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Under The Visible Life

Kim Echlin · 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

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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

MusicianCultural IdentityFemale FriendshipLiterary Fiction
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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

Cultural IdentityMusicianFemale FriendshipLiterary Fiction
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Swing Time

Zadie Smith · 464 pages

"An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty Two brown girls dream of being dancers--but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood frien

MusicianCultural IdentityLiterary FictionFemale Friendship
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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

Female FriendshipLiterary FictionCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
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Rules of Civility

Amor Towles · 352 pages

A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall Street secretary Katey Kontent into the upper echelons of New York society, where she befriends a shy multi-millionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow.

Female FriendshipLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMusician
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers · 334 pages

Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior

MusicianCultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Time of Our Singing

Richard Powers · 640 pages

"Tout commence en 1939, lorsque Delia Daley et David Strom se rencontrent à un concert de Marian Anderson. Peut-on alors imaginer qu'une jeune femme noire épouse un juif allemand fuyant le nazisme? Et pourtant ... Leur passion pour la musique l'emporte sur les conventions et offre à leur amour un sanctuaire de paix où, loin des hurlements du monde et de ses vicissitudes, ils élèvent leurs trois en

MusicianCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Boy, Snow, Bird

Helen Oyeyemi · 308 pages

This novel is a reimagining of the fairy tale Snow White recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity set in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty, the opposite of the life she has left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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The Red Tent

Anita Diamant · 321 pages

Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood--the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers--Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--the f

Cultural IdentityFemale FriendshipLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Learned by Heart

Emma Donoghue · 338 pages

Cultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini · 416 pages

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an

Cultural IdentityFemale FriendshipLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon · 468 pages

The new novel from Michael Chabon, his first in 5 years, is a lovingly painted pop-culture epic. One street, two families. As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, longtime friends, band mates and co-regents of Brokeland Records. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary nurse mi

MusicianCultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Sula

Toni Morrison · 174 pages

Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the bl

Cultural IdentityFemale FriendshipLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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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"--

Female FriendshipCultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Ravel

Jean Echenoz · 115 pages

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Sabrina & Corina

Kali Fajardo-Anstine · 212 pages

Female FriendshipLiterary FictionCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
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A Good American

Alex George · 387 pages

The Meisenheimer family struggles to find their place among the colorful residents of their new American hometown, including a giant teenage boy, a pretty schoolteacher whose lessons consist of more than music, and a spiteful, bicycle-riding dwarf.

MusicianCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Other Side of the World

Stephanie Bishop · 269 pages

In the tradition of Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work or Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand That First Held Mine comes a complex, tender and gorgeously written novel of parenthood, love and marriage that is impossible to put down. Cambridge 1963. Charlotte struggles to reconnect with the woman she was before children, and to find the time and energy to paint. Her husband, Henry, cannot face the thought of anot

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Music And Freedom

Zoe Morrison · 352 pages

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston · 231 pages

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a classic Harlem Renaissance novel by American writer Zora Neale Hurston. The novel follows Janie Crawford as she recounts the story of her life as she journeys from a naive teenager to a woman in control of her destiny.

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

Ayana Mathis · 279 pages

A novel about a mother's courage, sacrifice and love, set against the volatile history of twentieth century America. When Hattie clambered from a train, her skirt still hemmed with Georgia mud and the dream of Philadelphia sitting round as a marble in her mouth, she couldn't guess that two years later, aged sixteen, she'd be fighting to keep her baby twins alive. Saddled with a husband who will br

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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China Dolls

Lisa See · 401 pages

"The New York Times bestselling author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony In Love, Shanghai Girls, and Dreams of Joy returns with her highly anticipated new novel. A bold and bittersweet story of secrets and sacrifice, love and betrayal, prejudice and passion, China Dolls reveals a rich portrait of female friendship, as three young women navigate the "Chop Suey Circuit"--America's extravagan

Cultural IdentityFemale FriendshipCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Elena Ferrante · 417 pages

Since the publication of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan novels, Elena Ferrante's fame as one of our most compelling, insightful, and stylish contemporary authors has grown enormously. She has gained admirers among authors--Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, Claire Messud, to name a few--and critics--James Wood, John Freeman, Eugenia Williamson, for example. But her most resounding

Cultural IdentityFemale FriendshipLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Three Daughters of Eve

Elif Shafak · 384 pages

"The stunning, timely new novel from the acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of The Architect's Apprentice and The Bastard of Istanbul. Peri, a married, wealthy, beautiful Turkish woman, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground -- an old polaroid of three young wom

Female FriendshipCultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven

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