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The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Jose Saramago · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Faith CrisisReligious IdentityReligion & SpiritualityTragic
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Paradise Lost

John Milton · 336 pages

John Milton's Paradise Lost is one of the greatest epic poems in the English language. It tells the story of the Fall of Man, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery, of innocence pitted against corruption, in which God and Satan fight a bitter battle for control of mankind's destiny. The struggle rages across three worlds - heaven, hell, and earth - as Satan and his ban

Omniscient NarratorFaith CrisisReligion & SpiritualityDense Prose
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Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Herman Melville · 420 pages

A classic of the sea, telling of the pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who defied capture.

Omniscient NarratorFaith CrisisReligion & SpiritualityDense Prose
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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pages

Omniscient NarratorReligious IdentityDense ProseReligion & Spirituality
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The Last Temptation of Christ

Nikos Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakes · 506 pages

Faith CrisisMythology RetellingReligious IdentityReligion & Spirituality
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Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 498 pages

A masterpiece of guilt and redemption that transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, is determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will. When he commits an act of murder and theft, he sets in

Omniscient NarratorDense ProseFaith CrisisReligion & Spirituality
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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

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityReligion & SpiritualityDense Prose
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Ulysses

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

Mythology RetellingFaith CrisisDense ProseReligious Identity
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Metamorphoses

Ovid · 394 pages

Mythology RetellingOmniscient NarratorTragicDense Prose
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Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe · 192 pages

Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widel

Omniscient NarratorFaith CrisisReligious IdentityLiterary Fiction
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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

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityOmniscient NarratorTragic
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The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck · 553 pages

Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression is as vivid now as ever. The story focuses on a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, farmers who work another man’s land for a share of the crops. Driven from their home by drought and poverty they take to the road in a battered old truck and make their way to California to look for work. When they arrive they find hundreds of others like them being f

Omniscient NarratorFaith CrisisDense ProseLyrical Prose
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The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy · 76 pages

Ivan Ilych, a peaceful public official in the Russian provinces, has his life permanently changed by a serious illness which no doctor can accurately diagnose.

Omniscient NarratorFaith CrisisTragicLiterary Fiction
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The Mists of Avalon

Marion Zimmer Bradley · 876 pages

When Morgan le Fay (Morgaine) has to sacrifice her virginity during fertility rites, the man who impregnates her is her younger brother Arthur, who she turns against when she thinks he has betrayed the old religion of Avalon.

Mythology RetellingReligious IdentityFaith CrisisTragic
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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.

Omniscient NarratorDense ProseTragicFaith Crisis
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Joseph and His Brothers

Thomas Mann · 1,207 pages

This remarkable new translation of the Nobel Prize-winner’s great masterpiece is a major literary event. Thomas Mann regarded his monumental retelling of the biblical story of Joseph as his magnum opus. He conceived of the four parts–The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph in Egypt, and Joseph the Provider–as a unified narrative, a “mythological novel” of Joseph’s fall into slavery and his ris

Mythology RetellingOmniscient NarratorDense ProseReligious Identity
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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

Faith CrisisReligion & SpiritualityReligious IdentityTragic
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The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde · 224 pages

**The Picture of Dorian Gray** is a philosophical novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical *Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine*. The novel-length version was published in April 1891. (Source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray))

Omniscient NarratorDense ProseLyrical ProseTragic
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The Spire

William Golding · 224 pages

Told in a stream-of-consciousness narrative, this is a story of obsession. Against the advice of his builder, the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, slowly dying from tuberculosis, plans the construction of a towering spire atop the cathedral as the culmination of his life’s work but becomes increasingly deranged as the construction faces constant problems due to the sheer grandiosity of the work.

Faith CrisisDense ProseTragicReligious Identity
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Children of the Alley

Naguib Mahfouz · 448 pages

A poor Cairo father represents God and his sons, Jesus, Mohammed and other profits (from Christian Science Monitor 9/06/2006)

Mythology RetellingOmniscient NarratorReligion & SpiritualityLiterary Fiction
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Gilead

Marilynne Robinson · 256 pages

**WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION** In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civi

Faith CrisisReligion & SpiritualityReligious IdentityLiterary Fiction
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March

Geraldine Brooks · 304 pages

Faith CrisisTragicReligion & SpiritualityDense Prose
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Knowledge of Angels

Jill Paton Walsh · 275 pages

This "disturbing and beautiful novel of ideas" (Ursula K. Le Guin) is enacted by a wide variety of characters on a Mediterranean island before the Reformation: a saintly monk whose faith is sorely tested; a wild, flesh-eating child who is captured by mountain shepherds and taken to the cardinal prince of the island; a castaway who swims ashore to a very strange welcome. Peopled by peasants, serva

Faith CrisisOmniscient NarratorReligious IdentityTragic
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The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Victor Hugo · 443 pages

In fifteenth-century Paris, a disfigured man named Quasimodo, who was abandoned as an infant in the cathedral of Notre-Dame and now lives in its bell tower, must come to the aid of a beautiful gypsy girl named Esmeralda after she repels the advances of the cruel archdeacon Don Claude Frollo.

Omniscient NarratorDense ProseReligion & SpiritualityTragic

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