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 authorThe Underpainter
Jane Urquhart · 340 pages
"The detached eye of the narrator never falters, though passion hums beneath the surface like some vast primeval beast beneath the ice. The mixing of paints becomes erotic, and the minute recalling of details is sensual...Characters appear like wraiths from the fog, become dazzling specks on a snowblind eye, encounter dreams and apparitions, while the cold, painted-out hero is laid before us in hi
The Corpse Washer
Sinan Antoon · 185 pages
"Born to a traditional Shi'ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, Jawad decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor, to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, in defiance of his father's wishes and determined to forge his own path. But the circumstances of history dictate otherwise. Sa
The Illuminations
Andrew O'Hagan · 293 pages
A British army captain whose artistic pioneer grandmother lived an illusory life to cope with hardships begins transforming his own sense of reality in the aftermath of a mission gone wrong before confronting a mystery from his family's past.
The Garden of Evening Mists
Tan Twan Eng · 352 pages
"On a mountain above the clouds, in the central highlands of Malaya lived the man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.” Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about him, but a war would come, and a decade would pass before she travels up to the Garden of Evening Mists to see him, in 1951. A survivor of a brutal Japanese camp, she has spent the last few years
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.
The Yellow Birds
Kevin Powers · 240 pages
In this haunting fictional account, an Iraq war veteran contemplates the lives, including his own, devasated by the random violence of war.
Johnny Got His Gun
Dalton Trumbo · 271 pages
This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered--not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives ... This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome ... but so is wa
Beasts of No Nation
Uzodinma Iweala · 180 pages
In this stunning debut novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country. Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the con
Where I Left My Soul
Jerome Ferrari · 157 pages
He was interned at Buchenwald during the German occupation and imprisoned by the Vietnamese when France's armies in the Far East collapsed. Now Capitaine Degorce is an interrogator himself, and the only peace he can find is in the presence of Tahar, a captive commander in the very organization he is charged with eliminating. - But his confessor is no saint: Tahar stands accused of indiscriminate m
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Mitch Albom · 196 pages
The Five People You Meet In Heaven is a 2003 novel by Mitch Albom. It follows the life and death of a ride mechanic named Eddie who is killed in an amusement park accident and sent to heaven, where he encounters five people who had a significant impact on him while he was alive. It was published by Hyperion and remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 95 weeks.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 186 pages
Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
Beaufort
Ron Leshem · 320 pages
Beaufort is at once a searing coming-ofage story and a novel for our times - one of the most powerful, visceral portraits of the horror, camaraderie, and absurdity of war in modern fiction." "Beaufort. To the handful of Israeli soldiers occupying the ancient crusader fortress. it is a little slice of hell - a forbidding, fear-soaked enclave perched atop two acres of land in southern Lebanon, surro
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak · 542 pages
***This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.*** One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. ***The book quickly became an international be
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque · 236 pages
This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. These young men become enthusiastic soldiers, but their world of duty, culture, and progress breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the hatred that meaninglessly pits young men of the s
De Niro's Game
Rawi Hage · 280 pages
In the Christian part of Beirut, torn by civil war, two befriended young men make a different choice about whether to flee or join the fight.
The Short-Timers
Gustav Hasford · 180 pages
L'opera prima di un ex combattente che ha vissuto direttamente l'inferno della guerra. Siamo in Vietnam nel 1968. Dopo un addestramento selvaggio, i giovani marines sono precipitati in un panorama d'incubo, annerito dal napalm e infestato da cadaveri umani in decomposizione. È allora che la Guerra lascia cadere la maschera di Gloria, Onore, Virilità e Amor Patrio e mostra il suo volto vero. Il cap
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.
The Small Backs of Children
Lidia Yuknavitch · 256 pages
In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family. The image, instantly iconic, garners acclaim and prizes and, in the United States, becomes a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer's best friend, who has suffered a devastating traged
The Sirens of Baghdad
Yasmina Khadra · 307 pages
Forced to leave the University of Baghdad when the Americans invade Iraq, a young man from a small desert village returns home, where he witnesses three events that transform him. First, American soldiers at a checkpoint kill the sweet and beloved village idiot. Several days later, an American plane bombs a wedding on the outskirts of the village.
Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 463 pages
*Catch-22* is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original. Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy, *Catch-22* is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousan