Books like 'Ravensong'
Readers who enjoyed Ravensong by Lee Maracle also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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The Secrets of the Tea Garden by Janet MacLeod Trotter
Rated: 4.56 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsShe’s gone in search of happy memories. But was her idyllic childhood in India an illusion? After the Second World War, Libby Robson leaves chilly England for India, and the childhood home where she left her heart—and her beloved father, James—fourteen years ago. At first Libby is intoxicated by India’s vibrant beauty: the bustle of Calcutta, the lush tea gardens of Assam... -
Collected Poems by Federico García Lorca
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA revised edition of this major writer's complete poetical work"And I who was walkingwith the earth at my waist,saw two snowy eaglesand a naked girl.The one was the otherand the girl was neither."--from "Qasida of the Dark Doves"Federico García Lorca is the greatest poet of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world's most influential modernist writers... -
The Girl in the Striped Dress by Ellie Midwood
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsGermany, 1947. A strange case scheduled for the Denazification Court lands on the desk of an American psychiatrist currently serving in Germany, Dr. Hoffman. A former Auschwitz guard, Franz Dahler, is set to appear in court, and he has requested to bring the most unexpected witness to testify in his defense - one of his former inmates and current wife, Helena...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction social-commentary 20th-century adult book dark epic -
The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes
Rated: 4.44 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsOne of his best-known works, Hughes wrote The Ways of White Folks while living in Carmel, California. In it, he shares acrid and poignant stories of blacks colliding--sometimes humorously, but often tragically--with whites throughout the 1920s and 1930s... -
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The Colours of Love by Rita Bradshaw
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsCan love survive when all is lost? England is at war, but nothing can dim land girl Esther Wynford's happiness at marrying the love of her life - fighter pilot Monty Grant. Their short honeymoon results in a baby, but on the birth of her daughter, Joy, Esther's world falls apart... -
The Darkest Canyon: Book Two in A Holocaust Story Series by Roberta Kagan
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsNazi Germany. Gretchen Schmidt has a secret life. She is in love with a married Jewish man. She is hiding him while his wife is posing as an Aryan woman. Her best friend Hilde, who unbeknownst to Gretchen is a sociopath, is working as a guard at Ravensbruck concentration camp... -
The Selected Poems by Federico García Lorca
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThe Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca has introduced generations of readers to mesmerizing poetry since 1955. Lorca (1898-1937) is admired all over the world for the lyricism, immediacy and clarity of his poetry, as well as for his ability to encompass techniques of the symbolist movement with deeper psychological shadings. But Lorca's poems are, most of all, admired for their beauty... -
Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain / Giovanni’s Room / Another Country / Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
Rated: 4.40 of 5 stars · 10 ratings“The civil rights struggle,” said The New York Times Book Review, “found eloquent expression in [Baldwin’s] novels. His historical importance is indisputable.” Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence... -
Collected Short Stories: Volume 2 by W. Somerset Maugham
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis final classic collection reveals Somerset Maugham's unique talent for exposing and exploring the bitter realities of human relationships in tales of love, infidelity, passion and prejudice. The stories range from "The Lotus Eater" where a man envisions a life of bliss in the Mediterranean, to the astringent tales of "The Outstation" and "The Back of Beyond" in Malaya and South East Asia...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies classics fiction historical -
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:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult book drama fiction -
Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsSome bodies won't stay buried.Some stories need to be told. When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family's property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the present and the past... -
Duet for Three Hands by Tess Thompson
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsA story of forbidden love, lost dreams, and family turmoil. The first book in a new historical series from bestselling author Tess Thompson, Duet for Three Hands is equal parts epic love story, sweeping family saga, and portrait of days gone by. Set against the backdrop of the American South between 1928 and 1934, four voices blend to tell a tale of prejudice, fear, and love...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century adult book drama female-author -
The Garden of the Departed Cats by Bilge Karasu
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsIn an ancient Mediterranean city, a tradition is maintained: every ten years an archaic game of human chess is staged, the players (visitors versus locals) bearing weapons. This archaic game, the central event of The Garden of the Departed Cats, may prove as fatal as the deadly attraction our narrator feels for the local man who is the Vizier, or Captain, of the home team...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction 20th-century adult book fiction historical -
The Traveller's Daughter by Michelle Vernal
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsROSA’S PAST IS HER PANDORA’S BOX, AND THE LID IS ABOUT TO BE LIFTED … ‘If you lie down with dogs you’ll rise with fleas’ – Irish Proverb Rosa Sorenson’s conversation was often peppered with sayings from her homeland. It was these conversational clangers that gave her daughter Kitty the only clue as to a childhood her mother refused to speak of...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book family female-mc fiction -
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The Lies They Told by Ellen Marie Wiseman
Rated: 4.39 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn rural 1930s Virginia, a young immigrant mother fights for her dignity and those she loves against America’s rising eugenics movement – when widespread support for policies of prejudice drove imprisonment and forced sterilizations based on class, race, disability, education, and country of origin – in this tragic and uplifting novel of social injustice, survival, and hope for readers of Susan... -
People of the Mist by Kathleen O'Neal Gear, W. Michael Gear
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsWith People of the Mist, bestselling authors W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear take us to the Chesapeake Bay of six hundred years ago, when the unprovoked and brutal murder of a young woman on the eve of her wedding threatens to turn the entire Algonquin Nation against itself in a brutal war that could destroy them as a people...Categorized as:
historical-fiction indigenous-mc poc-mc 20th-century adult ancient-civilization book female-author -
Dalva by Jim Harrison
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFrom her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures...Categorized as:
historical-fiction indigenous-mc literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century adult book classics -
The Inhabited Woman by Gioconda Belli, Margaret Randall
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsLavinia is The Inhabited Woman: accomplished, independent, and fiercely modern. She is sheltered and self-involved, until the spirit of an Indian woman warrior enters her being, then she dares to join a revolutionary movement against a violent dictator and—through the power of love—finds the courage to act...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century action-adventure adult book female-author -
Missing Soluch by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsPerhaps the most important work in modern Iranian literature, this starkly beautiful novel examines the trials of an impoverished woman and her children living in a remote village in Iran, after the unexplained disappearance of her husband, Soluch.Lyrical yet unsparing, the novel examines her life as she contends with the political corruption, authoritarianism, and poverty of the village...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book fiction historical -
Two Thousand Seasons by Ayi Kwei Armah
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsTrans Atlantic and African slave trades are the subject of Armah's Two Thousand Seasons (1973) in which a pluralized communal voice speaks through the history of Africa, its wet and dry seasons, from a period of one thousand years. Arab and European oppressors are portrayed as "predators," "destroyers," and "zombies"...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century action-adventure adult book colonization -
Fathers and Crows by William T. Vollmann
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsWith the same panoramic vision and mythic sensibility he brought to The Ice-Shirt, William T. Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Indians and Europeans in the New World...Categorized as:
historical-fiction indigenous-mc literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century adult book early-modern -
The Cake Tree in the Ruins by Akiyuki Nosaka
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsIntensely moving stories that tell of the absurd violence of war, and tenderly depict the animals and children caught in its vortex.In 1945, Akiyuki Nosaka watched the Allied firebombing of Kobe kill his adoptive parents, and then witnessed his sister starving to death...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century adult anthologies asian-mc fiction -
This Is How It Begins by Joan Dempsey
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratings“In a time when religious liberty is on trial, This Is How It Begins is an extraordinarily pertinent novel dripping in suspense and powerful scenes of political discourse . . . a must read . . .” —Foreword (starred review)A woman bearing a thorny secret. A man fighting for religious freedom. A battle neither saw coming. Massachusetts, 2009. Ludka Zeilonka is relishing her emeritus status... -
An Instant in the Wind by André P. Brink
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThe year is 1749, when the Boers ruled South Africa. And so it has come to his Baas's final command to his Hottentot slave Adam, to flog his mother, because she refuses to prune the master's vineyard in order to attend her own beloved mother's funeral. And when he refuses to do so, and his Baas smashes his face with a piece of wood, Adam turns on him, and beats him almost to death...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century action-adventure adult book colonization -
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Mother's Boy by Patrick Gale
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratings'Tender, evocative' TLS'Richly engaging' SpectatorA Radio 4 Serial Fiction Book of the Week'A characteristically tender novel about a young man growing up in the shadow of one war and the whispers of the next' Observer'A wonderful novel about relationships, particularly between a mother and son... -
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:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book fiction historical fantasy -
Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsSet in the American Deep South, each of the powerful novellas collected here concerns an aspect of the lives of black people in the postslavery era, exploring their resistance to white racism and oppression. Published in 1938, this was the first book from Wright, who would continue on to worldwide fame as the author of the novels Native Son and Black Boy... -
A World for Julius by Alfredo Bryce Echenique
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsJulius was born in a mansion on Salaverry Avenue, directly across from the old San Felipe Hippodrome. Life-size Disney characters and cowboy movie heroes romp across the walls of his nursery. Out in the carriage house, his great-grandfather’s ornate, moldering carriage takes him on imaginary adventures...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century adult book classics coming-of-age -
The Women of the Copper Country by Mary Doria Russell
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements had seen enough of the world to know that it was unfair. She’s spent her whole life in the copper-mining town of Calumet, Michigan where men risk their lives for meager salaries—and had barely enough to put food on the table and clothes on their backs... -
People of the Sea by W. Michael Gear, Kathleen O'Neal Gear
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA spellbinding tale of life and love, death and adventure, in North America eleven thousand years ago, when mammoths roamed the continent. Award-winning archaeologists Michael and Kathleen Gear, using the best archaeological information, have created a stunning vision of our pre-history, and of the men and women who lived in this rapidly changing world... -
News from the Empire by Fernando del Paso
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsOne of the acknowledged masterpieces of Mexican literature, Fernando del Paso's News from the Empire is a powerful and encyclopedic novel of the tragic lives of Maximilian and his wife, Carlota, the short-lived Emperor and Empress of Mexico...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction fiction historical 20th-century politics book adult -
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:
historical-fiction indigenous-mc literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century adult book coming-of-age -
Letters from Thailand by Botan
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsWhen the original Thai version of Letters from Thailand appeared in Bangkok in 1969, it was promptly awarded the SEATO Prize for Thai Literature. This new English translation reveals it as one of Thailand's most entertaining and enduring modern novels, and one of the few portrayals of the immigrant Chinese experience in urban Thailand...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book female-author fiction historical -
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:
historical-fiction indigenous-mc literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century adult anthologies classics -
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Buddies by Ethan Mordden
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratings"What unites us, all of us, surely is brotherhood, a sense that our friendships are historic, designed to hold Stonewall together," muses on character in Ethan Mordden's Buddies. This need for friendship, for nonerotic affection, for buddies, shines forth as an American obsession from Moby-Dick through Of Mice and Men to The Sting... -
Island of Shattered Dreams by Chantal T. Spitz
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsFinally in English, Island of Shattered Dreams is the first ever novel by an indigenous Tahitian writer. In a lyrical and immensely moving style, this book combines a family saga and a doomed love story, set against the background of French Polynesia in the period leading up to the first nuclear tests...Categorized as:
historical-fiction indigenous-mc poc-mc fiction 20th-century journey colonization 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... -
I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots by Susan Straight
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsBeginning in the late 1950s, this novel tells the story of Marietta Cook, a tall girl growing up in Pine Gardens, a Gullah-speaking village in South Carolina. When Marietta's mother dies, she heads to Charleston in search of her uncle - only to find a lover and return pregnant with twins two years later... -
Fires of Paradise by Brenda Joyce
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThe Scorching Saga of the Braggs Continues . . . Heiress to the magnificent Bragg empire, lovely, headstrong socialite Lucy Bragg lives a life that flies in the face of convention. Dark and rugged half-breed Shozkay Savage lives an outlaw's life on the edge. These two people inhabit different worlds--hers, opulent and privileged; his, dangerous and wild... -
Passage West by Rishi Reddi
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA Recommended Book from BookRiot, Bustle, The Millions and Teen Vogue A Los Angeles Times BEST CALIFORNIA BOOK of 2020 * A New England Independent Booksellers' 2020 NEW ENGLAND BOOK AWARD FINALISTA sweeping, vibrant first novel following a family of Indian sharecroppers at the onset of World War I, revealing a little-known part of California history1914: Ram Singh arrives in the Imperial Valley...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc fiction historical ww1 poc-author female-author -
The Collected Stories by Colette
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe Collected Stories of Colette beings together in one volume for the first time in any language the comprehensive collection of short stories by the novelist known worldwide as Colette, and now acknowledged, with Proust, as the most original French narrative writer of the first half of our century...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies classics female-author -
Miracle of the Rose by Jean Genet
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis is the third of Genet's prose works to be published in the United States, following Our Lady of the Flowers (1963) and The Thief's Journal (1964). It is, however, Genet's second novel, having been written in La Santé and Tourelles prisons in 1943, directly after Our Lady of the Flowers...Categorized as:
historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies classics fiction -
The Sleeping Dictionary by Sujata Massey
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsFrom an award-winning novelist, a stunning portrait of late Raj India—a sweeping saga and a love story set against a background of huge political and cultural upheaval.YOU ASK FOR MY NAME, THE REAL ONE, AND I CANNOT TELL. IT IS NOT FOR LACK OF EFFORT. In 1930, a great ocean wave blots out a Bengali village, leaving only one survivor, a young girl...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century adult audiobook book coming-of-age -
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All We Left Behind by Danielle R. Graham
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsFor fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz‘Heart-wrenching. Emotional. A powerful story of wartime love and devotion’ Glynis Peters, author of The Secret OrphanA powerful and incredibly moving historical novel inspired by an untold story of the Second World War.Vancouver 1941As the war rages around the world, Hitler’s fury is yet to be felt on the peaceful shores of Mayne Island...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century book family fiction historical -
Whisper of the Moon Moth by Lindsay Jayne Ashford
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFrom the author of The Color of Secrets and The Woman on the Orient Express comes a poignant novel inspired by the Hollywood legend—and the secrets of—actress Merle Oberon, famous for playing Cathy to Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff in the film Wuthering Heights. For nineteen-year-old Estelle Thompson, going to the cinema is more than a way to pass the time…it’s a way out...Categorized as:
historical-fiction poc-mc literary-fiction romance historical fiction audiobook mystery -
The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie Jr.
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA classic portrait of America's vast frontier that inspired the Western genre in fiction.Originally published more than fifty years ago, The Big Sky is the first of A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s epic adventure novels set in the American West. Here he introduces Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers: traveling the Missouri River from St... -
Zayni Barakat by Gamal al-Ghitani, جمال الغيطاني
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratings"In the course of my long travels I have never seen a city so devastated. After a long time I ventured out into the streets. Death, cold and heavy, hung in the air. Walls have no value here, doors have been eliminated. No one is certain that they will see another day...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book fiction historical politics -
Deadwood by Pete Dexter
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsDEADWOOD, DAKOTA TERRITORIES, 1876: Legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickcock and his friend Charlie Utter have come to the Black Hills town of Deadwood fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace. Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards... -
The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel from the 1940s by the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy. Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighborhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit...
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