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The Virgin in the Garden

A.S. Byatt · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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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.

Dense ProseSprawling EpicCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel · 653 pages

In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power England is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him.

Dense ProseSprawling EpicCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Swann's Way

Marcel Proust · 450 pages

Presents the first book of Proust's monumental work "Remembrance of Things Past", introducing such themes as the destructive force of obsessive love, the allure and the consequences of transgressive sex, and the selective eye that shapes memories.

Dense ProseSprawling EpicCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Franny and Zooey

J.D. Salinger · 202 pages

Franny came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed in 1957 by Zooey. Both stories are early entries in a narrative series about the Glasses, a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York. In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her boyfriend for a football weekend, where they go to a café. The story is essentially an account of

TheaterSistersCharacter-DrivenDense Prose
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Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Gregory Maguire · 448 pages

When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil? Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a

SistersDense ProseSprawling EpicLiterary Fiction
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The Signature of All Things

Elizabeth Gilbert · 512 pages

" A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, from the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed. In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery. Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows th

Sprawling EpicCharacter-DrivenDense ProseSisters
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Menewood

Nicola Griffith · 720 pages

Dense ProseSprawling EpicCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Ship of Magic

Robin Hobb · 698 pages

Bingtown is a hub of exotic trade and home to a merchant nobility famed for its liveships—rare vessels carved from wizardwood, which ripens magically into sentient awareness. Now the fortunes of one of Bingtown’s oldest families rest on the newly awakened liveship Vivacia. For Althea Vestrit, the ship is her rightful legacy. For Althea’s young nephew, wrenched from his religious studies and f

Sprawling EpicCharacter-DrivenDense ProseSisters
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Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 400 pages

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env

TheaterCharacter-DrivenDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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Tipping the Velvet

Sarah Waters · 480 pages

Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-h

TheaterCharacter-DrivenDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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Howards End

E.M. Forster · 320 pages

Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. A strong-willed and intelligent woman refuses to allow the pretensions of her husband's smug English family to ruin her life. Howards End is considered by some to be Forster's masterpiece

SistersDense ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Wife

Sigrid Undset · 423 pages

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All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

Dense ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionSprawling Epic
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Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

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The Seamstress

Frances de Pontes Peebles · 646 pages

As seamstresses, the young sisters Emilia and Luzia dos Santos know how to cut, how to mend, and how to conceal. These are useful skills in the lawless backcountry of Brazil, where ruthless land barons called "colonels" feud with bands of outlaw cangaceiros, trapping innocent residents in the cross fire.Emilia, whose knowledge of the world comes from fashion magazines and romance novels, dreams of

SistersSprawling EpicCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

SistersDense ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Ducks, Newburyport

Lucy Ellmann · 1,022 pages

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The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow · 536 pages

Augie's nonconformity leads him into an eventful, humorous, and sometimes earthy way of life.

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Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi · 320 pages

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the

Sprawling EpicSistersLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Wolves of Eternity

Karl Ove Knausgård

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The Shadow Sister

Lucinda Riley · 498 pages

Star D'Aplièse is at a crossroads in her life after the sudden death of her beloved father--the elusive billionaire, affectionately called Pa Salt by his six daughters, all adopted from across the four corners of the world. He has left each of them a clue to her true heritage, and Star nervously decides to follow hers, which leads her to an antiquarian bookshop in London, and the start of a whole

SistersSprawling EpicCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 448 pages

> With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor fu

SistersSprawling EpicCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Human Traces

Sebastian Faulks · 614 pages

Sixteen-year-old Jacques Rebiere is living a humble life in rural France, studying butterflies and frogs by candlelight in his bedroom. Across the Channel, in England, the playful Thomas Midwinter, also sixteen, is enjoying a life of ease-and is resigned to follow his father's wishes and pursue a career in medicine. A fateful seaside meeting four years later sets the two young men on a profound co

Sprawling EpicDense ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Mason & Dixon

Thomas Pynchon · 773 pages

Told from the focal point of one Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke – a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy – who attempts to entertain and divert his extended family on a cold December evening (partly for amusement, and partly to keep his coveted status as a guest in the house). Claiming to have accompanied Mason and Dixon throughout their journeys, Cherrycoke tells a tale intermingling Mason and Dixon's biographi

Dense ProseSprawling EpicLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven

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