What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorConversations with Friends
Sally Rooney · 315 pages
Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home a
Women
Charles Bukowski · 297 pages
Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that woul
This Is How You Lose Her
Junot Diaz · 240 pages
This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.
True At First Light: A Fictional Memoir
Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway · 319 pages
"Both revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953." (From the 1999 hardback edition dustjacket.)
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway · 251 pages
Hemingway's profile of the Lost Generation captures life among the expatriates on Paris' Left Bank during the 1920s, the brutality of bullfighting in Spain, and the moral and spiritual dissolution of a generation.
Someone I Loved
Anna Gavalda, Catherine Evans · 157 pages
The Real Thing
Tom Stoppard · 84 pages
Henry may be the wittiest playwright of his generation, but he's hopelessly naive when it comes to understanding love and infidelity. Writing about betrayal is one thing, living with it is another. After Henry leaves his wife for another woman, he's confronted with being the cuckold himself.
Cakes and Ale
W. Somerset Maugham · 255 pages
For Alroy Kear the task is sample: write the authorized biography of the eminently respectable Victorian novelist Edward Driffield and make it a bestseller. What he doesn't reckon on is the truth.
Outline
Rachel Cusk · 256 pages
Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: the
Love, Etc
Julian Barnes · 249 pages
There used to be two sides to every story. Now there are three...In Talking it Over Gillian and Stuart were married until Oliver - witty, feckless Oliver - stole Gillian away. In Love, etc Julian Barnes revisits the three of them, using the same intimate technique of allowing the characters to speak directly to the reader, to whisper their secrets, to argue for their version of the truth. Darker a
The Graduate
Charles Webb · 208 pages
When Benjamin Braddock graduates from a small Eastern college and moves home to his parents' house, everyone wants to know what he's going to do with his life. Embittered by the emptiness of his college education and indifferent to his grim prospects—grad school? a career in plastics?—Benjamin falls haplessly into an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the relentlessly seductive wife of his father's busine
The Zahir
Paulo Coelho · 320 pages
Set in Paris and in the enchanting landscape of central Asia, this new novel by the author of the international bestsellers The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes follows the journey of a man obsessed with finding the wife who left him without an explanation.The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges that money and celebrity bring. His wife of te
Justine
Lawrence Durrell · 253 pages
Story of the modern Egyptian city of Alexandria, in which an Irish schoolmaster, a passionate, tormented Jewess, a Greek cabaret dancer, and a Coptic financier play out their destinies amid decadent surroundings symbolic of an erotic world. *Justine,* published in 1957, is the first volume in Lawrence Durrell's literary tetralogy, *The Alexandria Quartet.* The tetralogy consists of four interlo
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
Blue Angel
Francine Prose · 314 pages
It's been years since Swenson, a professor in a New England creative writing program, has published a novel.It's been even longer since any of his students have shown promise. Enter Angela Argo, a pierced, tattooed student with a rare talent for writing. Angela is just the thing Swenson needs. And, better yet, she wants his help. But, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intenti
Chaos of the Senses
Ahlam Mosteghanemi · 302 pages
In the midst of the Algerian civil war, Hayat is a young novelist trapped in a loveless marriage. While her husband, a high-ranking officer, preoccupies himself with politics, Hayat finds freedom from her highly regimented life in the world of her writing. There she weaves a passionate story for her characters. But the line between fiction and reality blurs when she falls for a man who seems to ha
The Last Time They Met
Anita Shreve · 330 pages
A dazzling story about marriage, forgiveness, and chances not taken, by the bestselling author of Body Surfing and A Wedding in December. At a literary festival a poet named Linda Fallon meets for the first time in years a fellow poet, Thomas Janes, whose fame has grown during a decade of seclusion. This is no chance meeting. Thomas saw that Linda was scheduled to appear, and chose this moment to
Commonwealth
Ann Patchett · 322 pages
"One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six