Books like 'An American Tragedy'
Readers who enjoyed An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
Rated: 4.48 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsAndy Dufresne, a banker, was convicted of killing his wife and her lover and sent to Shawshank Prison. He maintains his innocence over the decades he spends at Shawshank during which time he forms a friendship with "Red", a fellow inmate.Source: stephenking...Categorized as:
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Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Sally Beauman
Rated: 4.26 of 5 stars · 80 ratingsLast night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Her future looks bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Max de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise...Categorized as:
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And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Rated: 4.27 of 5 stars · 86 ratingsFirst, there were ten—a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a little private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal—and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder...Categorized as:
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And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Rated: 4.26 of 5 stars · 87 ratingsFirst, there were ten—a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a little private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal—and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder...Categorized as:
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The Spook Who Sat by the Door by Sam Greenlee
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA classic in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a comment on the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy.Dan Freeman, the spook who sat by the door, is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program...Categorized as:
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The Key by Kathryn Hughes
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFrom the #1 bestselling author of The Letter Kathryn Hughes comes The Key, an unforgettable story of a heartbreaking secret that will stay with you for ever. 'Riveting' Lesley Pearse on The Letter. 'Gripping' Good Housekeeping on The Secret. 1956 It's Ellen Crosby's first day at work as a student nurse at Ambergate County Lunatic Asylum... -
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, Geoff Wilkes
Rated: 4.23 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsInspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is the gripping tale of an ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule. This Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the novel. Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear...Categorized as:
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Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThe dons of Harriet Vane's alma mater, the all-female Shrewsbury College, Oxford, have invited her back to attend the annual Gaudy celebrations. However, the mood turns sour when someone begins a series of malicious acts including poison-pen messages, obscene graffiti and wanton vandalism. Harriet asks her old friend Wimsey to investigate...Categorized as:
classics crime drama historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult amateur-sleuth -
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThe magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century...Categorized as:
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Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIn all failed relationships there is a point that passes unnoticed at the time, which can later be identified as the beginning of the decline. For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park.Croydon, 1964. Helen Hansford is in her thirties and an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital where she has been having a long love affair with a charismatic, married doctor...Categorized as:
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The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Murderess is a bone-chilling tale of crime and punishment with the dark beauty of a backwoods ballad. Set on the dirt-poor Aegean island of Skiathos, it is the story of Hadoula, an old woman living on the margins of society and at the outer limits of respectability. Hadoula knows about herbs and their hidden properties, and women come to her when they need help...Categorized as:
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Honeysuckle Season by Mary Ellen Taylor
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFrom bestselling author Mary Ellen Taylor comes a story about profound loss, hard truths, and an overgrown greenhouse full of old secrets.Adrift in the wake of her father’s death, a failed marriage, and multiple miscarriages, Libby McKenzie feels truly alone. Though her new life as a wedding photographer provides a semblance of purpose, it’s also a distraction from her profound pain... -
Brodeck by Philippe Claudel
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSet in an unnamed time and place, Brodeck blends the familiar and unfamiliar, myth and history into a work of extraordinary power and resonance. Readers of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Kafka will be captivated by Brodeck...Categorized as:
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The Woman in the Wood by Lesley Pearse
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFifteen-year-old twins Maisy and Duncan Mitcham have always had each other. Until the fateful day in the wood . . . One night in 1960, the twins awake to find their father pulling their screaming mother from the house. She is to be committed to an asylum. It is, so their father insists, for her own good... -
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Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott, Agatha Christie
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsReturning from a visit to her daughter in Iraq, Joan Scudamore finds herself unexpectedly alone and stranded in an isolated rest house by flooding of the railway tracks. This sudden solitude compels Joan to assess her life for the first time ever and face up to many of the truths about herself...Categorized as:
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Only Time Will Tell by Jeffrey Archer
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 39 ratingsFrom the internationally bestselling author of Kane and Abel and A Prisoner of Birth comes Only Time Will Tell, the first in an ambitious new series that tells the story of one family across generations, across oceans, from heartbreak to triumph. The epic tale of Harry Clifton’s life begins in 1920, with the words “I was told that my father was killed in the war...Categorized as:
coming-of-age crime drama historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult -
Qb VII by Leon Uris
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsIn Queen’s Bench Courtroom Number Seven, famous author Abraham Cady stands trial. In his book The Holocaust—born of the terrible revelation that the Jadwiga Concentration Camp was the site of his family’s extermination—Cady shook the consciousness of the human race. He also named eminent surgeon Sir Adam Kelno as one of Jadwiga’s most sadistic inmate/doctors...Categorized as:
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The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 42 ratingsIn this classic, John le Carre's third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he created a world unlike any previously experienced in suspense fiction...Categorized as:
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Random Harvest by James Hilton
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsCharles Rainier, a prosperous Briton, loses his memory as a result of shellshock in the First World War...Categorized as:
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Ciuleandra by Liviu Rebreanu
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsWritten in the interwar period and published in 1927, this psychological thriller has captured the imagination of Romanian readers ever since. The book begins with a murder, as Puiu, a young aristocrat, strangles his wife on the night of the royal ball. To avoid a public trial and prison sentence, his father arranges to have him committed to a mental asylum... -
In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes, Paula Rabinowitz
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsPostwar Los Angeles is a lonely place where the American Dream is showing its seamy underside—and a stranger is preying on young women. The suggestively named Dix Steele, a cynical vet with a chip on his shoulder about the opposite sex, is the LAPD's top suspect...Categorized as:
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Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsHamilton captures the edgy, obsessive and eventually murderous mindset of a romantically frustrated British man in this WWII-era novel. London 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation with Netta who is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George...Categorized as:
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The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsFrom the bestselling author of , is a powerfully eloquent tribute to the arduous demands of rural America, and of the tenacity of the human spirit.Colorado, January 1977. Eighty-year-old Edith Goodnough lies in a hospital bed, IV taped to the back of her hand, police officer at her door. She is charged with murder...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age drama historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies -
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsOne of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate artistic expression...Categorized as:
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A Rose for Emily and Other Stories by William Faulkner, Washington Irving
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsEmily is a member of a family in the antebellum Southern aristocracy; after the Civil War, the family has fallen on hard times... -
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...Categorized as:
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Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsIn Alias Grace, bestselling author Margaret Atwood has written her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since The Handmaid's Tale. She takes us back in time and into the life of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century...Categorized as:
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Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsA triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible--and tries to stay alive doing it...Categorized as:
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The Mansion by William Faulkner
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe Mansion completes Faulkner’s great trilogy of the Snopes family in the mythical county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, which also includes The Hamlet and The Town. Beginning with the murder of Jack Houston, and ending with the murder of Flem Snopes, it traces the downfall of this indomitable post-bellum family, who managed to seize control of the town of Jefferson within a generation... -
The Missing Daughter by Emily Gunnis
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFrom the author of the runaway bestseller The Girl in the Letter comes a heartwrenching, twisting novel of betrayal, tragedy and a shocking family secret buried for decades.1960. Thirteen-year-old Rebecca lives in fear of her father’s temper. As a storm batters Seaview Cottage one night, she hears a visitor at the door and a violent argument ensues...Categorized as:
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Mysteries by Knut Hamsun
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsMysteries (1892) is the story of Johan Nilsen Nagel, a mysterious stranger who suddenly turns up in a small Norwegian town one summer-and just as suddenly disappears. Nagel is a complete outsider, a sort of modern Christ treated in a spirit of near parody...Categorized as:
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The Moonspinners by Mary Stewart
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsYoung, beautiful, and adventurous Nicola Ferris loves her life as a secretary at the British Embassy on the lush island of Crete. Then on her day off, she links up with two hiking companions who have inadvertently stumbledupon a scene of blood vengeance. And suddenly the life Nicola adores is in danger of coming to an abrupt, brutal, and terrifying end . -
The Lobotomist's Wife by Samantha Greene Woodruff
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAn enthralling historical novel of a compassionate and relentless woman, a cutting-edge breakthrough in psychiatry, and a nightmare in the making.Since her brother took his life after WWI, Ruth Emeraldine has had one goal: to help those suffering from mental illness. Then she falls in love with charismatic Robert Apter—a brilliant doctor championing a radical new treatment, the lobotomy...Categorized as:
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The Edge of Lost by Kristina McMorris
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 25 ratingsNEW YORK TIMES & USA TODAY BESTSELLEROn a cold night in October 1937, searchlights cut through the darkness around Alcatraz. A prison guard’s only daughter—one of the youngest civilians who lives on the island—has gone missing. Tending the warden’s greenhouse, convicted bank robber Tommy Capello waits anxiously...Categorized as:
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The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsAlive and hiding in South America, the fiendish Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a horrifying project—the creation of the Fourth Reich. Barry Kohler, a young investigative journalist, gets wind of the project and informs famed Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman, but before he can relay the evidence, Kohler is killed...Categorized as:
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Poirot quitte la scène by Agatha Christie
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsArthritic and immobilized, Poirot calls on his old friend Captain Hastings to join him at Styles to be the eyes and ears that will feed observations to Poirot's still razor sharp mind. Though aware of the criminal's identity, Poirot will not reveal it to the frustrated Hastings, and dubs the nameless personage 'X'...Categorized as:
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Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
Rated: 4.02 of 5 stars · 43 ratingsIn 1986, Henry Lee joins a crowd outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle's Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has discovered the belongings of Japanese families who were sent to internment camps during World War II... -
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 61 ratingsBest known for the 1892 title story of this collection, a harrowing tale of a woman's descent into madness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote more than 200 other short stories. Seven of her finest are reprinted here...Categorized as:
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The Alienist by Caleb Carr
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsWhen The Alienist was first published in 1994, it was a major phenomenon, spending six months on the New York Times bestseller list, receiving critical acclaim, and selling millions of copies. This modern classic continues to be a touchstone of historical suspense fiction for readers everywhere.The year is 1896. The city is New York...Categorized as:
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Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsRamsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him... -
Embers by Sándor Márai
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsAs darkness settles on a forgotten castle at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, two men sit down to a final dinner together. They have not seen one another in forty-one years. At their last meeting, in the company of a beautiful woman, an unspoken act of betrayal left all three lives shattered - and each of them alone...Categorized as:
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Libra by Don DeLillo
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFrom the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and Zero KIn this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history...Categorized as:
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The Bad Seed (P.S.) by William March
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsNow reissued – William March's 1954 classic thriller that's as chilling, intelligent and timely as ever before. This paperback reissue includes a new P.S. section with author interviews, insights, features, suggested reading and more.What happens to ordinary families into whose midst a child serial killer is born? This is the question at the center of William March's classic thriller...Categorized as:
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Forest of the Hanged by Liviu Rebreanu
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsDuring the First World War, just behind the eastern front, there was a forest, where Austrians and Hungarians used to hang deserters. To this place came Apostol Bologa, a young Romanian officer eager to serve his country. Born in a Romanian region of Transylvania which was then under Hungarian rule, he had naturally enough joined the Austro-Hungarian army...Categorized as:
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The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsBy chance, John and Jean--one English, the other French--meet in a provincial railway station. Their resemblance to each other is uncanny, and they spend the next few hours talking and drinking - until at last John falls into a drunken stupor. It's to be his last carefree moment, for when he wakes, Jean has stolen his identity and disappeared...Categorized as:
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The Summer of Katya by Trevanian
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn the golden summer of 1914, Jean-Marc Montjean, recently graduated from medical school, comes to the small French village of Salies to assist the village physician. His first assignment is to treat the brother of a beautiful woman named Katya Treville. As he and her family become friendly, he realizes they are haunted by an old, dark secret . . -
Winter Journey by Diane Armstrong
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsHalina Shore is a Polish-born forensic dentist who lives in Australia. When she travels to Poland to take part in the investigation of a war crime, she finds herself at the centre of a bitter struggle in a community that has been divided by a grim legacy... -
Famous Last Words by Timothy Findley
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIn the final days of the Second World War, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley scrawls his desperate account on the walls and ceilings of his ice-cold prison high in the Austrian Alps. Officers of the liberating army discover his frozen, disfigured corpse and his astonishing testament - the sordid truth that he alone possessed...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult alternate-history book fiction -
Pick-Up by Charles Willeford
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsHe Holed Up With a Helpless LushProwling the grimy streets of San Francisco low-life, Helen is a beautiful, sensuous drunk - and a pathetically easy pick-up. Harry just wants to help, but before long he and Helen are both adrift in a sea of alcohol - until Harry conceives the ultimate crime.. -
In My Father's House by Ernest J. Gaines
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA compelling novel of a man brought to reckon with his buried past...In St. Adrienne, a small black community in Louisiana, Reverend Phillip Martin—a respected minister and civil rights leader—comes face to face with the sins of his youth in the person of Robert X, a young, unkempt stranger who arrives in town for a mysterious "meeting" with the Reverend...
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