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
Include books by the same authorThe Great Indian Novel
Shashi Tharoor · 423 pages
Writing in English, Shasi Tharoor has produced a stunning novel that is at once ambitious, daring, boldly satirical, and outrageously funny. The two structural pillars of his astonishing work are the national epic, the *Mahabharata,* and the Indian struggle in this century for independence from Great Britain.
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift · 256 pages
The Jokers
Albert Cossery · 145 pages
The jokers are the government, and the biggest joker of all is the governor, a bug-eyed, strutting, rapacious character of unequaled incompetence who presides over the nameless Middle Eastern city where this effervescent comedy by Albert Cossery is set. The jokers are also the revolutionaries, no less bumbling and no less infatuated with the trappings of power than the government they oppose. And
Numero Zero
Umberto Eco · 208 pages
"A novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder."-- 1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce's death remain controversial. 1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can't resist to ghostwrite a book. His subject: a fledgling newspaper, which happens to be financed
A Man of the People
Chinua Achebe · 149 pages
To Play the King
Michael Dobbs · 320 pages
Distraction
Bruce Sterling · 467 pages
It's November 2044, an election year, and the state of the Union is a farce. The government is broke, the cities are privately owned, and the military is shaking down citizens in the streets. Washington has become a circus and no one knows that better than Oscar Valparaiso. A political spin doctor, Oscar has always made things look good. Now he wants to make a difference. But Oscar has a skelet
The Tailor Of Panama
John le Carre
Harry Pendel is the charismatic proprietor and guiding genius of a top Panama City tailoring firm. Andrew Osnard is an Old Etonian and spy, his mission is to keep a watchful eye on political manoeuvrings leading up to the handing over of the Panama Canal. Originally published: London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.
Night Watch
Terry Pratchett · 384 pages
One moment, Sir Sam Vimes is in his old patrolman form, chasing a sweet-talking psychopath across the rooftops of Ankh-Morpork. The next, he's lying naked in the street, having been sent back thirty years courtesy of a group of time-manipulating monks who won't leave well enough alone. This Discworld is a darker place that Vimes remembers too well, three decades before his title, fortune, beloved
Hocus Pocus
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 302 pages
A small, exclusive college in upstate New York is nestled along the frozen shores of Lake Mohiga ... and directly across from a maximum-security prison. The two institutions manage to coexist peacefully, until 10,000 prisoners break out and head directly for the college.
In the Pond
Ha Jin · 178 pages
Set in the northern provincial commune town of Dismount Fort, In the Pond tells the story of Shao Bin, a worker at the Harvest Fertilizer plant who aims above his station. Passed over on the list to receive a larger apartment, while those in favor with the party are selected ahead of him, Shao Bin chafes at his powerlessness until he hits upon a solution: placing a satirical cartoon in the provinc
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe · 690 pages
Absurdistan
Gary Shteyngart · 333 pages
"Absurdistan is not just a hilarious novel, but a record of a particular peak in the history of human folly. No one is more capable of dealing with the transition from the hell of socialism to the hell of capitalism in Eastern Europe than Shteyngart, the great-great grandson of one Nikolai Gogol and the funniest foreigner alive."--Aleksandar HemonFrom the critically acclaimed, bestselling author o
An Ideal Husband
Oscar Wilde · 96 pages
Bleak House
Charles Dickens · 815 pages
As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, t
What a Carve Up!
Jonathan Coe · 512 pages
A brilliant noir farce, a dystopian vision of Britain, a family history and the story of an obsession. Michael is a lonely, rather pathetic writer, obsessed by the film, 'What A Carve Up!' in which a mad kinfeman cuts his way through the inhabitants of a decrepit stately pile as the thunder rages. Inexplicably he is commissioned to write the family history of the Winshaws, an upper class Yorkshire
Elmer Gantry
Sinclair Lewis · 434 pages
Elmer Gantry is one of the Sinclair Lewis's most famous novels. Considered scandalous in its day, it is a vicious satire of preachers and those they fool. Gantry has no redeeming features but is seen by the gullible public as a man who speaks the truth about God. Of course he could just as easily have been a lawyer or a politician and the heart of Lewis's satire is how easily people believe what t
Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 463 pages
*Catch-22* is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original. Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy, *Catch-22* is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousan
The Orphan Master's Son
Adam Johnson · 456 pages
An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is giv
Shame
Salman Rushdie · 307 pages
In het hedendaagse Pakistan, met zijn grote tegenstelling tussen rijk en arm, zijn machtsstrijd, politiek gekonkel en corruptie dagelijks voorkomende verschijnselen.
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
John Steinbeck · 182 pages
Steinbeck's only work of political satire turns the French Revolution on its head, as amateur astronomer Pippin Heristal is drafted in to rule the unruly French. Enchanting comedy ensues as Steinbeck creates the most hilarious royal court ever around the brief, bold reign of the corduroy-clad Pippin, his social-climbing wife Maria, his star-struck daughter Clotilde and her Californian beau, Todd.
The Gilded Age
Mark Twain · 479 pages
A biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America in which Twain and his neighbor attack the greed, lust, and naivete of their time.
High Society
Ben Elton · 381 pages
High society is a story about our world today, a collection of criminal nations in which everybody is either breaking the law or knows people who do.