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Certainty

Madeleine Thien · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J

Dual TimelineGrief and MourningWorld War IIBittersweet
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Where My Heart Used to Beat

Sebastian Faulks · 336 pages

Robert, a British doctor haunted by World War II memories, agrees to write a biography of a renowned specialist in memory loss who possesses unsettling knowledge of Robert's past.

World War IIDual TimelineGrief and MourningBittersweet
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The Shell Seekers

Rosamunde Pilcher · 582 pages

The Shell Seekers is a novel of connection: of one family, and of the passions and heartbreak that have held them together for three generations. The Shell Seekers is filled with real people--mothers and daughters, husband and lovers--inspired with real values. The Shell Seekers centers on Penelope Keeling--a woman you'll always remember in world you'll never forget. The Shell Seekers is a magical

Dual TimelineWorld War IIGrief and MourningBittersweet
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Fugitive Pieces

Anne Michaels · 304 pages

Anne Michaels's fiercely beautiful debut novel tells the interlocking stories of three men of different generations whose lives are transformed by the events and shifting effects of the same war. At its center is poet Jakob Beer: traumatically orphaned as a young boy during the Second World war, rescued from the mud of a buried Polish city and secreted to a Greek island by Athos Roussos, scientist

Grief and MourningDual TimelineWorld War IILiterary Fiction
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The Madonnas of Leningrad

Debra Dean · 231 pages

One of the most talked about books of the year . . . Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. And while the elderly Russian woman cannot hold on to fresh memories -- the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild -- her distant past is preserved: vivid images that rise unbidden of her youth in war-torn Leningrad.In the fall of

Dual TimelineLyrical ProseWorld War IIBittersweet
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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

Dual TimelineGrief and MourningLyrical ProseBittersweet
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Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson · 424 pages

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th

Dual TimelineWorld War IIBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Out Stealing Horses

Per Petterson · 264 pages

An early morning adventure out stealing horses leads to the tragic death of one boy and a resulting lifetime of guilt and isolation for his friend, in this moving tale about the painful loss of innocence and of traditional ways of life that are gone forever.

Dual TimelineWorld War IIGrief and MourningLyrical Prose
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The Nightingale

Kristin Hannah · 460 pages

Despite their differences, sisters Vianne and Isabelle have always been close. Younger, bolder Isabelle lives in Paris while Vianne is content with life in the French countryside with her husband Antoine and their daughter. But when the Second World War strikes, Antoine is sent off to fight and Vianne finds herself isolated so Isabelle is sent by their father to help her. As the war progresses

Dual TimelineGrief and MourningBittersweetWorld War II
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Hamnet

Maggie O'Farrell · 365 pages

England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on. A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and

Dual TimelineBittersweetLiterary FictionGrief and Mourning
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The Railwayman's Wife

Ashley Hay · 307 pages

""An absorbing and uplifting read."--M.L. Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans "This is a book in which grief and love are so entwined they make a new and wonderful kind of sense."--Fiona McFarlane, author of The Night Guest Amidst the strange, silent aftermath of World War II, a widow, a poet, and a doctor search for lasting peace and fresh beginnings in this internationally acclaimed, awa

Grief and MourningWorld War IIBittersweetLyrical Prose
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Dual TimelineWorld War IILyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Piano Cemetery

Jose Luis Peixoto · 288 pages

Grief and MourningDual TimelineLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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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

Dual TimelineGrief and MourningLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Sarah's Key

Tatiana de Rosnay · 342 pages

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking th

Dual TimelineGrief and MourningBittersweetWorld War II
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The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje · 307 pages

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of

Lyrical ProseWorld War IILiterary FictionGrief and Mourning
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Autumn Laing

Alex Miller · 452 pages

Autumn Laing has long outlived the legendary circle of artists she cultivated in the 1930s. Now 'old and skeleton gaunt', she reflects on her tumultuous relationship with the abundantly talented Pat Donlon and the effect it had on her husband, on Pat's wife and the body of work which launched Pat's career. A brilliantly alive and insistently energetic story of love, loyalty and creativity.

Dual TimelineBittersweetLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Sea

John Banville · 233 pages

Following the death of his wife, Max Morden retreats to the seaside town of his childhood summers, where his own life becomes inextricably entwined with the members of the vacationing Grace family.

Dual TimelineGrief and MourningLyrical ProseBittersweet
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Ghost Moth

Michele Forbes · 252 pages

Northern Ireland, 1949. Katherine must choose between George Bedford - solid, reliable, devoted George - and Tom McKinley, who makes her feel alive. The reverberations of that summer - of the passions that were spilled, the lies that were told and the bargains that were made - still clamour to be heard in 1969. Northern Ireland has become a tinderbox but tragedy also lurks closer to home. As Kathe

Dual TimelineLyrical ProseBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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A Pigeon and a Boy

Meir Shalev · 311 pages

During the 1948 War of Independence--a time when pigeons are still used to deliver battlefield messages--a gifted young pigeon handler is mortally wounded. In the moments before his death, he dispatches one last pigeon, carrying his extraordinary gift to the girl he has loved since adolescence. Intertwined with this story is the contemporary tale of Yair Mendelsohn, who has his own legacy from the

Dual TimelineLyrical ProseBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Obituary Writer

Ann Hood · 312 pages

Dual TimelineGrief and MourningBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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The Secret Scripture

Sebastian Barry · 300 pages

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges

Dual TimelineLyrical ProseLiterary FictionBittersweet
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Great Circle

Maggie Shipstead · 608 pages

Dual TimelineWorld War IILyrical ProseLiterary Fiction

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