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The Giraffe's Neck

Judith Schalansky · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood · 638 pages

More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...

Dense ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionElderly Protagonist
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The Weight of Ink

Rachel Kadish · 576 pages

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenElderly Protagonist
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Elizabeth Costello

J.M. Coetzee · 230 pages

Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished and aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through a series of eight formal addresses. From an award-acceptance speech at a New England liberal arts college to a lecture on evil in Amsterdam and a sexually charged reading by the poet Robert Duncan, the author draws the reader toward its astonishing conclusion. The novel is, on its surface, the story

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSlow-Paced
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Bleak House

Charles Dickens · 815 pages

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, t

Dense ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionDry Humor
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Ducks, Newburyport

Lucy Ellmann · 1,022 pages

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenDry Humor
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Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol · 548 pages

Dense ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionDry Humor
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The Untouchable

John Banville · 410 pages

(From the Hardcover edition) Twenty years after his "retirement," ex-spy Victor Maskell attempts to come to terms with what has happened to his life by embarking on his memoirs. This is the plot which fuels Banville's stunning new novel--a story that goes beyond the mere facts of espionage to penetrate the intricate heart of the spy.

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenDry Humor
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Bring Up the Bodies

Hilary Mantel · 432 pages

The sequel to Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenDry Humor
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The Fraud

Zadie Smith · 520 pages

Truth and justice tested by a 19th-century author and his cousin, and a fraudulent pretender and his manumitted witness.

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
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Agaat

Marlene Van Niekerk · 581 pages

Dense ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner · 569 pages

Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit.

Literary FictionDense ProseCharacter-DrivenElderly Protagonist
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Gingerbread

Helen Oyeyemi · 372 pages

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenDry Humor
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Possession

A.S. Byatt · 555 pages

Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, *Possession* is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSlow-Paced
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Herzog

Saul Bellow · 352 pages

In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption. Introduction by Philip Roth

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSlow-Paced
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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.

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSlow-Paced
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The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton · 320 pages

Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s, the world in which she grew up, and from which she spent her life escaping. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this society; he accepts its standards and abides by its rules but

Literary FictionDense ProseCharacter-DrivenDry Humor
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Questions of Travel

Michelle de Kretser · 517 pages

"Laura Fraser grows up in Sydney, motherless, with a cold father and an artistic bent. Ravi Mendes is on the other side of the world--his humble father dead, his mother struggling, determined to succeed in computer science. Their stories alternate throughout-- culminating in unlikely fates for them both, destinies influenced by travel--voluntary in her case, enforced in his. With money from an inh

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSlow-Paced
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The Winter Vault

Anne Michaels · 341 pages

Award-winning poet and novelist Anne Michaels gives us a love story of extraordinary depth and complexity, a mesmerizing tale that juxtaposes historical events with the most intimate moments of individual lives.In 1964, a newly married Canadian couple settles into a Nile River houseboat moored below the towering figures of Abu Simbel. Avery is one of the engineers responsible for the dismantling a

Dense ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Katabasis

R. F. Kuang · 560 pages

Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own. Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek:The story of a hero’s descent to the underworldAlice L

Dense ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionSlow-Paced
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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.

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenDry Humor
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The Tree Of Man

Patrick White · 480 pages

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSlow-Paced
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Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf · 219 pages

Virginia Woolf’s novel chronicles a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a politician’s wife in 1920s London, as she prepares to host a party that evening. The narrative follows Clarissa’s thoughts (and sometimes those of people she meets) as she goes about her errands, and events in the day remind her of her youth and friendships from the past. As the book progresses characters from the past eme

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
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Menewood

Nicola Griffith · 720 pages

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenSlow-Paced
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How to Paint a Dead Man

Sarah Hall · 289 pages

From Sarah Hall, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Daughters of the North and The Electric Michelangelo comes the Harper Perennial paperback original novel How to Paint a Dead Man, a daringly imaginative tale in which multiple lives are woven together through the prism of a still life painting. Moving from Italy to England, spanning nearly half a century, and bringing together the lives of fo

Dense ProseLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenElderly Protagonist

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