AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

The Given World

Marian Palaia · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

The Time In Between

David Bergen · 288 pages

When their father leaves his B.C. home and travels back to Vietnam where he fought years earlier, a brother and sister follow him.

Vietnam WarWar and Its AftermathCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Machine Dreams

Jayne Anne Phillips · 331 pages

The story of the Hampsons--Mitch, Jean, Danner, and Billy--from the Depression through the Vietnam War.

Vietnam WarWar and Its AftermathLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
❤️

The Brothers K

David James Duncan · 645 pages

Vietnam WarWar and Its AftermathLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
❤️

The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam

Bao Ninh · 228 pages

The Sorrow of War - by turns bleak and poetic, pellucid and cunning - opens with Kien, an infantry cadre from Hanoi, engaged in the grim business of retrieving and burying the dead at the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. From here, the novel ranges back to Kien's youth and the pains of adolescent love, and moves forward to his attempts, as a struggling writer in postwar Hanoi, to

Vietnam WarWar and Its AftermathLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
❤️

She Weeps Each Time You're Born

Quan Barry · 270 pages

A young girl born under mysterious circumstances a few years before the reunification of Vietnam possesses the otherworldly ability to hear the voices of the dead.

Vietnam WarWar and Its AftermathLiterary FictionFemale Lead
❤️

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen · 384 pages

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.

War and Its AftermathVietnam WarLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
❤️

Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann · 349 pages

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly in

Vietnam WarLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenDeath of a Sibling
🙂

Democracy

Joan Didion · 234 pages

This tale of love and murder revolves around Inez Christian Victor, the wife of a man who wants to be President of the United States.

Vietnam WarLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
🙂

A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving · 543 pages

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." So begins John Irving's new novel. In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys - best friends - are playing ina Li

Vietnam WarLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
🙂

Salt Houses

Hala Alyan · 320 pages

"From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home ... On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they wi

War and Its AftermathLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
🙂

Saigon

Anthony Grey · 789 pages

Vietnam WarWar and Its AftermathCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
🙂

Gods Go Begging

Alfredo Vea · 320 pages

"Jesse Pasadoble, a former infantry soldier who served his country with honor and courage, is now a defense attorney living in San Francisco. It was in Vietnam that Jesse learned to "hate death and to develop an almost anguished love of the living" during a horrific siege in which he should have died but didn't. For Jesse, the battle still rages: in his tortured memories; in the gang wars that ar

Vietnam WarWar and Its AftermathLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Master Butchers Singing Club

Louise Erdrich · 416 pages

What happens when a trained killer discovers, in the aftermath of war, that his true vocation is love? From the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of Love Medicine comes an enchanting, richly imagined world "where butchers sing like angels."

War and Its AftermathLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
🙂

The Stone Carvers

Jane Urquhart · 396 pages

War and Its AftermathLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
🙂

The Boat

Nam Le · 272 pages

The seven stories in Nam Le's masterful collection The Boat take us across the globe, from the slums of Colombia to Iowa City; from the streets of Tehran to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea. They guide us to the heart of what it means to be human -- and herald the arrival of a remarkable new writer.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Vietnam WarWar and Its AftermathLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
🙂

The Winter Vault

Anne Michaels · 341 pages

Award-winning poet and novelist Anne Michaels gives us a love story of extraordinary depth and complexity, a mesmerizing tale that juxtaposes historical events with the most intimate moments of individual lives.In 1964, a newly married Canadian couple settles into a Nile River houseboat moored below the towering figures of Abu Simbel. Avery is one of the engineers responsible for the dismantling a

War and Its AftermathCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

After This

Alice McDermott · 279 pages

A portrait of an American family during the middle decades of the twentieth century evokes the social, spiritual, and political turmoil of the era as seen through the experiences of a middle-class couple and their children.

Vietnam WarLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenLyrical Prose
🙂

The Quiet American

Graham Greene · 211 pages

One of Graham Greene's best works. The story is set at the time of the French war against the Viet Cong and tells the story of liberal British journalist Thomas Fowler, his mistress Phuong, and their relationship with American idealist Pyle. The latter is an earnest young man indocrinated with geo-political theory and whose attempts to shape the world to American ideals ends in his own personal tr

Vietnam WarCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

The Twins

Tessa de Loo · 378 pages

War and Its AftermathCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien · 256 pages

*The Things They Carried* (1990) is a collection of linked short stories by American novelist Tim O'Brien, about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the Vietnam War. His third book about the war, it is based upon his experiences as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division.

Vietnam WarWar and Its AftermathLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
🙂

The Patience Stone

Atiq Rahimi · 141 pages

In Persian folklore, Syngue Sabour is the name of a magical black stone, a patience stone, which absorbs the plight of those who confide in it. It is believed that the day it explodes, after having received too much hardship and pain, will be the day of the Apocalypse. But here, the Syngue Sabour is not a stone but rather a man lying brain-dead with a bullet lodged in his neck. His wife is with hi

War and Its AftermathLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
🙂

The Orchard of Lost Souls

Nadifa Mohamed · 352 pages

"The Orchard of Lost Souls takes place in Hargeisa in 1987, and charts the descent of Somalia into civil war through the entwined lives of three women"--

War and Its AftermathLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
🙂

The Night Watch

Sarah Waters · 506 pages

A novel of relationships set in 1940s London that brims with vivid historical detail, thrilling coincidences, and psychological complexity, by the author of the Booker Prize finalist Fingersmith. Sarah Waters, whose works set in Victorian England have awards and acclaim and have reinvigorated the genres of both historical and lesbian fiction, returns with novel that marks a departure from ninetee

War and Its AftermathLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
🙂

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

War and Its AftermathLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.