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Earthly Powers

Anthony Burgess · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Faith CrisisSexual OrientationReligious IdentityLiterary Fiction
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The Untouchable

John Banville · 410 pages

(From the Hardcover edition) Twenty years after his "retirement," ex-spy Victor Maskell attempts to come to terms with what has happened to his life by embarking on his memoirs. This is the plot which fuels Banville's stunning new novel--a story that goes beyond the mere facts of espionage to penetrate the intricate heart of the spy.

Elderly ProtagonistSexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistDense Prose
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Menewood

Nicola Griffith · 720 pages

Sprawling EpicDense ProseReligious IdentityLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Herman Melville · 420 pages

A classic of the sea, telling of the pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who defied capture.

Faith CrisisSprawling EpicDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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Ulysses

James Joyce · 736 pages

Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge Jo

Faith CrisisSprawling EpicReligious IdentityDense Prose
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The Recognitions

William Gaddis · 956 pages

Obsessed with seventeenth-century Flemish masterpieces, Wyatt Gwyon forges original artwork amazingly faithful to the spirit and techniques of the time.

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The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

Faith CrisisReligious IdentitySexual OrientationLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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God Says No

James Hannaham · 303 pages

Gary Gray marries his first girlfriend, a fellow student from Central Florida Christian College who loves Disney World as much as he does. They are nineteen years old, God-fearing, and eager to start a family, but a week before their wedding Gary goes into a waffle house bathroom and lets something happen. God says no is his testimony--the story of a young Black Christian struggling with desire an

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Creation

Gore Vidal · 574 pages

"The hero-narrator, Cyrus Spitama, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster, is brought up in a fifth-century B.C. Persian court and educated with his closest friend, Xerxes, who is destined to become master of the empire that stretches from India to the Mediterranean. As an ambassador for Xerxes, Cyrus embarks on journeys far beyond the boundaries of the known world, seeking wealth and trade routes.".

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Viper's Tangle

Francois Mauriac · 289 pages

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Priestess of Avalon

Marion Zimmer Bradley, Diana L. Paxson · 394 pages

Faith CrisisSprawling EpicReligious IdentityDense Prose
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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

Sprawling EpicSexual OrientationDense ProseLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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The Divine Comedy

Dante Alighieri · 476 pages

This multimedia product synchronizes Sermonti's reading of the Divind Comedy with the scrolling of the actual text across the screen, allowing the viewer to read and listen at the same time.

Faith CrisisReligious IdentityDense ProseSprawling Epic
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Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie · 548 pages

Religious IdentitySprawling EpicDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Origin of the Brunists

Robert Coover · 441 pages

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The Instructions

Adam Levin · 1,028 pages

Levin creates a world driven equally by moral fervor and slapstick comedy. Expelled from multiple Jewish day-schools for acts of violence and backtalk, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity.

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A Visitation of Spirits

Randall Kenan · 257 pages

From Publishers Weekly As its title suggests, a powerful strain of mysticism runs through this story of personal awakening in a black North Carolina family, but first-time novelist Kenan has a rare gift for naturalism as well, capturing the texture of farm life with vivid detail. The novel follows Horace Cross, a brilliant, tormented teenager who is his family's greatest hope, through a night whe

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Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Jeanette Winterson · 176 pages

This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts. At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves.

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A Season in Hell

Arthur Rimbaud · 64 pages

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Godric

Frederick Buechner · 178 pages

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The Cunning Man

Robertson Davies · 469 pages

Dr. Jonathan Hullah, a former police surgeon with "a high degree of cunning," is shocked when St. Aidan's Father Hobbes drops dead during church services. What made the good--and perfectly healthy--clergyman die so suddenly? To solve the mystery, Dr. Hullah whisks us on a fascinating tour of his own rich and highly observant life.

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Paradise Lost

John Milton · 336 pages

John Milton's Paradise Lost is one of the greatest epic poems in the English language. It tells the story of the Fall of Man, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery, of innocence pitted against corruption, in which God and Satan fight a bitter battle for control of mankind's destiny. The struggle rages across three worlds - heaven, hell, and earth - as Satan and his ban

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Demian

Hermann Hesse · 166 pages

A young man awakens to selfhood and to a world of possibilities beyond the conventions of his upbringing in Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s beloved novel Demian. Emil Sinclair is a quiet boy drawn into a forbidden yet seductive realm of petty crime and defiance. His guide is his precocious, mysterious classmate Max Demian, who provokes in Emil a search for self-discovery and spiritual fulfillme

Faith CrisisDense ProseSexual OrientationLiterary Fiction
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