Books like 'Broken April'
Readers who enjoyed Broken April by Ismail Kadare also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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Martin Eden by Jack London
Rated: 4.46 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsThe semiautobiographical Martin Eden is the most vital and original character Jack London ever created. Set in San Francisco, this is the story of Martin Eden, an impoverished seaman who pursues, obsessively and aggressively, dreams of education and literary fame...Categorized as:
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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:
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Kane & Abel by Jeffrey Archer
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsBorn on the same day near the turn of the century on opposite sides of the world, both men are brought together by fate and the quest of a dream. These two men -- ambitious, powerful, ruthless -- are locked in a relentless struggle to build an empire, fuelled by their all-consuming hatred...Categorized as:
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They Burn Thistles by Yaşar Kemal
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThis is the story of a bitter war between the poor Turkish peasants of the Taurus Mountains and the Aghas who covet their land. Ali Safa is determined to take possession of the village of Vayvay but its inhabitants will not sell. Then one villager weakens, prepared to part with his land in return for the Agha's best stallion...Categorized as:
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Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsRichard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the highly acclaimed translators of and which was an Oprah Book Club pick and million-copy bestseller, bring their unmatched talents to a collection of thirty of Chekhov’s best tales from the major periods of his creative life...Categorized as:
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This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsMinke is a young Javanese student of great intelligence and ambition. Living equally among the colonists and colonized of 19th-century Java, he battles against the confines of colonial strictures. It is his love for Annelies that enables him to find the strength to embrace his world...Categorized as:
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To Live by Yu Hua, 余华
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFrom the author of Brothers and China in Ten Words this celebrated contemporary classic of Chinese literature was also adapted for film by Zhang Yimou. This searing novel, originally banned in China but later named one of that nation's most influential books, portrays one man's transformation from the spoiled son of a landlord to a kindhearted peasant...Categorized as:
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The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsHaunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of 1961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million people...Categorized as:
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The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 36 ratings"The Harafish begins with the tale of Ashur al-Nagi, a man who grows from humble beginnings to become a great leader, a legend among his people. Generation after generation, however, Ashur's descendants grow further from his legendary example...Categorized as:
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The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of World War I, The Bridge on the Drina earned Ivo Andric the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. A great stone bridge built three centuries ago in the heart of the Balkans by a Grand Vezir of the Ottoman Empire dominates the setting of Andric's stunning novel...Categorized as:
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Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA haunting tale of power, corruption, and the complex search for identity, Conversation in The Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of Manuel Apolinario Odría Amoretti...Categorized as:
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Child of All Nations by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn Child of All Nations, the reader is immediately swept up by a story that is profoundly feminist, devastatingly anticolonialist—and full of heartbreak, suspense, love, and fury. Pramoedya immerses the reader in a world that is astonishing in its vividness: the cultural whirlpool that was the Dutch East Indies of the 1890s...Categorized as:
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The Angry Tide by Winston Graham
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Angry Tide is the seventh novel in Winston Graham's classic Poldark saga, the major TV series from Masterpiece on PBS.Cornwall, towards the end of the 18th century. Ross Poldark sits for the borough of Truro as Member of Parliament - his time divided between London and Cornwall, his heart divided about his wife, Demelza...Categorized as:
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Circles in a Forest by Dalene Matthee
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe Knysna Forest: a primal world of strange beauty and hidden dangers, of secrets shrouded beneath the canopy of towering trees, where, for centuries, the only sounds were the songs of birds and the trumpeting of the magnificent elephants.... until man arrived to claim for himself the rare wood of the trees, and the rarer ivory of the elephants' tusks...Categorized as:
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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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The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSet in the vast windswept Central Asian steppes and the infinite reaches of galactic space, this powerful novel offers a vivid view of the culture and values of the Soviet Union's Central Asian peoples...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction journey literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
Palace of Desire by Naguib Mahfouz
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThe sensual and provocative second volume in the Cairo Trilogy, Palace Of Desire follows the Al Jawad family into the awakening world of the 1920's and the sometimes violent clash between Islamic ideals, personal dreams and modern realities...Categorized as:
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Palestine's Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories by Ghassan Kanafani
Rated: 4.40 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsPolitics and the novel, Ghassan Kanafani once said, are an indivisible case. Fadl al-Naqib has reflected that Kanafani wrote the Palestinian story, then he was written by it. His narratives offer entry into the Palestinian experience of the conflict that has anguished the people of the Middle East for more than a century...Categorized as:
historical-fiction politics classics realistic fiction historical university 20th-century -
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis stirring, poignant novel, based on real historical events that made of actual people true heroes, unfolds the tragedy that befell the Armenian people in the dark year of 1915. The Great War is raging through Europe, and in the ancient, mountainous lands southwest of the Caspian Sea the Turks have begun systematically to exterminate their Christian subjects...Categorized as:
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A History of Loneliness by John Boyne
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsPropelled into the priesthood by a family tragedy, Odran Yates is full of hope and ambition. When he arrives at Clonliffe Seminary in the 1970s, it is a time in Ireland when priests are highly respected, and Odran believes that he is pledging his life to "the good."Forty years later, Odran's devotion is caught in revelations that shatter the Irish people's faith in the Catholic Church...Categorized as:
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Small Country by Gaël Faye
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratings‘A luminous and poignant novel about childhood, war, exile and identity…this is literature at its most powerful’ Le Parisien Magazine Burundi, 1992. For ten-year-old Gabriel, life in his comfortable expat neighbourhood of Bujumbura with his French father, Rwandan mother and little sister, Ana, is something close to paradise...Categorized as:
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Samarkand by Amin Maalouf
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsAccused of mocking the inviolate codes of Islam, the Persian poet and sage Omar Khayyam fortuitously finds sympathy with the very man who is to judge his alleged crimes. Recognising genuis, the judge decides to spare him and gives him instead a small, blank book, encouraging him to confine his thoughts to it alone. Thus begins the seamless blend of fact and fiction that is Samarkand...Categorized as:
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The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott, Richard Brown
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe second novel in The Raj Quartet: the arrest by British police of Mohammed Ali Kasim, who is known to sympathise with the Quit India movement, signifies a further deterioration in Anglo-India relations. For families such as the Laytons, who have lived and served in India for generations, the immediate social and political realities are both disturbing and tragic...Categorized as:
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Extinction by Thomas Bernhard
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe last work of fiction by one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Extinction is widely considered Thomas Bernhard’s magnum opus. Franz-Josef Murau—the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family—lives in Rome in self-imposed exile, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends...Categorized as:
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Cometh the Hour by Jeffrey Archer
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 28 ratings"Cometh the Hour" opens with the reading of a suicide note, which has devastating consequences for Harry and Emma Clifton, Giles Barrington and Lady Virginia.Giles must decide if he should withdraw from politics and try to rescue Karin, the woman he loves, from behind the Iron Curtain...Categorized as:
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If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsPrimo Levi was among the greatest witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In this gripping novel, based on a true story, he reveals the extraordinary lives of the Russian, Polish and Jewish partisans trapped behind enemy lines during the Second World War...Categorized as:
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Tuareg by Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe Tuaregs are the true sons of the desert. They can survive in the harshest of conditions like nobody else. The noble inmouchar Gacel Sayah, is the master of a large extension of the desert. One day, two fugitives arrive from the north and Gacel, following his ancient and sacred hospitality laws, gives them shelter...Categorized as:
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The Kites by Romain Gary
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsOn a small farm in Normandy, as Hitler rises to power in Germany, young Ludo comes of age in the care of his Uncle Ambrose, an eccentric mailman, kite-maker, and pacifist. Ludo’s quiet existence changes the day he meets Lila, a girl from the aristocratic Polish family who own the estate next door. In a single glance, Ludo instantly falls in love forever; Lila, on the other hand, remains elusive...Categorized as:
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The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThe War of the End of the World is one of the great modern historical novels. Inspired by a real episode in Brazilian history, Mario Vargas Llosa tells the unforgettable story of an apocalyptic movement, led by a mysterious prophet, in which prostitutes, beggars and bandits establish Canudos, a new republic, a libertarian paradise...Categorized as:
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Selected Stories by O. Henry
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 24 ratings"Selected Stories of O. Henry," by O. Henry, is part of the "Barnes & Noble Classics"" "series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras...Categorized as:
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A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsNevil Shute's most beloved novel, a tale of love and war, follows its enterprising heroine from the Malayan jungle during World War II to the rugged Australian outback.Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman living in Malaya, is captured by the invading Japanese and forced on a brutal seven-month death march with dozens of other women and children...Categorized as:
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Pereira Declares: A Testimony by Antonio Tabucchi
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsDr. Pereira is an aging, overweightjournalist who has failed to noticethe menacing cloud of fascism overSalazarist Portugal, until one day hemeets an aspiring young writer andanti-fascist. Breaking out of his apolitical torpor, Pereira reluctantly rises to heroism...Categorized as:
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Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories by Ghassan Kanafani
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThis collection of important stories by novelist, journalist, teacher, and Palestinian activist Ghassan Kanafani includes the stunning novella Men in the Sun (1962), the basis of the The Deceived. Also in the volume are "The Land of Sad Oranges" (1958), "'If You Were a Horse..Categorized as:
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The Centurions by Jean Lartéguy
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThis is Jean Larteguy's most famous book that garnered international acclaim and sold millions of copies. It was also the basis for the movie, The Lost Command, starring Anthony Quinn. In his autobiography, Larteguy writes that he got the name of the book from when he was traveling with the Foreign Legion in the Sahara and came across an old Roman column at an oasis...Categorized as:
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Mightier Than the Sword by Jeffrey Archer
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsA bomb goes off, but how many passengers on the MV Buckingham have lost their lives? You will find out only if you read the opening chapter of Mightier than the Sword...Categorized as:
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They Were Counted by Miklós Bánffy, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsPainting an unrivalled portrait of the vanished world of pre-1914 Hungary, this story is told through the eyes of two young Transylvanian cousins, Count Balint Abady and Count Laszlo Gyeroffy...Categorized as:
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Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić, Joseph Hitrec
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSet in the town of Travnik, Bosnian Chronicle presents the struggle for supremacy in a region that stubbornly refuses to submit to any outsider. The era is Napoleanic and the novel, both in its historical scope and psychological subtley, Tolstoyan. In its portray of conflict and fierce ethnic loyalties, the story is also eerily relevant...Categorized as:
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The Third Wedding by Costas Taktsis, Κώστας Ταχτσής
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe German Occupation, the Civil War and life itself seen through the eyes of two Athenian women...Categorized as:
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Strumpet City by James Plunkett
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThis new edition of the epic Strumpet City marks the centenary of the 1913 Lockout. It has been chosen as Dublin City Libraries' One City, One Book for 2013. First published in 1969, it has repeatedly been described as one of the greatest Irish novels of all time.Centring on the seminal lockout of 20,000 workers in Dublin in 1913, Strumpet City encompasses a wide sweep of city life...Categorized as:
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A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsVikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find—through love or through exacting maternal appraisal—a suitable boy for Lata to marry...Categorized as:
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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 Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsConsidered one of Sweden's greatest 20th-century writers, Vilhelm Moberg created Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson to portray the joys and tragedies of daily life for early Swedish pioneers in America. His consistently faithful depiction of these humble people's lives is a major strength of the Emigrant Novels...Categorized as:
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Riiginõunik by Boris Akunin
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSince the publication of The Winter Queen, a New York Times Notable Book and the first mystery featuring Erast Fandorin, Boris Akunin’s historical mystery series has become a worldwide sensation, selling millions of copies and propelling Akunin into the ranks of Russia’s most widely read contemporary novelists...Categorized as:
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Pavilion of Women by Pearl S. Buck
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsOn her fortieth birthday, Madame Wu carries out a decision she has been planning for a long time: she tells her husband that after twenty-four years their physical life together is now over and she wishes him to take a second wife...Categorized as:
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Selected Stories by O. Henry
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsO. Henry originated the humorous, energetic tale that ends with an ironic, even shocking twist. In "After Twenty Years," for example, two boys agree to meet at a particular spot exactly twenty years later. Both are faithful, but in the intervening years one boy has turned into a criminal, the other into a policeman...Categorized as:
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Rapsodie der eenzaamheid by Agnar Mykle, Maurice Michael
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsDutch translation of Lasso rundt fru Luna... -
Linnea in Monet's Garden by Christina Björk, Lena Anderson
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsLinnea has visited Claude Monet's garden! In Paris, she got to see many of his actual paintings. Now she understands what it means for a painter to be called an Impressionist. This innovative art book for children contains full-color photos of many of Monet's famous paintings...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction journey realistic 20th-century action-adventure book children -
Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergović
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsMiljenko Jergovic’s remarkable début collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro – winner of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize – earned him wide acclaim throughout Europe. Croatian by birth, Jergovic ? spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war... -
Of Mice and Men & Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAlternate Cover Edition ISBN 014004891X (ISBN13:...Categorized as:
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Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsOne bright spring day in 1925, Gabriela arrives from the poverty-stricken backwoods of Brazil to the lively seaside port of Ilhéus amid a flock of filthy migrant workers. Though wearing rags and covered in dirt, she attracts the attention of Nacib, a cafe owner, who is in desperate need of a new cook. So dire is his situation that he hires the disheveled girl...Categorized as:
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