What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe End of the Affair
Graham Greene · 217 pages
"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, of which he is the narrator. And it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous love affair with Sarah Miles - a hate bred of a passion that ultimately lost out to God. Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exor
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 349 pages
A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.
All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr · 544 pages
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are t
Suite Française
Irene Nemirovsky · 426 pages
Écrit dans le feu de l'Histoire, Suite française dépeint presque en direct l'Exode de juin 1940, qui brassa dans un désordre tragique des familles françaises de toute sorte, des plus huppées aux plus modestes. Avec bonheur, Irène Némirovsky traque les innombrables petites lâchetés et les fragiles élans de solidarité d'une population en déroute. Cocottes larguées par leur amant, grands bourgeois dé
Sarah's Key
Tatiana de Rosnay · 342 pages
Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking th
A Grain of Wheat
Ngugi wa Thiong'o · 272 pages
The works of Kenyan author Ngugi have made a powerful impact throughout the world. A Grain of Wheat was recognised as one of Africa's 100 best books of the twentieth century in an initiative organised by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. The central action in this novel by Ngugi wa Thiong'o takes place in December of 1963 in a village in Kenya that is preparing for the coming of Uhuru (Indepen
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 Nightingale
Kristin Hannah · 460 pages
Despite their differences, sisters Vianne and Isabelle have always been close. Younger, bolder Isabelle lives in Paris while Vianne is content with life in the French countryside with her husband Antoine and their daughter. But when the Second World War strikes, Antoine is sent off to fight and Vianne finds herself isolated so Isabelle is sent by their father to help her. As the war progresses
Closely Watched Trains
Bohumil Hrabal · 85 pages
Hrabal's postwar classic about a young man's coming of age in German-occupied Czechoslovakia is among his most beloved and accessible works. Closely Watched Trains is the subtle and poetic portrait of Miloš Hrma, a timid young railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief. Day after day as he watches trains fly by, he torments himself with t
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
Code Name Verity
Elizabeth Wein · 347 pages
In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage, and great courage as she relates what she must to survive while keeping secret all that she can.
The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan · 332 pages
Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve
The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje · 307 pages
With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of
Les Misérables: Volume Two
Victor Hugo · 512 pages
Every Man Dies Alone
Hans Fallada · 543 pages
Based on a true story, this never-before-translated masterpiece was overlooked for years after its author--a bestselling writer before World War II who found himself in a Nazi insane asylum at war's end--died just before it was published.In a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis, it tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their onl
A Separate Peace
John Knowles · 196 pages
Gene Forrester looks back fifteen years to a World War II year in which he and his best friend were roommates in a New hampshire boarding school.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Richard Flanagan · 464 pages
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a love story unfolding over half a century between a doctor and his uncle’s wife. Taking its title from one of the most famous books in Japanese literature, written by the great haiku poet Basho, Flanagan’s novel has as its heart one of the most infamous episodes of Japanese history, the construction of the Thailand-Burma Death Railway in World War II. In
The Girl in the Blue Beret
Bobbie Ann Mason · 352 pages
An American World War II pilot shot down in Occupied Europe returns to his crash site decades later and finds himself drawn back in time to the brave people who helped him escape from the Nazis.
The Boy Who Dared
Susan Campbell Bartoletti · 192 pages
Day 264. It's morning. Soft gray light slips over the tall redbrick wall. It stretches across the exercise yard and reaches through the high, barred windows. In a cell on the ground floor, the light shifts dark shapes into a small stool, a scrawny table, and a bed made of wooden boards with no mattress or blanket. On that bed, a thin, huddled figure, Helmuth, a boy of seventeen, lies awake. Shiver
A Country Road, A Tree
Jo Baker · 336 pages
"From the best-selling author of Longbourn, a stunning new novel that follows an unnamed writer--Samuel Beckett--whose life and extraordinary literary gift are permanently shaped in the forge of war. When war breaks out in Europe in 1939, a young, unknown writer journeys from his home in neutral Ireland to conflict-ridden Paris and is drawn into the maelstrom. With him we experience the hardships
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway · 471 pages
High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco's rebels.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera · 314 pages
A young woman obsessed with a man torn between his love for her and his womanizing; one of his mistresses and her faithful lover--these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel.