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The Gold Bug Variations

Richard Powers · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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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

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The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin · 336 pages

E-book extra: In-depth study guide.Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life. Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to t

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The Weight of Ink

Rachel Kadish · 576 pages

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The Tiger's Wife

Tea Obreht · 360 pages

Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the ti

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Zeno of Bruges

Marguerite Yourcenar · 333 pages

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Eifelheim

Michael Flynn · 260 pages

In 1349, one small town in Germany disappeared and has never been resettled. Tom, a contemporary historian, and his theoretical physicist girlfriend Sharon, become interested. Tom indeed becomes obsessed. By all logic, the town should have survived, but it didn't and that violates everything Tom knows about history. What's was special about Eifelheim that it utterly disappeared more than 600 years

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Mating

Norman Rush · 480 pages

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Brazzaville Beach

William Boyd · 398 pages

Set in Africa, Hope Clearwater, an ecologist studying chimpanzees and wife of a mathematician, looks back on the events that led her to leave England and her husband.

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The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand · 727 pages

The Fountainhead is a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand. It was Rand's first major literary success and brought her fame and financial success. More than 6.5 million copies of the book have been sold worldwide.

Scientist ProtagonistDense ProseLiterary FictionNew York City
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Strong Motion

Jonathan Franzen · 518 pages

Another second novel. As always Franzen’s scope is immense, and his talent is clear on every page. If Palanuick is the very best writer, sentence to sentence, then Franzen is clearly the best living novelist. This story involves one Louis Holland, and a Harvard seismologist named Dr. Reneé Seitchek, and it revolves around abortion activists, big corporations, and strange sudden earthquakes appeari

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The Dream of Scipio

Iain Pears · 398 pages

In national bestseller *The Dream of Scipio*, acclaimed author Iain Pears intertwines three intellectual mysteries, three love stories, and three of the darkest moments in human history. United by a classical text called "The Dream of Scipio," three men struggle to find refuge for their hearts and minds from the madness that surrounds them in the final days of the Roman Empire, in the grim years o

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Wolves of Eternity

Karl Ove Knausgård

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Kepler

John Banville · 192 pages

Johannes Kepler, born in 1571 in south Germany, was one of the world's greatest mathematicians and astronomers. The author of this book uses this history as a background to his novel, writing a work of historical fiction that is rooted in poverty, squalor and the tyrannical power of emperors.

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In the First Circle

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 741 pages

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The Starless Sea

Erin Morgenstern · 512 pages

**FAR BENEATH** the surface of the earth, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories. The entryways that lead to this sanctuary are often hidden, sometimes on forest floors, sometimes in private homes, sometimes in plain sight. But those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them. Zachary Ezra Rawlins is searc

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Middlemarch

George Eliot · 795 pages

Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.

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Ratner's Star

Don DeLillo · 438 pages

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Umbrella

Will Self · 422 pages

It is 1971, and Zachary Busner is a maverick psychiatrist who has just begun working at a mental hospital in suburban north London. As he tours the hospital's wards, Busner notes that some of the patients are exhibiting a very peculiar type of physical tic: rapid, precise movements that they repeat over and over. These patients do not react to outside stimuli and are trapped inside an internal wor

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Easter Island

Jennifer Vanderbes · 308 pages

Easter Island is the mysterious backdrop that connects the lives of two remarkable women. Elsa Pendleton is an Edwardian Englishwoman, forced into a marriage of convenience. The other is American botanist Greer Faraday, recently widowed and troubled by unhappy memories. As Greer is forced to confront some unwelcome truths, her story becomes irresistibly entwined with Elsa's.

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Hopeful Monsters

Nicholas Mosley · 550 pages

"Hopeful Monsters is a tour de force of intellect and eros - one in which Albert Einstein taunts a lecture hall full of Nazis and Ludwig Wittgenstein is an awkward guest at an English garden party. It is a love story in which a young English physicist and a German-Jewish anthropologist pursue each other across landscapes that range from Hitler's Germany to Los Alamos on the eve of the atomic age.

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The Stranger's Child

Alan Hollinghurst · 448 pages

In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate--a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance--to his family's modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in D

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A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Janna Levin · 230 pages

"The narrator is a scientist herself, a physicist obsessed with Kurt Godel, the greatest logician of many centuries, and with Alan Turing, the extraordinary mathematician, breaker of the Enigma Code during World War II. "They are both brilliantly original and outsiders," the narrator tells us. "They are both besotted with mathematics. But for all their devotion, mathematics is indifferent, unalter

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