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Closely Watched Trains

Bohumil Hrabal · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

World War IIComing of AgeBittersweetClassics
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A Separate Peace

John Knowles · 196 pages

Gene Forrester looks back fifteen years to a World War II year in which he and his best friend were roommates in a New hampshire boarding school.

World War IIComing of AgeBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Train

Georges Simenon, Robert Baldick · 148 pages

"Restored to print for the first time in more than forty years, this masterpiece of psychological suspense tells the tale of Marcel Féron--a poor man who, against all odds, has made a 'normal' life in a bucolic French village in the Ardennes. But one spring day in 1940, the German army invades France, and he must abandon his home and confront the fate that he has secretly awaited. Separated from h

TrainsWorld War IIBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Blood of Others

Simone de Beauvoir · 240 pages

World War IIRebels and ResistanceBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Every Man Dies Alone

Hans Fallada · 543 pages

Based on a true story, this never-before-translated masterpiece was overlooked for years after its author--a bestselling writer before World War II who found himself in a Nazi insane asylum at war's end--died just before it was published.In a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis, it tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their onl

World War IIRebels and ResistanceBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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City of Thieves

David Benioff · 286 pages

From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival — and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime. During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives b

World War IIComing of AgeDark ComedyBittersweet
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The Train Was On Time

Heinrich Boll · 133 pages

TrainsWorld War IILiterary FictionClassics
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Bud, Not Buddy

Christopher Paul Curtis · 249 pages

It's 1936, in Flint, Michigan. Times may be hard, and ten-year-old Bud may be a motherless boy on the run, but Bud's got a few things going for him: 1. He has his own suitcase filled with his own important, secret things. 2. He's the author of Bud Caldwell's Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself. 3. His momma never told him who his father was, but

TrainsComing of AgeBittersweetClassics
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From Here to Eternity

James Jones · 827 pages

Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941. Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets "the treatment" that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife. Both Warden and Prewitt a

World War IIBittersweetClassicsLiterary Fiction
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The Reader

Bernhard Schlink · 224 pages

World War IIComing of AgeBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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God's Bits of Wood

Ousmane Sembene · 333 pages

TrainsRebels and ResistanceLiterary FictionClassics
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Moscow Stations

Venedikt Erofeev · 128 pages

TrainsDark ComedyLiterary FictionClassics
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All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr · 544 pages

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are t

World War IIComing of AgeBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Caine Mutiny

Herman Wouk · 536 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize this atmospheric novel tells the story in flashback of a mutiny aboard a United States minesweeper during WW2. The murky events of the mutiny emerge during a court-martial and it soon becomes clear that few people will emerge from the trial with any credit.

World War IIComing of AgeLiterary FictionClassics
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The Tobacconist

Robert Seethaler · 234 pages

"Seventeen-year-old Franz Huchel journeys to Vienna to apprentice at a tobacco shop. There he meets Sigmund Freud, a regular customer, and over time the two very different men form a singular friendship. When Franz falls desperately in love with the music hall dancer Anezka, he seeks advice from the renowned psychoanalyst, who admits that the female sex is as big a mystery to him as it is to Franz

Coming of AgeBittersweetWorld War IILiterary Fiction
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Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski · 288 pages

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye of

Coming of AgeDark ComedyLiterary FictionClassics
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World War IIRebels and ResistanceLiterary FictionClassics
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Corelli's Mandolin

Louis de Bernieres · 437 pages

The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical, heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an i

World War IIBittersweetDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Jacob the Liar

Jurek Becker

World War IIBittersweetLiterary FictionClassics
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The Sword of Honour Trilogy

Evelyn Waugh · 710 pages

"This trilogy spanning World War II, based in part on Evelyn Waugh's own experiences as an army officer, is the author's surpassing achievement as a novelist. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cru

World War IIClassicsLiterary FictionBittersweet
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This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 256 pages

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semi-autobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the

Coming of AgeBittersweetLiterary FictionClassics
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The Catcher in the Rye

J.D. Salinger · 218 pages

Story of Holden Caufield with his idiosyncrasies, penetrating insight, confusion, sensitivity and negativism. Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.

Coming of AgeBittersweetLiterary FictionClassics
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The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Giorgio Bassani · 286 pages

Giorgio Bassani's acclaimed novel of unrequited love and the plight of the Italian Jews on the brink of World War II has become a classic of modern Italian literature. Made into an Academy Award - winning film in 1970, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is a richly evocative and nostalgic depiction of prewar Italy. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew in the Italian city of Ferrara, has long been

World War IIBittersweetLiterary FictionClassics
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How Green Was My Valley

Richard Llewellyn · 495 pages

**This is a story set in a south Wales coal mining valley and tells of a family striving to improve their lives through hard work, education and their non-conformist faith.** The main character is the youngest son, Huw Morgan and his life's journey through the difficulties associated with the mining industry and the awful risks involved in deep coal mining in the **mid nineteenth century**. The

Coming of AgeBittersweetClassicsLiterary Fiction

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