblical vision that changes his life; thereafter, he suffers some terrible losses but also meets a woman whose quiet intensity changes his life.
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.
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy · 440 pages
Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv
In the Beauty of the Lilies
John Updike · 512 pages
The Last Temptation of Christ
Nikos Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakes · 506 pages
Earthly Powers
Anthony Burgess · 656 pages
Anthony Burgess has long been regarded as one of the most original and daring writers of our time. In Earthly Powers, Burgess has writtena book rich with astonishing powers and surprising events.
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Jose Saramago · 341 pages