What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorMemoirs of a Polar Bear
Yoko Tawada · 256 pages
"The Memoirs of a Polar Bear is a novel that stars three generations of talented writers and performers who happen to be polar bears. The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in The New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness"--Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous, both as circus performers and
Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
Mo Yan · 552 pages
Stripped of his possessions and executed as a result of Mao's Land Reform Movement in 1948, benevolent landowner Ximen Nao finds himself endlessly tortured in Hell before he is systematically reborn on Earth as each of the animals in the Chinese zodiac.
Red Earth and Pouring Rain
Vikram Chandra · 580 pages
Vikram Chandra's first novel is a story about exile, about the hunger for experience and the ache for return that mark the beginning and end of all journeys, and about the processes of personal redefinition implicit in such migrations. In a feat of magnificent invention, it links epic history - and the tale of a culture spiraling toward a moment of unspeakable violence - with the fates of three c
Daughter of Fortune
Isabel Allende · 416 pages
"Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaiso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquin Andiera, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen pre
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie · 548 pages
Flush
Virginia Woolf · 163 pages
A wonderfully creative and whimsical book, the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel. After spending his youth in the country, Flush was given to the invalid poet Elizabeth Barrett and learned to live a quiet live as her companion. Flush is jealous when Robert Browning captures Miss Barrett's attention, but eventually accepts him and is wildly happy when they all move to Italy.
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
Lesley Nneka Arimah · 235 pages
"A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home. In "Who Will Greet You at Home," a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In "Wild," a disastrous night out shifts a teenager
The Dovekeepers
Alice Hoffman · 512 pages
A tale inspired by the tragic first-century massacre of hundreds of Jewish people at Masada presents the stories of a hated daughter, a baker's wife, a girl disguised as a warrior, and a medicine woman who keep doves and secrets while Roman soldiers draw near.
The Grass Dancer
Susan Power · 333 pages
Presented in the form of interconnected short stories, each told from a different point of view, this novel provides the reader with a snapshot of the life of one tribe from the 1860s through the 1980s.
Stork Mountain
Miroslav Penkov · 442 pages
"A young Bulgarian immigrant returns to the country of his birth in search of his grandfather, who suddenly and unexpectedly cut all contact with the family three years ago. The trail leads him to a village on the border with Turkey, a stone's throw away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains--a place of pagan mysteries and black storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, po
Comfort Woman
Nora Okja Keller · 224 pages
Possessing a wisdom and maturity rarely found in a first novelist, Korean-American writer Nora Okja Keller tells a heartwrenching and enthralling tale in this, her literary debut. Comfort Woman is the story of Akiko, a Korean refugee of World War II, and Beccah, her daughter by an American missionary. The two women are living on the edge of society—and sanity—in Honolulu, plagued by Akiko's period
The Silence of Trees
Valya Dudycz Lupescu · 302 pages
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon · 639 pages
The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar
Land of Love and Drowning
Tiphanie Yanique · 468 pages
In the early 1900s, an important ship sinks into the Caribbean Sea, just as the Virgin Islands are transferred from Danish to American rule. Orphaned by the sunk vessel are two sisters and their half-brother, now faced with an uncertain identity and future. Each of them is unusually beautiful, and each is in possession of a particular magic that will either sink or save them. Chronicling three gen
Boy, Snow, Bird
Helen Oyeyemi · 308 pages
This novel is a reimagining of the fairy tale Snow White recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity set in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty, the opposite of the life she has left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother
Come, Thou Tortoise
Jessica Grant · 422 pages
Audrey (a.k.a. Oddly) Flowers is living quietly in Oregon with Winnifred, her tortoise, when she finds out her dear father has been knocked into a coma back in Newfoundland. Despite her fear of flying, she goes to him, but not before she reluctantly dumps Winnifred with her unreliable friends. Poor Winnifred. When Audrey disarms an Air Marshal en route to St. John’s we begin to realize there’s s
Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya · 252 pages
Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.
Yiddish for Pirates
Gary Barwin · 346 pages
"Set in the years around 1492, 'Yiddish for Pirates' tells the story of Moishe, a young man who, enchanted by maps and seeking adventure, leaves the shtetl to join a ship's crews. There he meets Aaron, our ribald yet philosophical parrot narrator who becomes his near-constant companion. With a beakful of Yiddish jokes, this wisecracking bird guides us through a swashbuckling world of exploits on t
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
Benjamin Hale · 578 pages
Bruno Littlemore, the world's first chimpanzee with the ability to speak, tells the story of primatologist Lydia Littlemore's efforts to educate him; his untimely outbursts, which ultimately cost Lydia her job; and the unforgettable road trip that follows.
A Beautiful Truth
Colin McAdam · 292 pages
"Told simultaneously from the perspective of humans and chimpanzees, set in a Vermont home and a Florida primate research facility, A Beautiful Truth--at times brutal, other times deeply moving--is about the simple truths that transcend species, the meaning of family, the lure of belonging, and the capacity for survival. A powerful and haunting meditation on human nature told from the dual perspec
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
The Bingo Palace
Louise Erdrich · 274 pages