Books like 'Go Set a Watchman'
Readers who enjoyed Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee 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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The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Rated: 4.35 of 5 stars · 90 ratingsThree ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger...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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Kinfolk by Pearl S. Buck
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsKinfolk is the story of a Chinese family. Dr. Liang moves to America in search of a better life, but his children long to return to China. Each responds to their new life in China differently, providing rich insight into the struggles between Eastern and Western culture, and the differences between generations...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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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 104 ratingsTo Kill A Mockingbird The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic... -
A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsLibrarian note: Alternate cover edition of: 9780976395096Set on the eve of World War II, A Mind at Peace captures the anxieties of a Turkish family facing the difficult reality entrenched in the early republic, founded on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923...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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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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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 44 ratingsThe Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America...Categorized as:
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Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsMarcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English...Categorized as:
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And They Called It Camelot: A Novel of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis by Stephanie Marie Thornton
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAn intimate portrait of the life of Jackie O… Few of us can claim to be the authors of our fate. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy knows no other choice... -
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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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... -
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 Complete Stories of Truman Capote by Truman Capote
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA landmark collection that brings together Truman Capote’s life’s work in the form he called his “great love,” The Complete Stories confirms Capote’s status as a master of the short story...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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Where the Rivers Merge by Mary Alice Monroe
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 16 ratings"This is book club fiction at its finest!" —Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times bestselling author From New York Times bestselling author Mary Alice Monroe comes her highly anticipated Where the Rivers Merge, the first of two epic and triumphant novels celebrating one intrepid woman's life across multiple generations in the American South...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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Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThe concluding volume of the Border trilogy. In this magnificent new novel, the National Book Award-winning author of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing fashions a darkly beautiful elegy for the American frontier. It is 1952 and John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands in New Mexico, not far from the proving grounds of Alamogordo and the cities of El Paso and Juarez... -
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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The Unquiet Earth: A Novel by Denise Giardina
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsDillon Freeman returns from World War II to Blackberry Creek, West Virginia, where he confronts the coal mining industry as a union organizer and falls in love with his conventional cousin, Rachel. By the author of Storming Heaven...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... -
Manto: Selected Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratings...Categorized as:
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The Dollmaker by Harriette Simpson Arnow
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsStrong-willed, self-reliant Gertie Nevel's peaceful life in the Kentucky hills was devastated by the brutal winds of change. Uprooted form their backwoods home, she and her family were thrust into the confusion and chaos of wartime Detroit... -
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... -
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsMore than just a classic political novel, Warren’s tale of power and corruption in the Depression-era South is a sustained meditation on the unforeseen consequences of every human act, the vexing connectedness of all people and the possibility—it’s not much of one—of goodness in a sinful world...Categorized as:
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Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsA landmark American drama that inspired a classic film and a Broadway revival—featuring an introduction by David MametA blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, Twelve Angry Men holds at its core a deeply patriotic faith in the U.S. legal system... -
The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep by Juliet Butler
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsBased on a true story, The Less You Know the Sounder You Sleep is a tale of survival and self-determination, innocence and lies.‘We’re waiting. I squeeze my eyes shut and dig my fingers into Masha’s neck where I’m holding her. She digs hers into mine. The curtains slowly open. I can’t see anything because the spotlight is on us, bright as anything and blinding me, but I can hear the gasp go up...Categorized as:
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Queen of Clubs by Beezy Marsh
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsLondon, 1957: After rising up against gangland’s queen, Alice Diamond, formerly downtrodden Nell is living the perfect life of crime. Far from the East End slums where she was raised, she’s now an accomplished professional thief by day—lifting luxury goods from high-end department stores—and a glamorous nightclub owner after dark...Categorized as:
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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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Selected Short Stories by William Faulkner
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsFrom the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available are Snopes, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!William Faulkner was a master of the short story...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... -
Where the Air Is Clear by Carlos Fuentes
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratings"Where the Air Is Clear," Carlos Fuentes's first novel, is an unsparing portrayal of Mexico City's upper class. Departing from a traditional linear narrative, Fuentes overlays Mexican myths onto contemporary settings, showing that even the rich and powerful must succumb to the indomitable spirit of Mexico, which undermines all institutions and shapes all destinies...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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Ernest Gaines reads excerpts from A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFollowing a brief introduction to his life and work, author Ernest Gaines reads excerpts from his novel A gathering of old men, which deals with the Black tenant farmers in a rural area east of Baton Rouge, La. He introduces the characters Snookum, Janey, Miss Merle, and Rufe in this reading...Categorized as:
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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 Portable Faulkner by William Faulkner
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsIn prose of biblical grandeur and feverish intensity, William Faulkner reconstructed the history of the American South as a tragic legend of courage and cruelty, gallantry and greed, futile nobility and obscene crimes. No single volume better conveys the scope of Faulkner's vision than The Portable Faulkner... -
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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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:
bildungsroman classics coming-of-age drama family female-mc high-school historical-fiction
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