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Cathedral of the Sea

Ildefonso Falcones · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

World Without End

Ken Follett · 1,056 pages

En 1327, quatre enfants sont les témoins d'une poursuite meurtrière dans les bois : un chevalier tue deux soldats au service de la reine, avant d'enfouir dans le sol une lettre mystérieuse, dont le secret pourrait bien mettre en danger la couronne d'Angleterre. Depuis ce jour, le destin des enfants se trouve lié à jamais.

CathedralsClass StruggleMedieval KingdomHistorical Fiction
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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.

CathedralsClass StruggleMedieval KingdomHistorical Fiction
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The Heaven Tree Trilogy

Edith Pargeter · 899 pages

CathedralsMedieval KingdomHistorical FictionMale Lead
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Murder in the Cathedral

T.S. Eliot · 88 pages

A dramatization in free verse and with features derived from ancient and medieval theatre of the killing of Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury under King Henry II. Eliot used the device of a chorus, an ancient Greek invention, to express certain concerns and observations, and the killers take their turn to justify their action. When I read this play as a grammar school student in England, I

CathedralsMedieval KingdomHistorical FictionMale Lead
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The Nameless Day

Sara Douglass · 576 pages

CathedralsMedieval KingdomHistorical FictionMale Lead
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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.

CathedralsMedieval KingdomHistorical FictionMale Lead
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The Lady Chapel

Candace Robb · 343 pages

CathedralsMedieval KingdomHistorical FictionMale Lead
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A Woman of Substance

Barbara Taylor Bradford · 843 pages

Emma Harte Lowther Ainsley is seventy-eight years old and one of the richest most powerful women in the world. Self-reliant and ruthless, she uses money as a weapon and adversity as a tool. In her poverty-stricken youth, Emma exhibited an uncommon amount of initiative and intelligence even as a maidservant on a Yorkshire estate. Pregnant and unwed at fifteen, she fled her shameful situation to s

Class StruggleHistorical FictionUnderdogClassism
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Kane and Abel

Jeffrey Archer · 550 pages

Born on the same day near the turn of the century on opposite sides of the world, both men are brought together by fate and the quest of a dream.These two men — ambitious, powerful, ruthless — are locked in a relentless struggle to build an empire, fuelled by their all-consuming hatred. Over 60 years and three generations, through war, marriage, fortune, and disaster, Kane and Abel battle for the

Class StruggleHistorical FictionUnderdogClassism
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Nicholas Nickleby

Charles Dickens · 768 pages

Nicholas Nickleby is left responsible for his mother and sister when his father dies. The novel follows his attempt to succeed in supporting them, despite his uncle Ralph's antagonistic lack of belief in him. It is one of Dickens' early comic novels.

Class StruggleUnderdogWorking-Class ProtagonistHistorical 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

Class StruggleHistorical FictionUnderdogClassism
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The Red and the Black

Stendhal · 472 pages

Class StruggleHistorical FictionUnderdogClassism
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The Wicked and the Just

J. Anderson Coats · 352 pages

Medieval KingdomClass StruggleHistorical FictionClassism
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The Magicians' Guild

Trudi Canavan · 480 pages

This year, like every other, the magicians of Imardin gather to purge the city of undesirables. Cloaked in the protection of their sorcery, they move with no fear of the vagrants and miscreants who despise them and their work--until one enraged girl, barely more than a child, hurls a stone at the hated invaders ... and effortlessly penetrates their magical shield. What the Magicians' Guild has lon

Medieval KingdomClass StruggleRags to RichesUnderdog
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All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

Class StruggleHistorical FictionRags to RichesClassism
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The Tea Rose

Jennifer Donnelly · 762 pages

East London, 1888 - a city apart. A place of shadow and light where thieves, whores, and dreamers mingle, where children play in the cobbled streets by day and a killer stalks at night, where bright hopes meet the darkest truths. Here, by the whispering waters of the Thames, Fiona Finnegan, a worker in a tea factory, hopes to own a shop one day, together with her lifelong love, Joe Bristow, a cost

Class StruggleHistorical FictionUnderdogWorking-Class Protagonist
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A Morbid Taste for Bones

Ellis Peters · 229 pages

12th-century Shrewsbury monks go to Wales to recover a 7th-century saint’s relics, and encounter opposition from the relics’ current keepers. Then the opposition leader is murdered.

Medieval KingdomCathedralsHistorical FictionMale Lead
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The Good Earth

Pearl S. Buck · 316 pages

This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought

Class StruggleHistorical FictionUnderdogRags to Riches
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Last Argument of Kings

Joe Abercrombie · 647 pages

The King of the Union lies on his deathbed, the peasants revolt, and the nobles scramble to steal his crown. No one believes that the shadow of war is about to fall across the heart of the Union. Only the First of the Magi can save the world, but there are risks.

Medieval KingdomClass StruggleClassismSprawling Epic
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The Dean's Watch

Elizabeth Goudge · 383 pages

Set in a Cathedral city in the 1870s, a remote town dominated by the great cathedral and its formidable Dean Adam Ayscough, who holds a deep love for his parishioners and townspeople. But the craggy, homely old Dean, lived locked in by shyness... when an obscure watchmaker, the timid, fearful little Isaac Peabody, a genius of a clockmaker, strikes up an unlikely friendship with the Dean. It leads

CathedralsHistorical FictionMale Lead
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The Prince and the Pauper

Mark Twain · 270 pages

Class StruggleHistorical FictionRags to RichesClassism
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Vanity Fair

William Makepeace Thackeray · 699 pages

No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles - military and domestic - are fought, fo

Class StruggleHistorical FictionRags to RichesClassism
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Glittering Images

Susan Howatch · 504 pages

Charged by Canterbury with the spiritual monitoring of a wayward bishop, Dr. Charles Ashworth, a young, driven Anglican minister, encounters a genteel world whose deeply embedded apostasy forces him to confront his own inner demons.

CathedralsHistorical FictionMale Lead
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The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · 342 pages

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c

Class StruggleHistorical FictionUnderdogClassism
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