Books like 'The Bluest Eye'
Readers who enjoyed The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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The Fortress by Meša Selimović
Rated: 4.67 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA novel on 18th century Sarajevo under Ottoman rule, featuring a soldier returned from the wars. A Muslim, he marries a Christian girl who supports him while he dabbles in politics, eventually leading a raid to rescue a friend from jail... -
Pather Panchali: Song of the Road by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay
Rated: 4.56 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsPather Panchali deals with the life of the Roy family, consisting of Harihar, Sarbajaya, Apu and Durga, both in their ancestral village Nishchindipur in rural Bengal and later when they move to Varanasi in search of a better life, as well as the anguish and loss they face during their travels...Categorized as:
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Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Rated: 4.37 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsRichard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the highly acclaimed translators of War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Karenina, which was an Oprah Book Club pick and million-copy bestseller, bring their unmatched talents to The Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, a collection of thirty of Chekhov’s best tales from the major periods of his creative life...Categorized as:
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Body and Soul by Frank Conroy
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn the dim light of a basement apartment, six-year-old Claude Rawlings sits at an old white piano, picking out the sounds he has heard on the radio and shutting out the reality of his lonely world.The setting is 1940s New York, a city that is "long gone, replaced by another city of the same name...Categorized as:
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A River Runs Through it and Other Stories by Norman Maclean, Annie Proulx
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsJust as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century...Categorized as:
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Tumbling by Diane McKinney-Whetstone
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsDiane McKinney-Whetstone's lyrical first novel, Tumbling, vividly captures a tightly knit African-American neighborhood in South Philadelphia during the forties and fifties. Its central characters, Herbie and Noon, are a loving but unconventional couple whose marriage remains unconsummated for many years as Noon struggles to repossess her sexuality after a brutal attack in her past...Categorized as:
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The Citadel by A.J. Cronin
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Citadel follows the life of Andrew Manson, a young and idealistic Scottish doctor, as he navigates the challenges of practicing medicine across interwar Wales and England. Based on A.J. Cronin’s own experiences as a physician, this book boldly confronts traditional medical ethics, and has been noted as one of the inspirations for the formation of the National Health Service...Categorized as:
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In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsSet during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story of the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands...Categorized as:
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The Girl in the Photo by Catherine Hokin
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsTheresienstadt Concentration Camp, 1944. ‘I have to go away, my darling. Please, be brave, stay alive, for me.’ Mama’s voice breaks. The little girl tries to stop the forbidden tears from falling, as the train takes her mother, and she is left alone…Berlin, six years later. Hanni Winter glows with pride as she shows her new husband around her first solo photography exhibition...Categorized as:
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Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsBuddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, has become a classic of modern literature.It is the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family’s bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate...Categorized as:
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The Traveller's Daughter by Michelle Vernal
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsROSA’S PAST IS HER PANDORA’S BOX, AND THE LID IS ABOUT TO BE LIFTED … ‘If you lie down with dogs you’ll rise with fleas’ – Irish Proverb Rosa Sorenson’s conversation was often peppered with sayings from her homeland. It was these conversational clangers that gave her daughter Kitty the only clue as to a childhood her mother refused to speak of...Categorized as:
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A Woman of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsA celebration of an indomitable spirit, here is New York Times bestselling author Barbara Taylor Bradford's dazzling saga of a woman who dared to dream--and to triumph against all odds... In the brooding moors above a humble Yorkshire village stood Fairley Hall. There, Emma Harte, its oppressed but resourceful servant girl, acquired a shrewd determination...Categorized as:
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The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway, John Hemingway
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsTHE ONLY COMPLETE COLLECTION BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR In this definitive collection of Ernest Hemingway's short stories, readers will delight in the author's most beloved classics such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Hills Like White Elephants," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and will discover seven new tales published for the first time in this collection...Categorized as:
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Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsWritten in 1953, the last book by novelist Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance is a story about the destruction of a marriage. Ellen is “that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife” who loves her life in the English countryside. She tends her garden, dotes on her children, and, when she remembers, visits her cantankerous mother-in-law...Categorized as:
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century by M.H. Abrams, Stephen Greenblatt
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFirmly grounded by the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies--thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible--The Norton Anthology of English Literature has been revitalized in this Eighth Edition through the collaboration between six new editors and six seasoned ones...Categorized as:
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Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn a poor town in Kansas, an African American family struggles. At its centre sits Sandy Rodgers - a young boy attempting to find purpose amid the chaos, meagreness and music of his surroundings...Categorized as:
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Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery, Jane Urquhart
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsEmily Starr was born with the desire to write. As an orphan living on New Moon Farm, writing helped her face the difficult, lonely times. But now all her friends are going away to high school in nearby Shrewsbury, and her old-fashioned, tyrannical aunt Elizabeth will only let her go if she promises to stop writing! All the same, this is the first step in Emily's climb to success...Categorized as:
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The Diviners by Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Diviners is the culmination and completion of Margaret Laurence's Manawaka cycle.This is the powerful story of an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town is a toughening process – putting distance between herself and a world that wanted no part of her...Categorized as:
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The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsNnu Ego is a woman who gives all her energy, money and everything she has to raising her children - leaving her little time to make friends...Categorized as:
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Marking Time by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe wonderful sequel to The Light Years returns readers to Britain in September, 1939, as war breaks out. Sheltered Louise, now 16, goes from cooking school to London parties. For 14-year-old Polly, the terrors of war cannot forestall the pangs of adolescence. And though Clary's father has been reported missing since Dunkirk, she holds to the belief that he's alive...Categorized as:
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The Major Plays by Anton Chekhov, Rosamund Bartlett
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAnton ChekhovThe Major PlaysIvanov * The Sea Gull * Uncle Vanya * The Three Sisters * The Cherry Orchard“Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life,” Chekhov once declared. “For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time, their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up...Categorized as:
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The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsBo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune—in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest...Categorized as:
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The Street by Ann Petry
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 21 ratingsThe Street tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print...Categorized as:
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Finding Dorothy by Elizabeth Letts
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA richly imagined novel that tells the story behind The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , the book that inspired the iconic film, through the eyes of author L. Frank Baum's intrepid wife, Maud--from the family's hardscrabble days in South Dakota to the Hollywood film set where she first meets Judy Garland...Categorized as:
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Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 66 ratingsIn this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction...Categorized as:
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The Kudzu Queen by Mimi Herman
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 7 ratings“Funny, sad, and tender… Mimi Herman has written a novel that possesses a true and hard won understanding of the South.” —David Sedaris, author of Happy-Go-Lucky Fifteen-year-old Mattie Lee Watson dreams of men, not boys. So when James T...Categorized as:
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Collected Stories by Frank O'Connor
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe definitive collection of short stories by a master of the form and one of Ireland's most celebrated authorsThis indispensable volume contains the best of Frank O’Connor's short fiction. From “Guests of the Nation” to “The Mad Lomasneys” to “First Confession” to “My Oedipus Complex,” these tales of Ireland have touched generations of readers the world over and placed O'Connor alongside W. B...Categorized as:
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Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether, Nellie Y. McKay
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis modern classic is “a tough, tender, bitter novel of a black girl struggling towards womanhood” in 1930s Harlem—with a foreword by James Baldwin ( Publishers Weekly ). Depression-era Harlem is home for twelve-year-old Francie Coffin and her family, and it’s both a place of refuge and the source of untold dangers for her and her poor, working class family... -
The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield by Katherine Mansfield
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsWith an Introduction and Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin, San Francisco State University.Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as a writer who helped create the modern short story. Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888, she came to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College and returned permanently in 1908...Categorized as:
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Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThis fine, somber novel, by the author of the widely acclaimed The Lost Steps, deals with the French Revolution, chiefly in the Caribbean...Categorized as:
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Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsSet in the American Deep South, each of the powerful novellas collected here concerns an aspect of the lives of black people in the postslavery era, exploring their resistance to white racism and oppression. Published in 1938, this was the first book from Wright, who would continue on to worldwide fame as the author of the novels Native Son and Black Boy... -
A World for Julius by Alfredo Bryce Echenique
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsJulius was born in a mansion on Salaverry Avenue, directly across from the old San Felipe Hippodrome. Life-size Disney characters and cowboy movie heroes romp across the walls of his nursery. Out in the carriage house, his great-grandfather’s ornate, moldering carriage takes him on imaginary adventures...Categorized as:
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The Essential Plays by Anton Chekhov
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsBecause Chekhov’s plays convey the universally recognizable, sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, frustrations of decent people trying to make sense of their lives, they remain as fresh and vigorous as when they were written a century ago... -
The Manor by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThis novel portrays the difficulties encountered by traditionalist Jews coming to terms with the social changes that rocked Poland in the late 19th century. The central figure of the novel is Calman Jacoby, who stands between the old and the new, unable to embrace either whole-heartedly...Categorized as:
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Green Days by the River by Michael Anthony
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsA novel about a boy on the edge of adult responsibilities, this is the story of Shell - a Trinidadian boy wtho moves to a new village and meets two girls...Categorized as:
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Fiela's Child by Dalene Matthee
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSet in nineteenth-century rural Africa, Fiela's Child tells the gripping story of Fiela Komoetie and a white, three-year old child, Benjamin, whom she finds crying on her doorstep. For nine years Fiela raises Benjamin as one of her own children. But when census takers discover Benjamin, they send him to an illiterate white family of woodcutters who claim him as their son... -
Roman Fever (and Other Stories) by Edith Wharton
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA Virago Modern Classic These stories - all powerful moral analyses - demonstrate the true professionalism of Edith Wharton...Categorized as:
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Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall, Mary Helen Washington
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA vivid and bittersweet classic coming-of-age tale, set in immigrant Brooklyn. Remarkable for its courage, its color, and its natural control. --The New Yorker An unforgettable novel written with pride and anger, with rebellion and tears...Categorized as:
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Caucasia by Danzy Senna
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn Caucasia—Danzy Senna's extraordinary debut novel and national bestseller—Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970s Boston...Categorized as:
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The Mother by Pearl S. Buck
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsWithin this novel Ms. Buck paints the portrait of a poor woman living in a remote village whose joys are few and hardships are many. As the ancient traditions, which she bases her philosophies upon, begin to collide with the new ideals of the communist era, this peasant woman must find a balance between them and deal with the consequences... -
Whisper of the Moon Moth by Lindsay Jayne Ashford
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFrom the author of The Color of Secrets and The Woman on the Orient Express comes a poignant novel inspired by the Hollywood legend—and the secrets of—actress Merle Oberon, famous for playing Cathy to Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff in the film Wuthering Heights. For nineteen-year-old Estelle Thompson, going to the cinema is more than a way to pass the time…it’s a way out...Categorized as:
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Tandia by Bryce Courtenay
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsTandia sat waiting anxiously for the fight to begin between the man she loved the most in the world and the man she hated the most in the world.Tandia is a child of Africa: half Indian, half African, beautiful and intelligent, she is only sixteen when she is first brutalised by the police. Her fear of the white man leads her to join the black resistance movement, where she trains as a terrorist... -
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Rated: 4.02 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsGo Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic...Categorized as:
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The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 31 ratingsEthan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide...Categorized as:
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Sula by Toni Morrison
Rated: 3.99 of 5 stars · 37 ratingsThis rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines from their close-knit childhood in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.Nel Wright has chosen to stay in the place where she was born, to marry, raise a family, and become a pillar of the black community...Categorized as:
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Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThe first book in Louise Erdrich's highly acclaimed "Native American" trilogy that includes "The Beet Queen," "Tracks," and "The Bingo Palace," re-sequenced and expanded to include never-before-published chapters.Set on and around a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, Love Medicine is the epic story about the intertwined fates of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines... -
The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThis is one of McMurtry's most memorable novels - the basis for the film of the same name. Set in a small, dusty Texas town, it introduces Jacy, Duane and Sonny, teenagers stumbling towards adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love... -
No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAlistair MacLeod musters all of the skill and grace that have won him an international following to give us No Great Mischief, the story of a fiercely loyal family and the tradition that drives it.Generations after their forebears went into exile, the MacDonalds still face seemingly unmitigated hardships and cruelties of life...Categorized as:
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Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA modern classic in the African literary canon and voted in the Top Ten Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, this novel brings to the politics of decolonization theory the energy of women's rights. An extraordinarily well-crafted work, this book is a work of vision...Categorized as:
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The Dead by James Joyce
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsOften cited as the best work of short fiction ever written, "The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce...Categorized as:
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