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Chess Story

Stefan Zweig · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk · 208 pages

A man who struggles with insomnia meets a colorful extremist, and they create a secret organization together. Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the base

ClassicsLiterary FictionTortureMale Lead
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Darkness at Noon

Arthur Koestler · 254 pages

"The newly discovered lost text of Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness at Noon--the haunting portrait of a revolutionary, imprisoned and tortured under totalitarian rule--is now restored and in a completely new translation. Editor Michael Scammell and translator Philip Boehm bring us a brilliant novel, a remarkable discovery, and a new translation of an international classic"--

ClassicsLiterary FictionTortureMale Lead
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Mephisto

Klaus Mann · 267 pages

ClassicsLiterary FictionMale LeadWorld War II
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The Collector

John Fowles · 288 pages

Fowles’ stunning debut is a study of a lonely young sociopath who kidnaps the woman he has fixated on, keeping her in his cellar in the belief that she will eventually come to love him. The story is narrated in turns by the young man and his captive, giving two opposing points of view.

ClassicsLiterary FictionMale LeadTense and Suspenseful
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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

ClassicsTortureLiterary FictionMale Lead
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1984

George Orwell · 318 pages

Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often referred to as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by the English novelist George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair). It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repre

ClassicsLiterary FictionMale LeadTorture
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Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee · 165 pages

For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy for the victims, and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison.

ClassicsLiterary FictionTortureMale Lead
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 174 pages

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Iv

ClassicsLiterary FictionMale LeadTorture
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A Separate Peace

John Knowles · 196 pages

Gene Forrester looks back fifteen years to a World War II year in which he and his best friend were roommates in a New hampshire boarding school.

ClassicsLiterary FictionMale LeadWorld War II
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey · 311 pages

An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into

ClassicsLiterary FictionTortureMale Lead
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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

ClassicsLiterary FictionMale LeadWorld War II
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White Jacket or, the World on a Man-of-War

Herman Melville · 408 pages

ClassicsLiterary FictionTortureMale Lead
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The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood · 352 pages

ClassicsLiterary FictionTortureTense and Suspenseful
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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

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For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway · 471 pages

High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco's rebels.

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The Power of One

Bryce Courtenay · 518 pages

Follows Peekay, a white British boy in South Africa during World War II, between the ages of five and eleven, as he survives an abusive boarding school and goes on to succeed in life and the boxing ring, with help from a chicken, a boxer, a pianist, black African prisoners, and many others.

Literary FictionWorld War IITortureMale Lead
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The House of the Dead

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 308 pages

The House of the Dead (Russian: Записки из Мёртвого дома, Zapiski iz Myortvovo doma) is a semi-autobiographical novel published in 1860–2 in the journal Vremya by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, which portrays the life of convicts in a Siberian prison camp. The novel has also been published under the titles Memoirs from the House of The Dead, Notes from the Dead House (or Notes from a Dead House

ClassicsLiterary FictionTortureMale Lead
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Doctor Faustus

Thomas Mann · 510 pages

A new translation of a 1948 novel by a German writer based on the Faust legend. The protagonist is Adrian Leverkuhn, a musical genius who trades his body and soul to the devil in exchange for 24 years of triumph as the world's greatest composer.

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Billiards at Half-Past Nine

Heinrich Boll, Patrick Bowles · 295 pages

Böll's well-known opposition to fascism and war informs this moving story of a single day in the life of traumatized soldier Robert Faehmel, scion of a family of successful Cologne architects, as he struggles to return to ordinary life after the Second World War. An encounter with a war-time nemesis, now a power in the reconstruction of Germany, forces him to confront private memories and the woun

ClassicsLiterary FictionWorld War IIMale Lead
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Clea

Lawrence Durrell · 287 pages

The fourth and culminating novel in the Alexandria Quartet. Once again past episodes are raked over with a new perspective as the narrator casually begins an affair with the woman of the title, another character from the earlier books.

ClassicsLiterary FictionWorld War IIMale Lead
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The Moon and the Bonfire

Cesare Pavese · 190 pages

ClassicsLiterary FictionMale LeadWorld War II
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The Seventh Cross

Anna Seghers · 344 pages

Written in 1939, first published in 1942, a national bestseller and a 1943 BOMC Main Selection, The Seventh Cross presented a still doubtful, naive America a first-hand account of life in Hitler's Germany and of the horrors of the concentration camps. Seven men attempt an escape from Westhofen; the camp commander erects seven crosses, one for each. Only one, the young communist, Heisler, survives,

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The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit

Sloan Wilson · 287 pages

ClassicsLiterary FictionMale LeadWorld War II

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