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🧲 Books like this

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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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.

Slow-PacedFrame StoryBleakAtmospheric
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Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys · 189 pages

Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R

ColonialismBleakSlow-PacedAtmospheric
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The Fall

Albert Camus · 147 pages

Frame StorySlow-PacedDense ProseNovella
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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

Frame StoryColonialismBleakSlow-Paced
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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson · 138 pages

Mr. Gabriel Utterson is a serious, austere lawyer living a humdrum life in Victorian London. Yet there is a strange clause in his friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll's will: should he disappear for more than 3 months, everything will be inherited by Hyde. But after Edward Hyde's darker nature is revealed one dark winters night, Mr. Utterson begins to investigate the connection between the two men, and finds

Frame StoryNovellaBleakAtmospheric
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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.

ColonialismNovellaBleakClassics
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The Turn of the Screw

Henry James · 142 pages

The governess of two enigmatic children fears their souls are in danger from the ghosts of the previous governess and her sinister lover.

Frame StorySlow-PacedNovellaAtmospheric
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Frankenstein

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley · 224 pages

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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

ColonialismSlow-PacedBleakClassics
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Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 202 pages

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

BleakFrame StoryNovellaClassics
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Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre · 238 pages

Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist, holds a position of singular eminence in the world of letters. Among readers and critics familiar with the whole of Sartre's work, it is generally recognized that his earliest novel, La Nausée (first published in 1938), is his finest and most significant. It is unquestionably a key

Slow-PacedBleakDense ProseClassics
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Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë · 418 pages

Emily Bronte's dark romance, with an introduction from best-selling author Alice Hoffman Heathcliff comes to the brooding mansion of Wuthering Heighths as an orphan child. Cathy is the daughter of the wealthy family that takes him in. They are drawn together from the moment they meet, their love consuming, destructive, and full of desire. They cannot be together, and yet they cannot stay apart. Th

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The Last of the Mohicans

James Fenimore Cooper · 240 pages

In 1757, the third year of the French and Indian War, Hawkeye, a colonial scout, and his friends, Chingachkook, a chief of the Mohicans, and his son Uncas risk their lives to guide two English sisters through hostile territory and evade the evil Huron, Magua, who is determined to destroy them.

ColonialismWater and RiversDense ProseClassics
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The Inferno

Dante Alighieri · 288 pages

Dante, after becoming lost on the path of life, is led by Virgil into Hell to begin his journey back to the light of God.

Dense ProseFrame StoryClassicsSlow-Paced
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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pages

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The Trial

Franz Kafka · 256 pages

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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

ColonialismDense ProseBleakSlow-Paced
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The Fisherman

John Langan · 282 pages

In upstate New York, in the woods around Woodstock, Dutchman's Creek flows out of the Ashokan Reservoir. Steep-banked, fast-moving, it offers the promise of fine fishing, and of something more, a possibility too fantastic to be true. When Abe and Dan, two widowers who have found solace in each other's company and a shared passion for fishing, hear rumors of the Creek, and what might be found there

Frame StoryWater and RiversSlow-PacedAtmospheric
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The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy · 76 pages

Ivan Ilych, a peaceful public official in the Russian provinces, has his life permanently changed by a serious illness which no doctor can accurately diagnose.

BleakNovellaClassicsSlow-Paced
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Ethan Frome

Edith Wharton · 98 pages

*Edith Wharton wrote Ethan Frome as a frame story — meaning that the prologue and epilogue constitute a "frame" around the main story* **How It All Goes Down** It's winter. A nameless engineer is in Starkfield, Massachusetts on business and he first sees Ethan Frome at the post office. Ethan is a man in his early fifties who is obviously strong, and obviously crippled. The man becomes fascinat

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House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski · 736 pages

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Season of Migration to the North

Tayeb Salih · 169 pages

"When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger -- the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the disturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven

ColonialismFrame StoryAtmosphericClassics
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The Secret History

Donna Tartt · 557 pages

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last - inexorably - into evil.

Frame StorySlow-PacedAtmosphericDense Prose
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