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The Debt of Tears

Cao Xueqin · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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The Dreamer Wakes

Cao Xueqin, Gao E · 384 pages

Imperial ChinaTragicSprawling EpicClassics
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One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 422 pages

Tells the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.

Large FamilyTragicClassicsSprawling Epic
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The Good Earth

Pearl S. Buck · 316 pages

This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought

Imperial ChinaTragicClassicsLiterary Fiction
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Germinal

Emile Zola · 496 pages

The thirteenth novel in Emile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity's capacity for compassion and hope.Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he disco

TragicClassicsSprawling EpicEnsemble Cast
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A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens · 384 pages

A Tale of Two Cities is a historical novel published in 1859 by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris, and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the Fr

TragicClassicsSprawling EpicEnsemble Cast
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Matterhorn

Karl Marlantes

TragicCold War EraSprawling EpicEnsemble Cast
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Outlaws of the Marsh (Vol. 1-4)

Shi Nai'an, Luo Guanzhong · 2,149 pages

Imperial ChinaClassicsSprawling EpicEnsemble Cast
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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.

TragicSprawling EpicClassicsLiterary Fiction
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Three Kingdoms: Classic Novel in Four Volumes

Luo Guanzhong · 1,096 pages

Imperial ChinaClassicsSprawling EpicEnsemble Cast
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The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · 332 pages

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve

Imperial ChinaTragicLiterary FictionEnsemble Cast
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The Godfather

Mario Puzo · 447 pages

The Godfather is a crime novel by American author Mario Puzo. Originally published in 1969 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, the novel details the story of a fictional Mafia family in New York City (and Long Beach, New York), headed by Vito Corleone. Puzo's dedication for The Godfather is "For Anthony Cleri". The novel's epigraph is by the French author Honoré de Balzac: "Behind every great fortune there is

Large FamilySprawling EpicEnsemble CastClassics
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War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy · 716 pages

War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. The novel begins in the year 1805 during the reign of Tsar Alexander I and leads up to the 1812 French invasion of Russia by Napoleon. The era of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), when t

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The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 614 pages

Acclaimed by the 20th-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin for its “polyphony” (a literary concept introduced by Bakhtin to describe a plurality of voices within a narrative), The Idiot is regarded by modern critics as one of Dostoevsky’s most experimental and artistically uneven novels. The novel follows the entrance of the epileptic Prince Muishkin—a character Dostoevsky meant to represent a “

TragicClassicsEnsemble CastLiterary Fiction
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Les Misérables

Victor Hugo · 747 pages

In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

TragicClassicsLiterary FictionSprawling Epic
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River of Smoke

Amitav Ghosh · 521 pages

In September 1838 a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured laborers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. When the seas settle, five men have disappeared - two lascars, two convicts and one of the passengers. Did the same storm upend the fortunes of those aboard the Anahita, an opium carrier heading towards Can

Imperial ChinaSprawling EpicLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

TragicClassicsSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
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Sandalwood Death

Mo Yan · 409 pages

Sun Meiniang interacts with the three men in her life during the Boxer Rebellion, including Sun Bing, her father and a leader of the rebellion, who is destined to come to a cruel end.

Imperial ChinaTragicLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Journey to the West (4-Volume Boxed Set)

Wu Cheng'en · 2,346 pages

Imperial ChinaClassicsSprawling EpicEnsemble Cast
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Noli Me Tángere

Jose Rizal · 406 pages

The book revolves on the struggles of young Crisostomo Ibarra: how he humbly fights for his childhood sweetheart Maria Clara, for himself and for his fellowmen against the Spanish priest Padre Damaso and the Spanish Government who were then conquerors of San Diego, his native hometown. Coming home to San Diego from Spain to mourn for his father's death, he learned how his father, a rich illustrado

TragicSprawling EpicClassicsLiterary Fiction
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As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner · 250 pages

Written in stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators, the story follows a journey wherein the family of a dead woman try to transport her body to her birthplace in Mississippi in accordance with her wishes. When a ford across a river is flooded they are forced to take a roundabout route and it becomes a desperate race to complete their mission before the body begins to decompose.

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Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry · 945 pages

TragicClassicsSprawling EpicHistorical Fiction
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Fall on Your Knees

Ann-Marie MacDonald · 510 pages

TragicLarge FamilySprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams · 158 pages

Members of a neurotic Southern family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.

TragicCold War EraClassicsEnsemble Cast
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Corelli's Mandolin

Louis de Bernieres · 437 pages

The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical, heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an i

TragicSprawling EpicLiterary FictionEnsemble Cast

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