Books like 'The Garden of the Departed Cats'
Readers who enjoyed The Garden of the Departed Cats by Bilge Karasu also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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This I Know by Eldonna Edwards
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 17 ratingsSet in a small Midwest town in the late 1960s and helmed by an unforgettable young protagonist—compassionate, uncannily wise Grace—This I Know is a luminous coming-of-age story from an astonishing new voice. Eleven-year-old Grace Carter has a talent for hiding things...Categorized as:
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In the Land of Armadillos: Stories by Helen Maryles Shankman
Rated: 4.40 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA debut collection of linked stories from a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, set in a German-occupied town in Poland, where tales of myth and folklore meet the real-life monsters of the Nazi invasion.1942. With the Nazi Party at the height of its power, the occupying army empties Poland’s towns and cities of their Jewish populations...Categorized as:
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The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso, Tim Parks
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsPresenting the stories of Zeus and Europa, Theseus and Ariadne, the birth of Athens and the fall of Troy, in all their variants, Calasso also uncovers the distant origins of secrets and tragedy, virginity, and rape. "A perfect work like no other. (Calasso) has re-created . . . the morning of our world."--Gore Vidal. 15 engravings...Categorized as:
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രണ്ടാമൂഴം | Randamoozham by M.T. Vasudevan Nair
Rated: 4.27 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsRandamoozham is the masterpiece of Jnanpith winning writer M. T. Vasudevan Nair. It was translated into English as Second Turn in 1997. M. T. Vasudevan Nair won Vayalar Award, given for the best literary work in Malayalam, for the novel in 1985. Later, in the year 1995, Mr. Nair was awarded the highest literary award in India, Jnanpith Award, for his overall contribution to Malayalam literature... -
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The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges, George Guidall
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratings"The Garden of Forking Paths" (original Spanish title: "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan") is the title story in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941), which was republished in its entirety in Ficciones (Fictions) in 1944... -
The House of Asterion by Jorge Luis Borges
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsOne of Borges's shortest stories, The House of Asterion was written over a period of two days. The story explores themes of death, redemption, and the nature of monstrosity. Its narrative style has been referred to as a "literary puzzle", with the narrator's identity not fully revealed until the end of the story... -
Ken Follett Epic Historical Collection by Ken Follett, Joachim Kerzel
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsEpic Historical Collection Ken Follett Dive into the #1 New York Times bestselling author's masterpiece of medieval drama, The Pillars of the Earth, and its long-awaited sequel, World Without End... -
Hell Screen by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratings"There can be no doubt that Akutagawa had more individuality than any other writer of his time and has left in Japanese literature a mass of artistic work, often grotesque and curious, that, while it undoubtedly angers the proletarian experimenters who now hold the stage and fight with lusty pens and a highly developed class consciousness against all that he stood for, will continue to live as...Categorized as:
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The Deer and the Cauldron: The First Book by Jin Yong
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsOn the Dragon Throne of China sits the young Manchu Emperor Kang Xi. Back in 1644, his great-uncle Dorgon broke through the Great Wall from Manchuria in the north-east and took the Imperial capital, Peking. Now twenty years later, the Manchus are quelling the last sparks of Chinese resistance, hounding down members of the underground movement known as the Triad Secret Society... -
The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsWhen a woman discovers a rare book that has connections to her past, long-held secrets about her missing sister and their childhood spent in the English countryside during World War II are revealed.In the war-torn London of 1939, fourteen-year-old Hazel and five-year-old Flora are evacuated to a rural village to escape the horrors of the Second World War...Categorized as:
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Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsAustin Tappan Wright left the world a wholly unsuspected legacy. After he died in a tragic accident, among this distinguished legal scholar's papers were found thousands of pages devoted to a staggering feat of literary creationa detailed history of an imagined country complete with geography, genealogy, literature, language and culture. As detailed as J.R.R...Categorized as:
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The Book of Devices by İhsan Oktay Anar
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratings"He had sought to be the agent of all forces and actions on the Earth, and thus, just as he had transformed iron ingot into a music box, so had he strived to transform the Earth and all it contained into a machine." Ihsan Oktay Anar's 1996 novella, "The Book of Devices," is a skeleton key to the ever-inventive author's fictional world set in the Ottoman times...Categorized as:
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Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsA national bestseller, Dictionary of the Khazars was cited by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year...Categorized as:
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The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsJeanette Winterson’s novels have established her as one of the most important young writers in world literature. The Passion is perhaps her most highly acclaimed work, a modern classic that confirms her special claim on the novel...Categorized as:
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No. 23 Burlington Square by Jenni Keer
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsLondon, 1927: One house. Three lives. A decision that will change everything. A powerful, unique timeslip story, perfect for fans of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, The Miniaturist, and Lucinda Riley...Categorized as:
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Flanders by Patricia Anthony
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratings"A harrowing and beautiful novel, demonstrating — again — that Patricia Anthony is one of our great writers." — Publishers WeeklyIn this gritty look at World War I's trench warfare, a young American sharpshooter ventures into no man's land each night to be ready by daybreak for the grim business of slaying record numbers of enemies...Categorized as:
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La Maravilla by Alfredo Véa
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratings"Buckeye Road wasn't much of a town, just a place where a pocked and pitted road met an invisible street....It was less that unincorporated, it was unknown..."Yet it is here in the desert outside the Phoenix city limits that Alfredo Vea, Jr., finds a world of marvels spilling out of the adobe homes, tar-paper shacks, rusted Cadillacs, and battered trailers that are otherwise known as "Buckeye...Categorized as:
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A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsFirst published in 1932, here is John Cowper Powys's masterwork, an epic novel of terrific cumulative force and lyrical intensity...Categorized as:
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The Holly Groweth Green by Amy Rae Durreson
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsIt’s Christmas 1946 and wounded doctor Laurence is struggling to find a way to live during peacetime. Lost in the Hampshire countryside on a snowy Christmas Eve, Laurence stumbles across lonely Mistletoe Cottage and its owner: Avery. Avery is bright and beautiful, welcoming Laurence to his home with warmth and joy. But Laurence can’t stay forever, and Avery’s secrets mean he can never leave...Categorized as:
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The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic by Nick Joaquín, Gina Apostol
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsNick Joaquin is widely considered one of the greatest Filipino writers, but he has remained little-known outside his home country despite writing in English. With the post-colonial sensibilities of Junot Diaz, Teju Cole, and Jhumpa Lahiri and an ironic perspective of colonial history resonant with Marques and Llosa, Joaquin is a long-neglected writer ready to join the ranks of the world classics...Categorized as:
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The Golden Fleece by Robert Graves
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsAlong with I, Claudius, The Golden Fleece is considered one of Robert Graves's most exciting and transporting historical novels. The Golden Fleece was at one time the most sacred religious object of the ancient Greeks, and had been sent away as the result of a power struggle between the Greeks and earlier inhabitants of the Greek peninsula... -
The Beast's Garden by Kate Forsyth
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsIt's August 1939 in Germany, and Ava's world is in turmoil. To save her father, she must marry a young Nazi officer, Leo von Löwenstein, who works for Hitler's spy chief in Berlin. However, she hates and fears the brutal Nazi regime, and finds herself compelled to stand against it.Ava joins an underground resistance movement that seeks to help victims survive the horrors of the German war machine... -
The Watchmaker's Daughter by Dianne Haley
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsHiding the worn piece of paper among her father’s watch deliveries, her eyes fill with tears at the memory of her brave friend walking towards the Nazi soldiers, and the sharp sound of gun fire. Her friend sacrificed herself so that she could deliver this message... -
The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsWhen he found himself unable to find a publisher for his story, author Philip Van Doren Stern printed up copies of the “The Greatest Gift” and gave them out as Christmas cards in 1943. Eventually, the story came to the attention of director Frank Capra, who explained later, “It was the story I had been looking for all my life! A good man, ambitious...Categorized as:
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The Garden of Time by J.G. Ballard
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratings...Categorized as:
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The Adventures of Robin Hood by Roger Lancelyn Green
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsRobin Hood is champion of the poor and oppressed by 12th-century England against the cruel power of Prince John and the brutal Sheriff of Nottingham. He takes refuge with his Merrie Men in the vast Sherwood Forest, emerging time and again to outwit his enemies with daring and panache. This book presents the story of social justice and cunning... -
The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, Mikolaj Dutsch
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsThe Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic... -
Bees in June by Elizabeth Bass Parman
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsSet against the optimism and excitement of the first moon landing in the summer of 1969, a feat many said was impossible, one woman struggles to achieve something she thinks is impossible--living a happy and fulfilling life.Rennie King's world isn't at all what she expected when she married the hotshot baseball player from her small town of Spark, Tennessee...Categorized as:
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The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel by Nikos Kazantzakis
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 11 ratingsA continuation of Homer’s epic poem, Kazantzakis’s own Odyssey finds Odysseus once again leaving Ithaca on finding that the satisfactions of home and hearth are not as he remembered them... -
The Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsIn this sequel to The King Must Die Theseus defies the Gods’ and claims the throne of Athens a move that culminates in the terrible, fateful destruction of the house of Minos -- the Minotaur... -
The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsIn The Last of the Wine, two young Athenians, Alexias and Lysis, compete in the palaestra, journey to the Olympic games, fight in the wars against Sparta, and study under Socrates. As their relationship develops, Renault expertly conveys Greek culture, showing the impact of this supreme philosopher whose influence spans epochs... -
Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThis brilliant reconception of the Arthurian epic cuts through the familiar myths and tells the story of the real King Arthur: Artos the Bear, the mighty warrior-king who saved the last lights of Western civilization when the barbarian darkness descended in the fifth century...Categorized as:
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Damascus Nights by Rafik Schami
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsRafik Schami's award-winning novel. In the classical Arab tradition of tale-telling, here is a magical book that celebrates the power of storytelling, delightfully transformed for modern sensibilities by an award-winning author. The time is present-day Damascus, and Salim the coachman, the city's most famous storyteller, is mysteriously struck dumb...Categorized as:
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The Sibyl by Pär Lagerkvist
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratings4 K- Blackstone Exclusive This Nobel Prize-winning author here explores the meaning of divine and human love, through the characters of a wandering Jew and a sibyl of Delphi. This is a remarkable book...Lagerkvist has written a disturbing and fearful fable about human and divine love, and about the glories and disasters of both...Categorized as:
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Above Us Only Sky by Michele Young-Stone
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsFrom the author of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, which Library Journal called, “ripe for Oprah or fans of Elizabeth Berg or Anne Tyler,” comes a magical novel about a family of women separated by oceans, generations, and war, but connected by something much greater—the gift of wings.On March 29, 1973, Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back... -
The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree by India Hayford
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsDisguised by years in exile and a name she found on a gravestone, an unconventional young woman returns to her childhood home in rural 1967 Arkansas in this hauntingly visceral Southern tale of desperate choices, found family, folk magic and noisy ghosts. Genevieve Charbonneau talks to ghosts and has a special relationship with rattlesnakes...Categorized as:
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The Swedish Cavalier by Leo Perutz, J. Maxwell Brownjohn
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 13 ratingsMuch admired by such disparate writers as Ian Fleming, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Graham Greene, Leo Perutz has won international recognition as a master storyteller and "a great modern writer" ( Philadelphia Inquirer)...Categorized as:
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Allan and the Holy Flower by H. Rider Haggard
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsAllan and the Holy Flower is a 1915 novel by H. Rider Haggard featuring Allan Quatermain. It first appeared serialised in The Windsor Magazine from issue 228 to 239, illustrated by Maurice Greiffenhagen, and in New Story Magazine from December 1913 through June 1914.Brother John, who has been living in Africa for many years, gives Allan Quatermain the largest orchid he has ever seen...Categorized as:
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Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa by Kenji Miyazawa
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe magic of Miyazawa's tales reaches out to people of all ages and lands. The sophisticated reader can savor them consciously as literature, while the younger reader can delight in them as imaginative stories that comment on and deepen his own experience. The underlying themes are universal, but the forms and treatment can be appreciated at many levels and vary subtly from piece to piece...Categorized as:
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Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics by Bliss Carman
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsSappho One Hundred Lyrics: Large Print By Bliss Carman Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics is a book of poetry by Canadian poet Bliss Carman. It was first printed in 1904 in Boston by L.C. Page. Carman's cousin, and fellow Canadian poet, Charles G.D. Roberts wrote an introductory essay, "The Poetry of Sappho... -
Pilgermann by Russell Hoban
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsHe climbs a ladder to reach another man's wife and gives himself up to her beauty, but then Pilgermann descends into a mob of peasants inspired by the Pope to shed the blood of Jews. Alone on the cobblestones, he cries out to Israel, to the Lord his God, to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. He is answered instead by Jesus Christ...Categorized as:
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I Burn Paris by Bruno Jasieński
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratings"This is a superb text of astonishing modernity, a veritable manifesto of the wretched of the earth ..."— MarianneBruno Jasienski’s I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland’s most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization in 1928 in the French magazine L’Humanité (for which Jasienski was deported)...Categorized as:
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The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsSet in fourth-century B.C. Greece, The Mask of Apollo is narrated by Nikeratos, a tragic actor who takes with him on all his travels a gold mask of Apollo, a relic of the theater's golden age, which is now past...Categorized as:
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Damascus Nights by Rafik Schami
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 21 ratingsIn the classical Arab tradition of tale-telling, here is a magical book that celebrates the power of storytelling, delightfully transformed for modern sensibilities by an award-winning author.The time is present-day Damascus, and Salim the coachman, the city's most famous storyteller, is mysteriously struck dumb... -
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Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell
Rated: 4.01 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsThe long-awaited new novel from the bestselling, prize-winning author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks.Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of...Categorized as:
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The Secret Library of Hanna Reeves by Christine Nolfi
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAn antiques dealer and an enigmatic heiress embark on a revelatory friendship in a haunting and hopeful novel about family ties, secrets, and belonging by the bestselling author of A Heart Like Home...Categorized as:
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Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith by Gina B. Nahai
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 17 ratingsWhen she is five years old, Lili, the narrator of this epic and magical tale, watches her mother, Roxanna the Angel, throw herself off the balcony of their house on the Avenue of Faith. Roxanna has left no farewell, no explanation. Her family's subsequent search for her reveals no body. no sign of a fall, no trace of an escape...Categorized as:
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Hallucinations: or, The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando by Reinaldo Arenas
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 11 ratingsIn the brilliant tradition of Don Quixote and Candide, this passionate novel by the author of Before Night Falls is a modern masterpiece of Latin American fiction...Categorized as:
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Not Wanted on the Voyage by Timothy Findley
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsNot Wanted on the Voyage is the story of the great flood and the first time the world ended, filed with an extraordinary cast of remarkable characters. With pathos and pageantry, desperation and hope, magic and mythology, this acclaimed novel weaves its unforgettable spell... -
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIt’s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul’s also got a secret: he’s a shapeshifter...Categorized as:
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