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🧲 Books like this

Everybody's Fool

Richard Russo · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Working-Class ProtagonistSmall TownDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
❤️

Cannery Row

John Steinbeck · 183 pages

Cannery Row is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, published in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California, on a street lined with sardine canneries that is known as Cannery Row. The story revolves around the people living there. Steinbeck revisited these characters and this milieu nine years later in his novel Sweet Thursday.

Working-Class ProtagonistEnsemble CastSmall TownCharacter-Driven
❤️

Heat & Light

Jennifer Haigh · 535 pages

Bestselling author Jennifer Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town and the conflicting forces at its heart - hope and desperation, greed and power, big business and small-town families. Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of

Working-Class ProtagonistSmall TownCharacter-DrivenEnsemble Cast
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Ensemble CastSmall TownDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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Factotum

Charles Bukowski · 205 pages

One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany o

Working-Class ProtagonistDark ComedyCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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The Bean Trees

Barbara Kingsolver · 240 pages

Taylor, a poor Kentuckian making her way west with an abandoned baby girl, stops in Tucson where she finds friends and discovers resources in apparently empty places.

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenEnsemble CastContemporary Fiction
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Bee Sting

Paul Murray · 645 pages

Ensemble CastDark ComedyCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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Clown Girl

Monica Drake · 316 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistDark ComedyCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Round House

Louise Erdrich · 352 pages

A young man is upended after a violent attack on his mother, which leaves his family in turmoil. Well-written page turner that is hard to put down!

Character-DrivenSmall TownLiterary FictionDark Comedy
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Anxious People

Fredrik Backman · 352 pages

It's New Year's Eve and House Tricks estate agents are hosting an open viewing in an up-market apartment when an incompetent bank robber rushes in and politely takes everyone hostage. For Anna-Lena and Roger, busy buying-up apartments to fill the hole in their marriage, it's something else to talk about. For Julia and Ro, panicky parents-to-be, it's yet another worry. Lonely bank manager

Ensemble CastDark ComedyCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe · 690 pages

Ensemble CastDark ComedyLiterary FictionContemporary Fiction
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The Lake the River and the Other Lake

Steve Amick · 365 pages

The lives, loves, fates, and fortunes of the colorful inhabitants of Weneshkeen, a resort town on the shore of Lake Michigan, both townies and ritzy summer visitors, intertwine over the course of a single tumultuous summer.

Ensemble CastSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Ensemble CastSmall TownCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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What's Eating Gilbert Grape

Peter Hedges · 335 pages

The coming-of-age of a 24-year-old grocery clerk who has spent his entire life in an Iowa town with a population of 1091.

Working-Class ProtagonistSmall TownDark ComedyContemporary Fiction
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Funny Girl

Nick Hornby · 452 pages

"From the bestselling author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down comes a highly anticipated new novel. Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingenue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest d

Ensemble CastWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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At Home in Mitford

Jan Karon · 542 pages

Ensemble CastCharacter-DrivenSmall TownContemporary Fiction
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The Van

Roddy Doyle · 316 pages

Jimmy Rabbitte is unemployed and rapidly running out of money. His best friend Bimbo has been made redundant at the company where he has worked for many years. The two old friends are out of luck and out of options. That is, until Bimbo finds a dilapidated 'chipper van' and the pair decide to go into business...By the bestselling author of The Commitments and The Snapper, The Van is a tender tale

Working-Class ProtagonistDark ComedyContemporary FictionLiterary Fiction
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No One Is Coming to Save Us

Stephanie Powell Watts · 384 pages

"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can'

Working-Class ProtagonistSmall TownCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Ford County

John Grisham · 320 pages

Ford County is a collection of novellas by John Grisham. His first collection of stories, it was published by Doubleday in the United States on November 3, 2009. The book contains 7 short stories: Blood Drive; Fetching Raymond; Fish Files; Casino; Michael's Room; Quiet Haven; Funny Boy.

Working-Class ProtagonistSmall TownDark ComedyContemporary Fiction
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Rhino Ranch

Larry McMurtry · 278 pages

Returning home to recover from a near-fatal heart attack, Duane discovers that he has a new neighbor: the statuesque K. K. Slater, a quirky billionairess who's come to Thalia to open the Rhino Ranch, dedicated to the preservation of the endangered black rhinoceros. Despite their obvious differences, Duane can't help but find himself charmed by K.K.'s stubborn toughness and lively spirit, and the t

Small TownCharacter-DrivenContemporary FictionLiterary Fiction
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We Live in Water

Jess Walter · 177 pages

"We Live in Water, the first collection of short fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jess Walter, is a suite of diverse, often comic stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit and generosity of spirit that has made him one of our most talked-about writers. In "Thief," a blue-collar worker turns unlikely detective to find out which of his kid

Working-Class ProtagonistDark ComedyCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Plainsong

Kent Haruf · 301 pages

Ensemble CastCharacter-DrivenSmall TownLiterary Fiction
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Gather

Kenneth M. Cadow · 325 pages

Publisher Annotation: A resourceful teenager in rural Vermont struggles to hold on to the family home while his mom recovers from addiction in this striking debut novel.

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenSmall TownContemporary Fiction
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Cold Storage

David Koepp · 304 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistDark ComedyEnsemble CastSmall Town

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