What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe 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
A Lesson Before Dying
Ernest J. Gaines · 256 pages
In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s. A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white
Light in August
William Faulkner · 480 pages
One of Faulkner's most admired and accessible novels, "Light in August reveals the great American author at the height of his powers. Lena Grove's resolute search for the father of her unborn child begets a rich, poignant, and ultimately hopeful story of perseverance in the face of mortality. It also acquaints us with several of Faulkner's most unforgettable characters, including the Reverend Gail
White Teeth
Zadie Smith · 480 pages
One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, WHITE TEETH is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous
The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie · 560 pages
One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe · 192 pages
Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widel
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
Harper Lee Collection: To Kill a Mockingbird + Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee · 624 pages
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin · 226 pages
In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power
Cry, the Beloved Country
Alan Paton · 278 pages
This book is the most famous and important novel in South Africa's history, and an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948. Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law is a work of searing beauty. The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, " We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poet
Godforsaken Idaho
Shawn Vestal · 209 pages
Nine stories illuminate what it means to be Mormon and how faith serves to humanize, in a work that includes a seriocomic portrait of a young Joseph Smith.
Preacher, Volume 1: Gone to Texas
Garth Ennis · 200 pages
I Want to Show You More
Jamie Quatro · 206 pages
A collection of short fiction offers a disquieting portrait of infidelity, faith, and family.
Wolf Whistle
Lewis Nordan · 290 pages
Based on the author's childhood memories of the murder of Emmett Till, the story of a Mississippi white-trash girl who teaches fourth grade at the Arrow Catcher Elementary School is the story of righteous racism and violence and the 1950s American Southern ethic at work.
Dubliners
James Joyce · 226 pages
James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation
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
Candide
Voltaire · 134 pages
Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an
Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories
Isaac Bashevis Singer · 208 pages
A Prayer for Owen Meany
John Irving · 543 pages
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." So begins John Irving's new novel. In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys - best friends - are playing ina Li
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
Cane
Jean Toomer, Rudolph P. Byrd · 224 pages
Published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane was widely heralded as one of the first masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, and its author as “a bright morning star” of the movement. Toomer himself, however, was reluctant to embrace an explicitly racialized identity, preferring to define himself as simply an American writer. Inspired in part by Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio , T