Books like 'The Big Rock Candy Mountain'
Readers who enjoyed The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical 20th century north-america usa north-dakota historical-fiction classics literary-fiction western family
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The Fortress by Meša Selimović
Rated: 4.67 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA novel on 18th century Sarajevo under Ottoman rule, featuring a soldier returned from the wars. A Muslim, he marries a Christian girl who supports him while he dabbles in politics, eventually leading a raid to rescue a friend from jail... -
![Martin Eden by Jack London]()
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... -
![Pather Panchali: Song of the Road by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay]()
Pather Panchali: Song of the Road by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay
Rated: 4.56 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsPather Panchali deals with the life of the Roy family, consisting of Harihar, Sarbajaya, Apu and Durga, both in their ancestral village Nishchindipur in rural Bengal and later when they move to Varanasi in search of a better life, as well as the anguish and loss they face during their travels...Categorized as:
bildungsroman classics coming-of-age drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century -
![Żelazny kaganek by Димитър Талев]()
Żelazny kaganek by Димитър Талев
Rated: 4.37 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsPowieść przedstawia losy macedońskiego rodu Głauszewów. Akcja powieści rozpoczyna się w połowie lat 30. XIX w. Stojan Głauszew, zabiwszy psa, który należał do lokalnego wielmoży tureckiego, w obawie przed jego gniewem decyduje się na ucieczkę ze wsi. Osiada w pobliskim mieście Prespa, gdzie poznaje Sułtanę, kobietę zaradną, silną i energiczną...Categorized as:
classics drama historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book -
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![Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner]()
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Rated: 4.24 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsStegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of personal, historical, and geographic discovery Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit...Categorized as:
classics drama family historical-fiction industrial-era literary-fiction western 20th-century -
![Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder]()
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 73 ratingsSet in the 1870's, these American classics present an authentic description of life in the uncharted West, and offer an intimate perspective on growing up during those trying times... -
![Kinfolk by Pearl S. Buck]()
Kinfolk by Pearl S. Buck
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsKinfolk is the story of a Chinese family. Dr. Liang moves to America in search of a better life, but his children long to return to China. Each responds to their new life in China differently, providing rich insight into the struggles between Eastern and Western culture, and the differences between generations...Categorized as:
historical-fiction classics family literary-fiction fiction historical 20th-century politics -
![Body and Soul by Frank Conroy]()
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...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic 20th-century -
![Run with the Horsemen by Ferrol Sams]()
Run with the Horsemen by Ferrol Sams
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsPorter Osborne Jr. is a precocious, sensitive, and rambunctious boy trying to make it through adolescence during the depression years. On a red-clay farm in Georgia he learns all there is to know about cotton chopping, hog killing, watermelon thumping, and mule handling. School provides a quick course in practical joking, schoolboy crushes, athletic glory, and clandestine sex...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age family historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century animals anthologies -
![To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee]()
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 104 ratingsTo Kill A Mockingbird The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic...Categorized as:
bildungsroman classics coming-of-age drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction north-america -
![All the Forgivenesses by Elizabeth Hardinger]()
All the Forgivenesses by Elizabeth Hardinger
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSet in Appalachia and the Midwest at the turn of the twentieth century, this exquisite debut novel paints an intimately rendered portrait of one resilient farm family's challenges and hard-won triumphs--helmed by an unforgettable heroine. Growing up on their hardscrabble farm in rural Kentucky, fifteen-year-old Albertina "Bertie" Winslow has learned a lot from her mama, Polly...Categorized as:
coming-of-age family historical-fiction literary-fiction north-america usa 20th-century audiobook -
![Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder]()
Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 39 ratingsLaura is almost fifteen. The long winter is over. With spring comes socials, dances, and "Literaries." There is also work to be done. Laura spends many hours each day sewing shirts to help send Mary to a college for the blind. But, in the evenings, Laura makes time for a new caller, Almazo Wilder...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age family historical-fiction industrial-era literary-fiction realistic western -
![A River Runs Through it and Other Stories by Norman Maclean, Annie Proulx]()
A River Runs Through it and Other Stories by Norman Maclean, Annie Proulx
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsJust as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age drama family historical-fiction industrial-era literary-fiction realistic -
![Hatter's Castle by A.J. Cronin]()
Hatter's Castle by A.J. Cronin
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsHatter's Castle (1931) is the first novel of author A. J. Cronin. The story is set in 1879, in the fictional town of Levenford, on the Firth of Clyde. The plot revolves around many characters and has many subplots, all of which relate to the life of the hatter, James Brodie, whose narcissism and cruelty gradually destroy his family and life...Categorized as:
classics drama family historical-fiction industrial-era literary-fiction 20th-century adult -
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![Sista brevet till Sverige by Vilhelm Moberg]()
Sista brevet till Sverige by Vilhelm Moberg
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsBook Four portrays the Nilsson family during the turmoil of living through the era of the Civil War and Dakota Conflict and their prospering in the midst of Minnesota's growing Swedish community of the 1860s-90s...Categorized as:
classics family historical-fiction literary-fiction north-america usa 20th-century adult -
![The City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre, Elina Klersy Imberciadori]()
The City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre, Elina Klersy Imberciadori
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsMade into a movie starring Patrick Swayze, this is the inspiring story of an American doctor who experienced a spiritual rebirth in an impoverished section of Calcutta...Categorized as:
classics drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction poverty social-commentary 20th-century -
![Sackett by Louis L'Amour]()
Sackett by Louis L'Amour
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA drifter by circumstance, William Tell Sackett hungered for a place he couldn’t name but knew he had to find. South of the Tetons, through a keyhole pass, he found it: a lonely yet beautiful valley—with a fortune in gold. Then he found an even greater treasure: Ange Kerry, a courageous and resourceful woman...Categorized as:
classics drama family historical-fiction industrial-era literary-fiction western 20th-century -
![The Citadel by A.J. Cronin]()
The Citadel by A.J. Cronin
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Citadel follows the life of Andrew Manson, a young and idealistic Scottish doctor, as he navigates the challenges of practicing medicine across interwar Wales and England. Based on A.J. Cronin’s own experiences as a physician, this book boldly confronts traditional medical ethics, and has been noted as one of the inspirations for the formation of the National Health Service...Categorized as:
classics drama historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic 20th-century adult audiobook -
![The Plays of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov]()
The Plays of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsEnglish translations of Chekhov's classic plays by a Russian-language scholar who is also a veteran Chekhovian actor... -
![The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage]()
The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFirst published in 1967, Thomas Savage's western novel about two brothers now includes an afterword by Annie Proulx.Phil and George are brothers, more than partners, joint owners of the biggest ranch in their Montana valley. Phil is the bright one, George the plodder. Phil is tall and angular; George is stocky and silent...Categorized as:
classics drama family historical-fiction industrial-era literary-fiction north-america usa -
![Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann]()
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsBuddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, has become a classic of modern literature.It is the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family’s bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate...Categorized as:
bildungsroman classics drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult -
![The Lies They Told by Ellen Marie Wiseman]()
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... -
![Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth by Thomas Wolfe]()
Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth by Thomas Wolfe
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe sequel to Thomas Wolfe's remarkable first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River is one of the great classics of American literature. The book chronicles the maturing of Wolfe's autobiographical character, Eugene Gant, in his desperate search for fulfillment, making his way from small-town North Carolina to the wider world of Harvard University, New York City, and Europe... -
![The Fields by Conrad Richter]()
The Fields by Conrad Richter
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsConrad Richter's trilogy of novels The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950) trace the transformation of Ohio from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one character. The Fields continues the saga of the Luckett family that began in The Trees... -
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![Madame by Antoni Libera]()
Madame by Antoni Libera
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe comic "sentimental education" of a schoolboy who falls in love with his French teacher. Madame is an unexpected gem: a novel about Poland during the grim years of Soviet-controlled mediocrity, which nonetheless sparkles with light and warmth...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book -
![Fortune's Daughters by Consuelo Saah Baehr, Nicol Zanzarella]()
Fortune's Daughters by Consuelo Saah Baehr, Nicol Zanzarella
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsFaith Simpson is born at the dawn of the twentieth century into a dynasty that gives her everything she will ever need—except her parents’ love and attention. Often misunderstood, she trusts few as she grows up on the family’s manicured Long Island estate. Just twenty-nine miles away, on lower Manhattan’s dirty, crowded streets, Hope Lee’s world is one of poverty and desperation...Categorized as:
drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction poverty 20th-century adult audiobook -
![Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple]()
Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsWritten in 1953, the last book by novelist Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance is a story about the destruction of a marriage. Ellen is “that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife” who loves her life in the English countryside. She tends her garden, dotes on her children, and, when she remembers, visits her cantankerous mother-in-law...Categorized as:
classics family historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic 20th-century adult book -
![Dalva by Jim Harrison]()
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:
classics family historical-fiction industrial-era literary-fiction western 20th-century adult -
![Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes]()
Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn a poor town in Kansas, an African American family struggles. At its centre sits Sandy Rodgers - a young boy attempting to find purpose amid the chaos, meagreness and music of his surroundings...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction north-america poverty -
![Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig]()
Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe central volume in Ivan Doig's acclaimed Montana trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is an authentic saga of the American experience at the turn of this century and a passionate, portrayal of the immigrants who dared to try new lives in the imposing Rocky Mountains... -
![The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg]()
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:
classics drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult -
![A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean]()
A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsFrom its first magnificent sentence, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing," to the last, "I am haunted by waters," "A River Runs Through It" is an American classic...Categorized as:
classics drama family historical-fiction industrial-era literary-fiction realistic western -
![The Immigrants by Howard Fast]()
The Immigrants by Howard Fast
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsIn a passionate, multigenerational novel set against the backdrop of San Francisco, the son of an Italian fisherman struggles from the rubble of the great earthquake to build a shipping empire. Reprint... -
![The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter]()
The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe Education of Little Tree tells of a boy orphaned very young, who is adopted by his Cherokee grandmother and half-Cherokee grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee during the Great Depression... -
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![Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy]()
Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThe concluding volume of the Border trilogy. In this magnificent new novel, the National Book Award-winning author of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing fashions a darkly beautiful elegy for the American frontier. It is 1952 and John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands in New Mexico, not far from the proving grounds of Alamogordo and the cities of El Paso and Juarez... -
![Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco]()
Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThis landmark novella—one of the central texts of Mexican literature, is eerily relevant to our current dark times—offers a child’s-eye view of a society beset by dictators, disease, and natural disasters, set in “the year of polio, foot-and-mouth disease, floods...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction drama coming-of-age literary-fiction romance fiction 20th-century -
![High Tide at Noon by Elisabeth Ogilvie]()
High Tide at Noon by Elisabeth Ogilvie
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThe struggles, hardship, and joy of one woman's life on a Maine island are brought to life in this haunting and enduringly popular trilogy, the first three books of the Bennett's Island series... -
![Fairfield Hall by Margaret Dickinson]()
Fairfield Hall by Margaret Dickinson
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsRuthlessly ambitious Ambrose Constantine is determined that his daughter, Annabel, shall marry into the nobility. A fish merchant and self-made man, he has only his wealth to buy his way into society. When Annabel’s secret meetings with Gilbert, a young man employed at her father’s offices, stop suddenly, she learns that he has mysteriously disappeared... -
![The Kudzu Queen by Mimi Herman]()
The Kudzu Queen by Mimi Herman
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 7 ratings“Funny, sad, and tender… Mimi Herman has written a novel that possesses a true and hard won understanding of the South.” —David Sedaris, author of Happy-Go-Lucky Fifteen-year-old Mattie Lee Watson dreams of men, not boys. So when James T...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic family coming-of-age fiction historical audiobook -
![Collected Stories by Frank O'Connor]()
Collected Stories by Frank O'Connor
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe definitive collection of short stories by a master of the form and one of Ireland's most celebrated authorsThis indispensable volume contains the best of Frank O’Connor's short fiction. From “Guests of the Nation” to “The Mad Lomasneys” to “First Confession” to “My Oedipus Complex,” these tales of Ireland have touched generations of readers the world over and placed O'Connor alongside W. B...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic 20th-century adult anthologies fiction -
![Yesteryear by Dorothy Garlock]()
Yesteryear by Dorothy Garlock
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsAddie Hyde spent four years waiting to see if the high-spirited husband she had married in haste would come back after the South lost the war. Yet Kirby Hyde was never among the Confederates in rags and tatters straggling through Arkansas. Addie always had spunk, but now she also had a young son, two foster children she cherished, and trouble...Categorized as:
family historical-fiction industrial-era western 20th-century book fiction historical -
![The Valley Of Decision by Marcia Davenport]()
The Valley Of Decision by Marcia Davenport
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsOn the eve of World War II writer Marcia Davenport, best known for her biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, spent several years in Pittsburgh, her imagination caught by the drama of American industry. In 1942, Charles Scribner’s sons published her Pittsburgh novel, The Valley of Decision... -
![The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer]()
The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe vanished way of life of Eastern European Jews in the early part of the twentieth century is the subject of this extraordinary novel. All the strata of this complex society were populated by powerfully individual personalities, and the whole community pulsated with life and vitality... -
![Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether, Nellie Y. McKay]()
Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether, Nellie Y. McKay
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis modern classic is “a tough, tender, bitter novel of a black girl struggling towards womanhood” in 1930s Harlem—with a foreword by James Baldwin ( Publishers Weekly ). Depression-era Harlem is home for twelve-year-old Francie Coffin and her family, and it’s both a place of refuge and the source of untold dangers for her and her poor, working class family... -
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![This Calder Range by Janet Dailey]()
This Calder Range by Janet Dailey
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsChase Benteen Calder was bound to wrest a fortune from Montana land, where the whisper of riches swept across a sea of buffalo grass. With Lorna at his side, a woman who took the tough ways of the land as her destiny, he would breathe life into his dream. Through the treacherous Texas prairie, the perils of Indian country, and a bustling Dodge City, they forged their way to Montana...Categorized as:
family historical-fiction industrial-era literary-fiction western 20th-century adult book -
![Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier]()
Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThis fine, somber novel, by the author of the widely acclaimed The Lost Steps, deals with the French Revolution, chiefly in the Caribbean...Categorized as:
bildungsroman classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book fiction -
![A World for Julius by Alfredo Bryce Echenique]()
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:
classics coming-of-age drama historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book -
![Climates by André Maurois]()
Climates by André Maurois
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsWritten in 1928 by French biographer and novelist Andre Maurois, Climates became a best seller in France and all over Europe. The first 100,000 copies printed of its Russian translation sold out the day they appeared in Moscow bookstores... -
![The Essential Plays by Anton Chekhov]()
The Essential Plays by Anton Chekhov
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsBecause Chekhov’s plays convey the universally recognizable, sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, frustrations of decent people trying to make sense of their lives, they remain as fresh and vigorous as when they were written a century ago... -
![The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford]()
The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsMitford's most famous novels, "The Pursuit of Love" and "Love in a Cold Climate," satirize British aristocracy in the '20s and '30s through the amorous adventures of the Radletts, an exuberantly unconventional family closely modeled on Mitford's own...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic social-commentary
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