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Bengal Nights

Mircea Eliade · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Learned by Heart

Emma Donoghue · 338 pages

First LoveForbidden LoveLyrical ProseBittersweet
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Ancient Light

John Banville · 256 pages

An actor in the twilight of his career reflects on a poignant first love affair at the age of fifteen with his best friend's mother and inexplicably lands a role opposite a famous but fragile actress who helps him come to an astonishing realization.

First LoveForbidden LoveBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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In One Person

John Irving · 448 pages

A New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect," a phrase first used by John Ir

First LoveForbidden LoveBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Endless Love

Scott Spencer · 417 pages

"One of the most celebrated novels of its time, Endless Love remains perhaps the most powerful book ever written about young love. Riveting, compulsively readable, and ferociously sexual, Endless Love tells the story of David Axelrod and his overwhelming love for Jade Butterfield. David and Jade are consumed with each other: their rapport, their desire, their sexuality, take them further than they

First LoveForbidden LoveLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

Mathias Malzieu · 171 pages

Edinburgh, 1874. Born with a frozen heart, Jack is near death when his mother abandons him to the care of Dr. Madeleine--witch doctor, midwife, protector of orphans--who saves Jack by placing a cuckoo clock in his chest. And it is in her orphanage that Jack grows up among tear-filled flasks, eggs containing memories, and a man with a musical spine.

First LoveForbidden LoveBittersweetLyrical Prose
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Call Me by Your Name

Andre Aciman · 256 pages

It's the summer of 1983, and precocious 17-year-old Elio Perlman is spending the days with his family at their 17th-century villa in Lombardy, Italy. He soon meets Oliver, a handsome doctoral student who's working as an intern for Elio's father. Amid the sun-drenched splendor of their surroundings, Elio and Oliver discover the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will

First LoveForbidden LoveLiterary FictionBittersweet
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In the Orchard, the Swallows

Peter Hobbs · 138 pages

"A young Pakistani man survives fifteen years in a dreadful prison by clinging on to a single memory of a girl he once met in his family's beautiful mountainside orchard -- with disastrous consequences. Elegant and lyrical but never sentimental, this moving tale of love and redemption is storytelling at its most evocative and compassionate."--Publisher's description.

First LoveForbidden LoveBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Bells

Richard Harvell · 374 pages

The celebrated opera singer Lo Svizzero was born in a belfry high in the Swiss Alps where his mother served as the keeper of the loudest and most beautiful bells in the land. Shaped by the bells’ glorious music, he possessed an extraordinary gift for sound. But when his preternatural hearing was discovered—along with its power to expose the sins of the church—young Moses Froben was cast out of his

First LoveForbidden LoveLyrical ProseEmotional
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Tipping the Velvet

Sarah Waters · 480 pages

Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-h

First LoveForbidden LoveBittersweetFirst Person Narrator
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Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson · 424 pages

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th

Forbidden LoveFirst LoveBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Almost Life

Kiran Millwood Hargrave · 384 pages

First LoveForbidden LoveLyrical ProseBittersweet
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The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller · 368 pages

This is the story of the seige of Troy from the perspective of Achilles best-friend Patroclus. Although Patroclus is outcast from his home for disappointing his father he manages to be the only mortal who can keep up with the half-God Archilles. Even though many will know the facts behind the story the telling is fresh and engaging.

First LoveForbidden LoveFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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Delirium

Lauren Oliver · 441 pages

The first book in Lauren Oliver’s New York Times bestselling trilogy about forbidden love, revolution, and the power to choose. In an alternate United States, love has been declared a dangerous disease, and the government forces everyone who reaches eighteen to have a procedure called the Cure. Living with her aunt, uncle, and cousins in Portland, Maine, Lena Haloway is very much looking forwar

Forbidden LoveFirst LoveBittersweetLyrical Prose
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Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin · 224 pages

Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.

Forbidden LoveBittersweetLiterary FictionEmotional
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The Devil in the Flesh

Raymond Radiguet · 128 pages

First LoveForbidden LoveBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Reader

Bernhard Schlink · 224 pages

Forbidden LoveLiterary FictionFirst Person NarratorBittersweet
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The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri · 304 pages

"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, c

IndiaBittersweetLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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IndiaFirst LoveForbidden LoveFirst Person Narrator
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All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy · 301 pages

*All the Pretty Horses* is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Along with *The Crossing* (1994), and C*ities of the Plain* (19

First LoveForbidden LoveLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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I Too Had a Love Story

Ravinder Singh · 272 pages

Do love stories ever die? Can modern day gadgets like mobile phones and the 'http:\\www' era of internet bring you the love of your life? You haven't met her earlier, but commit to marry. Will you still call this a love marriage? And what if on the engagement day while you pull the ring out from your pocket, you realize what you planned was just a dream which never comes true...? How would you

IndiaFirst LoveFirst Person NarratorBittersweet
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Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend

Robert James Waller · 202 pages

Economics professor Michael Tillman travels to India in search of his lover Jellie Braden, the wife of a colleague who has suddenly disappeared.

IndiaForbidden LoveLyrical ProseEmotional
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Written on the Body

Jeanette Winterson · 190 pages

The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman.

Forbidden LoveBittersweetLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Em and The Big Hoom

Jerry Pinto · 240 pages

IndiaEmotionalLiterary FictionBittersweet
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The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

First LoveEmotionalLyrical ProseBittersweet
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