What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorWanting
Richard Flanagan · 256 pages
Assuming the governorship of the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land, Sir John Franklin and his wife adopt a young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, and ten years later after Franklin and his crew disappear in the Arctic, Charles Dickens takes an interest in the story, which has a profound effect on his own life.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Stephen Graham Jones · 441 pages
In 1912 a strange confession is given, over several nights, to a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunted the fields of the Blackfeet reservation, looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran Pastor is discovered within a wall and what it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to two hundred and seventeen Blackfeet dead in the snow. To
Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee · 220 pages
At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless, shunned by his friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife. He retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated smallholding, where a brief visit becomes an extended stay as he tries to find meaning from the one remaining relationship. David attempts to relate to Lu
The Sparrow
Mary Doria Russell · 428 pages
The Sparrow is a novel about a remarkable man, a living saint, a life-long celibate and Jesuit priest, who undergoes an experience so harrowing and profound that it makes him question the existence of God. This experience--the first contact between human beings and intelligent extraterrestrial life--begins with a small mistake and ends in a horrible catastrophe.
The Magic of Saida
M.G. Vassanji · 305 pages
Two-time Giller Prize winner Vassanji returns to the rich and haunting world of his most acclaimed, prize-winning novels, the East African coast. The haunting story of Kamal, a successful Canadian doctor who, in middle age and after decades in North America, decides to return to his homeland of East Africa to find his childhood sweetheart, Saida. Kamal's journey is motivated by a combination of gu
A Change Of Climate
Hilary Mantel · 342 pages
Set in Norfolk in 1980 but with flashbacks to South Africa and Bechuanaland of the 1960s. Ralph and Anna are "do-gooders". They run a trust for young people and take offenders into their home. But they harbour a secret: in Africa, years before, their son had been abducted, his body never found.
The Mermaid of Black Conch: A novel
Monique Roffey · 240 pages
The Pearl
John Steinbeck · 118 pages
Based on a Mexican folktale, this is the story of a great pearl found by a poor fisherman, the sorrow it brought to his family, and how it was lost again.
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Thomas Keneally · 178 pages
A short Australian novel telling the story of an aboriginal worker who rebels against his overbearing employer, wreaking a trail of destruction
The Autobiography of My Mother
Jamaica Kincaid · 246 pages
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 448 pages
> With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor fu
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
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 131 pages
Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State, in the heart of Africa, by the story's narrator Charles Marlow. Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest English writers, and Heart of Darkness is considered his best. His readers are
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz · 352 pages
Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us
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
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.
Canada
Richard Ford · 420 pages
After his parents are arrested and imprisoned for robbing a bank, fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is taken in by Arthur Remlinger who, unbeknownst to Dell, is hiding a dark and violent nature that interferes with Dell's quest to find grace and peace on the prairie of Saskatchewan.
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Cormac McCarthy · 337 pages
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indi
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
Zama
Antonio Di Benedetto · 242 pages
"First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentinean and Spanish-language literature. Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to As
The Stranger
Albert Camus · 124 pages
The Stranger is a 1942 novella by French author Albert Camus. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus' philosophy, absurdism coupled with existentialism, though Camus personally rejected the latter label. The title character is Meursault, an indifferent French settler in Algeria described as "a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme
Guerrillas
V.S. Naipaul · 248 pages
"Set on a troubled Caribbean island – where Asians, Africans, Americans and former British colonials co-exist in a state of suppressed hysteria – Guerrillas is a novel of colonialism and revolution. A white man arrives with his mistress, an Englishwoman influenced by fantasies of native power and sexuality, unaware of the consequences of her actions. Together with a leader of the ‘revolution’, the