Books like 'Fellow Travelers'
Readers who enjoyed Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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Time Regained by Marcel Proust, D.J. Enright
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsTime Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, begins in the bleak and uncertain years of World War I. Years later, after the war’s end, Proust’s narrator returns to Paris and reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the raw material of literature—his past life...Categorized as:
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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... -
Unintended Consequences by John Ross, Timothy Mullin
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsUnintended Consequences is a novel by John Ross, first published in 1996 by Accurate Press. The story chronicles the history of the gun culture, gun rights, and gun control in the United States from the early 1900s through the late 1990s...Categorized as:
historical-fiction politics action-adventure adult book fiction historical political-intrigue -
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... -
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Collected Stories by Carson McCullers
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe novelist, dramatist, and poet Carson McCullers was at the peak of her powers as a writer of short fiction.In nineteen stories that explore her signature themes of wounded adolescence, loneliness in marriage, and the tragicomedy of life in the South, McCullers's novellas "The Member of the Wedding" and "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" are also included...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult anthologies classics -
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:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book fiction historical -
The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsNotice: "In the First Circle" and "The First Circle": "In The First Circle" is 200pp longer; "The first circle" is a censored and abridged version.Set in Moscow during a three-day period in December 1949, 'The First Circle' is the story of the prisoner Gleb Nerzhin, a brilliant mathematician...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook book -
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:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies classics drama -
Past Caring by Robert Goddard, Paul Shelley
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAt a lush villa on the sun-soaked island of Madeira, Martin Radford is given a second chance. His life ruined by scandal, Martin holds in his hands the leather-bound journal of another ruined man, former British cabinet minister Edwin Strafford...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics adult amateur-sleuth audiobook book cozy -
The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 7 ratingsSarai Walker has done it again. With The Cherry Robbers she upends the Gothic ghost story with a fiery feminist zeal. --Maria SempleThe highly anticipated second novel from Sarai Walker, following her "slyly subversive" (EW) cult-hit Dietland--a feminist gothic about the lone survivor of a cursed family of sisters, whose time may finally be up... -
What You Promised by Adele Clee
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsHe promised his name and his protection - but he never promised his love.Matthew Chandler built his fortune catering to the debauched antics of the ton. But one turn of the cards threatens everything he’s worked hard to achieve. Suspecting foul play at the gaming table, Matthew needs time and money if he has any hope of uncovering the plot to ruin him... -
Bodies of Water by T. Greenwood
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIn 1960, Billie Valentine is a young housewife living in a sleepy Massachusetts suburb, treading water in a dull marriage and caring for two adopted daughters. Summers spent with the girls at their lakeside camp in Vermont are her one escape--from her husband's demands, from days consumed by household drudgery, and from the nagging suspicion that life was supposed to hold something different... -
The Cremator by Ladislav Fuks, Rajendra A. Chitnis
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratings“The devil’s neatest trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist.”—Giovanni Papini It is a maxim that both rings true in our contemporary world and pervades this tragicomic novel of anxiety and evil set amid the horrors of World War II...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult audiobook book classics -
Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kästner
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsGoing to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter . .Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult book classics comedy -
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Selected European Short Stories (Classic Books on CD Collection) [UNABRIDGED] by Guy de Maupassant, Saki
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsClassic favorites, include Guy de Maupassant s The Duel and The Umbrella, Saki s The Schartz-Metterklume Method, The Open Window, and The Story Teller, Anton Chekhov s The Scandal Monger and Verochka and Thomas Mann s The Wardrobe...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction adult anthologies audiobook classics fiction historical -
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:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult book classics -
Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThis is a novel by the author of Hold Tight... -
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:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies classics fiction gothic -
The Ogre by Michel Tournier
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAn international bestseller and winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, The Ogre is a masterful tale of innocence, perversion, and obsession. It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges from submissive schoolboy to "ogre" of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, taking us deeper into the dark heart of fascism than any novel since The Tin Drum... -
Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsOriginally written and slated for publication in 1939, this long-forgotten masterpiece was shelved by Random House when The Grapes of Wrath met with wide acclaim...Categorized as:
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The Seven That Were Hanged by Leonid Andreyev
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSergey did not know that the colonel, having locked himself all the previous night in his little study, had deliberated upon this ritual with all his power. "We must not aggravate, but ease the last moments of our son," resolved the colonel firmly, and he carefully weighed every possible phase of the conversation, every act and movement that might take place on the following day... -
The Duke's Children by Anthony Trollope
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsPlantagenet Palliser must face new challenges and a changing world if he is to hold his family together in the final installment of the Palliser Novels. After losing his devoted wife, Glencora, Duke Plantagenet Palliser takes on a task he has never had the time or skills to bother with before: dealing with his children...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 19th-century adult audiobook book classics -
U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money by John Dos Passos
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn the novels that make up the U.S.A.trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—Dos Passos creates an unforgettable collective portrait of America, shot through with sardonic comedy and brilliant social observation. He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult anthologies classics crime -
Mephisto by Klaus Mann
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsKlaus Mann - Thomas Mann’s son - wrote MEPHISTO while living in exile from the Germany of World War II. In it he captures the Isherwood-like atmosphere of Nazi Germany while telling a satiric story about the rise to power of one man - a thinly veiled caricature of his own brother-in-law...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction politics 20th-century audiobook book classics -
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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 politics fiction classics humor 20th-century psychological historical -
Regeneration by Pat Barker
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsRegeneration, one in Pat Barker's series of novels confronting the psychological effects of World War I, focuses on treatment methods during the war and the story of a decorated English officer sent to a military hospital after publicly declaring he will no longer fight. Yet the novel is much more...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult audiobook book -
The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThe masterful second novel in Pat Barker's classic 'Regeneration' trilogy - from the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the GirlsWINNER OF THE 1993 GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZE'Spellbinding and startlingly original' Sunday Telegraph'Gripping, moving, profoundly intelligent' Independent on Sunday'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult audiobook book -
Mary: Mrs. A. Lincoln by Janis Cooke Newman
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsMary Todd Lincoln is one of history’s most misunderstood and enigmatic women. The first president’s wife to be called First Lady, she was a political strategist, a supporter of emancipation, and a mother who survived the loss of three children and the assassination of her beloved husband. Yet she also ran her family into debt, held seances in the White House, and was committed to an insane asylum...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics adult american-civil-war audiobook book civil-war -
A Million Drops by Víctor del Árbol
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAn intense literary thriller that tears through the interlocked histories of fascism and communism in Europe without pausing for breath. Gonzalo Gil is a disaffected lawyer stuck in a failed career and a strained marriage, dodging the never-ending manipulation of his powerful father-in-law... -
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:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult alternate-history book classics -
The Spider's House by Paul Bowles, Francine Prose
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSet in Fez, Morocco, during that country's 1954 nationalist uprising, The Spider's House is perhaps Paul Bowles's most beautifully subtle novel, richly descriptive of its setting, and uncompromising in its characterizations...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century action-adventure adult black-mc book -
Phineas Redux: Special Edition by Anthony Trollope
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe fourth novel in Trollope's Palliser series, Phineas Redux stands on its own as a compelling work of political intrigue, personal crisis, and romantic jealousy. Phineas Finn lives quietly in Dublin, resigned to the fact that his political career is over and coming to terms with the death of his wife... -
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...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book coming-of-age -
The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsFollowing A Boy's Own Story (now a classic of American fiction) and his richly acclaimed The Beautiful Room Is Empty, here is the eagerly awaited final volume of Edmund White's groundbreaking autobiographical trilogy...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies classics comedy -
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Orpheus Builds a Girl by Heather Parry
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsBased on a true story, Orpheus Builds a Girl is a novel of sisterly love, sinister obsession, and the battle for control of the story. A dark, chilling debut novel from award-winning writer Heather Parry.German doctor Wilhelm Von Tore shares with the reader the story of his one true ove; a love written in the stars, decades in the making, a love so strong it transcended death itself...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction horror fiction gothic retellings historical dark -
Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsShortlisted for the 2007 Costa Novel Award“I read Skin Lane with one eye closed out of sheer animal terror. Then, unimaginably, it brought me to tears; what a work of art—so unexpected and heartbreaking and lovely.”—Armistead Maupin“A powerful and complex story of sexual obsession. . . . A profoundly original meditation on thwarted desire... -
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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:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies fiction historical male-author -
The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsSet in France during the days immediately before World War II, this is the story of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy obsessed with the idea of freedom. Translated from the French by Eric Sutton... -
Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsHeinrich Böll's well-known, vehement opposition to fascism and war informs this moving story of Robert Faehmel. After being drawn into the Second World War to command retreating German forces despite his anti-Nazi feelings, Faehmel struggles to re-establish a normal life at the end of the war. He adheres to a rigorous schedule, including a daily game of billiards...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult book classics family -
Corregidora by Gayl Jones
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOne of The New Yorker's "The Best Books We Read in 2020" picks"Jones's great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them."--Anna Wiener, The New YorkerThe new edition of an American masterpiece, this is the harrowing story of Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer in the early 20th century forced to confront the inherited trauma of slavery...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction politics 20th-century abuse adult audiobook -
Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsPhilip Caputo’s tragic and epically ambitious new novel is set in Sudan, where war is a permanent condition. Into this desolate theater come aid workers, missionaries, and mercenaries of conscience whose courage and idealism sometimes coexist with treacherous moral blindness... -
The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsJean Blomart, patriot leader against the German forces of occupation, waits throughout an endless night for his lover, Helene, to die. He is the one who sent her on the mission that led to her death, and before morning, he must ultimately decide how many others to send to a similar fate...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction politics 20th-century adult book classics communism -
The Sheltering Sky / Let It Come Down / The Spider's House by Paul Bowles
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsPaul Bowles had already established himself as an important American composer when, at the age of 38, he published The Sheltering Sky and became widely recognized as one of the most powerful writers of the postwar period. By the time of his death in 1999 he had become a unique and legendary figure in modern literary culture... -
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The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 5 ratingsAn exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past.A house is a precious thing...It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction historical fiction wlw journey psychological -
And Then by Sōseki Natsume, Norma Moore Field
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsAnd Then , ranked as one of Soseki Natsume's most insightful and stirring novels, tells the story of Daisuke, a young Japanese man struggling with his personal purpose and identity, as well as the changing social landscape of Meiji-era Japan...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies classics drama fiction -
The Short Cut by Ennio Flaiano
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsIn this novel, first published in Italy in 1947, a chance encounter and an accidental shooting leave a young woman dead and a young soldier attempting to reason away responsibility and assuage his guilt... -
Grand Opening by Jon Hassler
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsTwelve-year old Brendan tells the story, set in 1944-45, that begins with his parents' decision to buy a run-down grocery store in a tiny Minnesota town. What they discover about small town idealism, bigotry, and good old American values will change them and the town forever...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction adult book family fiction historical psychological -
The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsWilliam Trevor's The Children of Dynmouth (Winner of the Whitbread Award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize) was first published in 1976 and is a classic account of evil lurking in the most unlikely places. In it we follow awkward, lonely, curious teenager Timothy Gedge as he wanders around the bland seaside town of Dynmouth...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book classics fiction historical -
Third Girl From The Left by Martha Southgate
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsAt the center of this dazzling novel is Angela, a twenty-year-old beauty who leaves the stifling conformity of Oklahoma to search for fame during the rise of blaxploitation cinema in Los Angeles. But for her mother, Mildred, a strait-laced survivor of the 1921 Tulsa race riots, Angela's acting career is unforgivable, and the distance between them grows into a silence that lasts for years...
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