What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorA Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley · 377 pages
This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s *King Lear* centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, *A Thousand Acres* takes on t
The Red Tent
Anita Diamant · 321 pages
Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood--the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers--Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--the f
The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding
Holly Ringland
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
Love Letters to the Dead
Ava Dellaira · 327 pages
When Laurel starts writing letters to dead people for a school assignment, she begins to spill about her sister's mysterious death, her mother's departure from the family, her new friends, and her first love.
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
Forgotten Country
Catherine Chung · 304 pages
Learning on the night of her sister's birth that a daughter has been lost in every generation of her Korean family, Janie assumes a protective role over her sister while learning more cautionary stories from her optimistic father and mythology-minded mother.
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 274 pages
The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Aimee Bender · 345 pages
The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t
Tell the Wolves I'm Home
Carol Rifka Brunt · 384 pages
It is 1987, and only one person has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus -- her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn's company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June's world is turned upside d
Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden · 456 pages
A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a n
Everything I Never Told You
Celeste Ng · 300 pages
"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl
Clear Light of Day
Anita Desai · 183 pages
Set in India's Old Delhi, CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY is Anita Desai's tender, warm, and compassionate novel about family scars, the ability to forgive and forget, and the trials and tribulations of familial love. At the novel's heart are the moving relationships between the members of the Das family, who have grown apart from each other. Bimla is a dissatisfied but ambitious teacher at a women's college w
Dreams of Joy
Lisa See · 354 pages
A continuation of "Shanghai Girls" finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation's intolerant Communist culture.
The Tiger's Wife
Tea Obreht · 360 pages
Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the ti
I'll Be Right There
Kyung-Sook Shin, singyeongsug · 288 pages
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery · 325 pages
EA novel by the French professor of philosophy Muriel Barbery. The book centers on a working-class concierge of an upscale apartment building in Paris, Renee Michel. She is an auto-didact of immense learning who deliberately conceals her intelligence. Her secret is discovered by a young resident of the building named Paloma. The novel is narrated alternately by each of these two characters. Fir
Till We Have Faces
C.S. Lewis · 320 pages
C.S. Lewis once described Till We Have Faces as his best work. It is a retelling of the Psyche myth with a subtle Christian bent. One of my professors, Dr. Jim Hand, once posed the question, "Is Psyche a case of spirit becoming flesh, or flesh becoming spirit?" It is a great novel with much depth.
The Transit of Venus
Shirley Hazzard · 352 pages
Caroline and Grace Bell, two orphan sisters eager to begin their lives in a new land, journey to England from Australia. What happens to these young women - seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal - becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves.
Among Others
Jo Walton · 304 pages
Seeking refuge in fantasy novel worlds throughout a youth under the shadow of a dubiously sane half-brother who dabbled in magic, Mori Phelps is forced to confront her mother in a tragic battle and gains unwanted attention when she attempts to perform spells herself.
Circe
Madeline Miller · 408 pages
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child—not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power—the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves. Threatened, Zeus b
The Sky Is Everywhere
Jandy Nelson · 275 pages
In the months after her sister dies, seventeen-year-old Lennie falls into a love triangle and discovers the strength to follow her dream of becoming a musician.
Long Bright River
Liz Moore · 473 pages
A female cop begins to fear for her addicted sister. A serial murder is targeting homeless female prostitutes. Can Mickey find her sister before the killer does ?