Books like 'Attic'
Readers who enjoyed Attic by Katherine Dunn also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical 20th century psychological literary-fiction coming-of-age magical-realism
-
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali
Rated: 4.43 of 5 stars · 31 ratingsAvailable in English for the first time, this best-selling Turkish classic of love and alienation in a changing world captures the vibrancy of interwar Berlin. A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade and discover life in 1920s Berlin...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook book classics -
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsWoman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century adult book classics female-author feminism -
Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, D.J. Enright
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFirst published in 1919, Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook bildungsroman book classics -
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsA big, powerful saga of men in combat, written over the course of thirty-five years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran.Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook book classics -
-
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... -
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
Rated: 4.23 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsUpon its original publication in 1951, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was immediately embraced as one of the first serious works of fiction to help readers grapple with the human consequences of World War II...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook book classics -
A Daughter's Sorrow by Cathy Sharp
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsHeartache and hardship in London’s East End, from the bestselling author of The Orphans of Halfpenny StreetBridget has always been the one to take on the responsibility for looking after her family... -
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:
literary-fiction coming-of-age romance historical-fiction fiction historical audiobook mystery -
Remembrance of Things Past: Volume III - The Captive, The Fugitive, & Time Regained by Marcel Proust
Rated: 4.55 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe third and final volume includes THE CAPTIVE, THE FUGITIVE, and TIME REGAINED...Categorized as:
literary-fiction 20th-century anthologies classics family fiction historical literary -
Keep Saying Their Names by Simon Stranger
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsInspired by historical events and by personal history, a shattering, exquisite double portrait of a Norwegian family savaged by World War II and of a man devoted to crimes against humanity, conjoined by an actual house of horrors they both call home...Categorized as:
literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book fiction historical historical-fiction -
HIDDEN by Linda Gillard
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsA birth. A death. Hidden for a hundred years. The new novel from the author of Kindle bestseller THE MEMORY TREE “Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the war...Categorized as:
literary-fiction historical 20th-century historical-fiction suspense war family fiction -
A Daughter’s Dream by Cathy Sharp
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsHeartache and hardship in London’s East End, from the bestselling author of The Orphans of Halfpenny StreetAmy Robinson and her fiance Matthew are struggling to resist the temptations faced by a soon-to-be-wed couple. To avoid these, Matthew throws himself into a new job and she goes to work in an exclusive new dress shop, where she meets Mary Maitland...Categorized as:
literary-fiction historical-fiction female-mc psychological family romance 20th-century holidays -
Taking Care by Joy Williams
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsStories deal with a young divorcee, a shared summer home, a troubled family, a wedding, childhood fears, the death of a pet, a lying child, and enlightenment...Categorized as:
literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies family female-author fiction historical -
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 33 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:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook bildungsroman book classics -
-
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:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook bildungsroman book classics -
Glamorous Powers by Susan Howatch
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsJon Darrow, a man with psychic powers, is a man who has played many parts: a shady faith-healer; a naval chaplain, a passionate husband, an awkward father, an Anglo-Catholic monk. In 1940 Darrow returns to the world he once renounced, but faced with many unforeseen temptations he fails to control his psychic, most glamorous powers...Categorized as:
literary-fiction 20th-century adult book christian fiction historical historical-fiction -
The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsNobel prize winner Samuel Beckett is one of the most profoundly original writers of our century. He gives expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature...Categorized as:
literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies classics fiction historical literary -
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsIt is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham," wrote Gore Vidal. "He was always so entirely there." Originally published in 1915, Of Human Bondage is a potent expression of the power of sexual obsession and of modern man's yearning for freedom...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century audiobook bildungsroman book classics drama -
The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.43 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe collected stories of Stefan Zweig, one of the most popular writers of short fiction of the twentieth century This collection brings together twenty-three of Stefan Zweig's best-loved short stories. Written in his typically flowing and readable style, these tales are characterised by their pacing, their psychological insightfulness, and above all their pervading humanity...Categorized as:
literary-fiction fiction classics 20th-century anthologies psychological fantasy historical -
The Promise by Chaim Potok
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 24 ratings“A superb mirror of a place, a time, and a group of people who capture our immediate interest and hold it tightly.” — The Philadelphia InquirerYoung Reuven Malter is unsure of himself and his place in life. An unconventional scholar, he struggles for recognition from his teachers... -
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 literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook book crime -
The Waves (Annotated) by Virginia Woolf, Molly Hite
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsThe Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, standing with those few works of twentieth-century literature that have created unique forms of their own. In deeply poetic prose, Woolf traces the lives of six children from infancy to death who fleetingly unite around the unseen figure of a seventh child, Percival...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult audiobook book classics -
Collected Stories and Other Writings by John Cheever
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsJohn Cheever’s stories rank among the finest achievements of twentieth-century short fiction. Ensnared by the trappings of affluence, adrift in the emptiness of American prosperity, his characters find themselves in the midst of dramas that, however comic, pose profound questions about conformity and class, pleasure and propriety, and the conduct and meaning of an individual life...Categorized as:
literary-fiction fiction classics 20th-century postmodernism anthologies psychological historical -
Ancient Tillage by Raduan Nassar
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsFor André, a young man growing up on a farm in Brazil, life consists of “the earth, the wheat, the bread, our table, and our family.” He loves the land, fears his austere, pious father, who preaches from the head of the table as if from a pulpit, and loathes himself as he begins to harbor shameful feelings for his sister Ana... -
-
The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsFrom the author of the beloved #1 national bestseller Crow Lake comes an exceptional new novel of jealously, rivalry and the dangerous power of obsession. Two brothers, Arthur and Jake Dunn, are the sons of a farmer in the mid-1930s, when life is tough and another world war is looming... -
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...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure anthologies audiobook classics dark -
A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas, Imre Goldstein
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThis extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiographical novel in the grand manner, claiming and extending the legacy of Proust and Mann. But it is more: Peter Nadas has given us a superb contemporary psychological novel that comes to terms with the ghosts, corpses, and repressed nightmares of Europe's recent past...Categorized as:
literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult book classics fiction historical -
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... -
The Obscene Madame D by Hilda Hilst
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe English-language debut of one of Brazil’s leading writers of the twentieth centuryThe Obscene Madame D is the first work by acclaimed Brazilian author Hilda Hilst to be published in English. Radically irreverent and formally impious, this novel portrays an unyielding radical intelligence, a sixty-year-old woman who decides to live in the recess under the stairs... -
The Between by Tananarive Due
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsWhen Hilton was just a boy, his aged grandmother saved him from drowning by pulling him out of a treacherous ocean current, sacrificing her life for his. Now, thirty years later, Hilton begins to think his borrowed time is running out...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult afrofuturism audiobook black-mc book -
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... -
The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon, as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook book classics -
Fatelessness by Imre Kertész
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsAt the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook book classics -
Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsPossessing the Secret of Joy is the story of Tashi, a tribal African woman who lives much of her adult life in North America. As a young woman, a misguided loyalty to the customs of her people led her to voluntarily submit to the tsunga's knife and be genitally mutilated (pharoanoically circumcised)... -
-
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... -
Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962 by Vladimir Nabokov
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThis Library of America volume is the second of three volumes that contain the most authoritative versions of the English works of the brilliant Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov.Lolita (1955), Nabokov’s single most famous work, is one of the most controversial and widely read books of its time...Categorized as:
literary-fiction fiction classics humor 20th-century psychological politics historical -
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... -
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 42 ratingsA modern classic, Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century action-adventure adult anthologies audiobook classics -
Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFor Davita Chandal, growing up in the New York of the 1930s and '40s is an experience of joy and sadness. Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope of a new and better world...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century bildungsroman book classics communism drama -
In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Mosionier, Michaela Washburn
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsTwo young sisters are taken from their home and family. Powerless to change their fortunes, they are separated, and each put into different foster homes. Yet over the years, the bond between them grows. As they each make their way in a society that is, at times, indifferent, hostile, and violent, one embraces her Métis identity, while the other tries to leave it behind... -
Sacred Country by Rose Tremain
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsAt the age of six, Mary Ward, the child of a poor farming family in Suffolk, has a revelation: she isn't Mary, she's a boy. So begins Mary's heroic struggle to change gender, while around her others also strive to find a place of safety and fulfilment in a savage and confusing world... -
The Wonder Worker by Susan Howatch
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe inhabitants of a small community are interlinked by the healer at its heart, Nick Darrow. There is Alice, the romantic but also an outcast; Lewis the priest, an irascible traditionalist; Francie, who has a desire to be loved; and Stacy, a young trainee looking for faith and direction... -
The Vivisector by Patrick White
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsHurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him - all are used as fodder for his art... -
The Collected Short Stories by Jean Rhys
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsJean Rhys was one of the twentieth century's foremost writers, a literary artist who made exqusite use of the raw material of her own often turbulent life to create fiction of memorable resonance and poignancy. Here for the first time in one volume are her complete stories...Categorized as:
literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies classics female-author fiction historical -
-
Nights at the Alexandra by William Trevor
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsFrom the award-winning author of Love and Summer: A short novel about coming of age in WWII-era provincial Ireland that “certainly lingers in the mind” (Harriet Waugh, Spectator). At fifty-eight, Harry is a lifelong bachelor who never left the Irish village where he was born...Categorized as:
literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies fiction historical historical-fiction male-author -
Splendor in the Grass by adapted from the screenplay by William Inge F. Andrew Leslie, William Inge
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsF. Andrew Leslie, adapted from the screenplay by William Inge, Inge, William, Leslie, F...Categorized as:
literary-fiction coming-of-age romance classics fiction drama historical-fiction family -
The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan
Rated: 3.99 of 5 stars · 66 ratingsRuth Young and her widowed mother, LuLing, have always had a tumultuous relationship. Now, before she succumbs to forgetfulness, LuLing gives Ruth some of her writings, which reveal a side of LuLing that Ruth has never known. . . -
The Life She Was Given by Ellen Marie Wiseman
Rated: 4.01 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsFrom acclaimed author Ellen Marie Wiseman comes a vivid, daring novel about the devastating power of family secrets--beginning in the poignant, lurid world of a Depression-era traveling circus and coming full circle in the transformative 1950s. On a summer evening in 1931, Lilly Blackwood glimpses circus lights from the grimy window of her attic bedroom...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century abuse action-adventure animals audiobook book -
The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThis powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis was first published by New Directions in 1956. Set in the early postwar years, The Setting Sun probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society... -
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
Rated: 3.95 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsWhen one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation...Categorized as:
coming-of-age literary-fiction 20th-century audiobook bildungsroman book classics dark-academia
Or - use our amazing romance book finder to get recommendations based on your favorite content tropes and themes. Mix and match at will.