What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorFranny 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
The Ninth Hour
Alice McDermott · 247 pages
On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man's brief existence, and
I Am Forbidden
Anouk Markovits · 304 pages
A family is torn apart by fierce belief and private longing in this unprecedented journey deep inside the most insular sect of Hasidic Jews, the Satmar. Opening in 1939 Transylvania, five-year-old Josef witnesses the murder of his family by the Romanian Iron Guard and is rescued by a Christian maid to be raised as her own son. Five years later, Josef rescues a young girl, Mila, after
The Rabbi
Noah Gordon · 389 pages
Michael Kind, descendiente de judíos criado en un barrio marginal de Nueva York, se debate entre el antagónico legado recibido por su abuelo y su educador, y el proporcionado por su padre. El abuelo le trasmitió su conciencia de pertenencia a la comunidad judía, mientras que su educador se encargó de la enseñanza religiosa. Como contrapunto a esa instrucción anclada en los orígenes de su pueblo, M
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie · 548 pages
The Family Orchard
Nomi Eve · 316 pages
"Nomi Eve's debut novel is a tapestry of Jewish life and humor and yearning, woven from timeless themes: the evolution of family, the setting down of roots, the sorrow of immigrants and the joy of pioneers, the secrets that bind families together and the legends that sustain them. In language as uniquely vibrant as the characters who inhabit it, The Family Orchard captures the intoxications of lov
The Tiger's Wife
Tea Obreht · 360 pages
Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the ti
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
The Puttermesser Papers
Cynthia Ozick · 235 pages
From Cynthia Ozick, a masterful modern-day picaresque - the adventures of a female Don Quixote transplanted in Manhattan. Ruth Puttermesser, yearning for a life of the mind (her idol is George Eliot), finds herself mired in the lowest circles of city bureaucracy. Her love life is hopeless. Her fantasies are more influential than wan reality - she takes Hebrew lessons from an uncle who died before
The Writing On My Forehead
Nafisa Haji · 314 pages
Free-spirited and rebellious Muslim-American Saira Qader rejected the constricting notions of family, duty, obligation, and fate, choosing instead to become a journalist, but when tragedy strikes five years later Saira looks to the stories of those who came before--her grandparents, a beloved aunt, her mother and father--and discovers that choice is not always our own, and that faith is not just a
Sacred Time
Ursula Hegi · 250 pages
When his aunt and cousins move into his 1950s Bronx home after his uncle goes to jail again, young Anthony Amedeo struggles with sharing a room with his twin female cousins, resulting in an event that irrevocably changes the family.
The Two-Family House
Lynda Cohen Loigman · 320 pages
"Brooklyn, 1947: in the midst of a blizzard, in a two-family brownstone, two babies are born minutes apart to two women. They are sisters by marriage with an impenetrable bond forged before and during that dramatic night; but as the years progress, small cracks start to appear and their once deep friendship begins to unravel. No one knows why, and no one can stop it. One misguided choice; one mome
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz · 352 pages
Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us
Fall on Your Knees
Ann-Marie MacDonald · 510 pages
Run
Ann Patchett · 304 pages
Since their mother's death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard Doyle cares about is his a
Dreaming in Cuban
Cristina Garcia · 251 pages
A vivid and funny first novel about three generations of a Cuban family divided by conflicting loyalties over the Cuban revolution, set in the world of Havana in the 1970s and '80s and in an emigre neighborhood of Brooklyn. It is a story of immense charm about women and politics, women and witchcraft, women and their men.
They Tell Me of a Home
Daniel Black · 352 pages
We Are Not Ourselves
Matthew Thomas · 620 pages
"Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed. Eileen can't help but dream of a calmer life, in a better neighborhood. When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men s
Meet Rebecca
Jacqueline Dembar Greene
In 1914 New York City, nine-year-old Rebecca is determined to show her family that she is old enough to light the Shabbos candles and go to the movies.
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
All-of-a-Kind Family
Sydney Taylor · 189 pages
The life of a Jewish family with seven children growing up on New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century is the subject of this series. It includes All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown, All-of-a-Kind Family Uptown, Ella of All-of-a-Kind Family, and others.
Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya · 252 pages
Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.
A Place at the Table
Susan Rebecca White · 314 pages
The lives of an ostracized gay Southern boy, a wealthy Connecticut woman, and an African-American chef converge in a chic Manhattan cafe, in a tale ranging from 1920s North Carolina to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and the present day.
Snow in August
Pete Hamill · 327 pages
In Brooklyn in the late 1940s, adolescent Michael Devlin is a dutiful son to his widowed mother and a conscientious altar boy at the parish church. One day, he meets Rabbi Judah Hirsch, a chance encounter that inaugurates a friendship with vast consequences, good and bad, for both of them. Michael lost his father in the war, and the rabbi, a recent immigrant to this country, lost his wife. The thr