Books like 'Looking for Cassandra Jane'
Readers who enjoyed Looking for Cassandra Jane by Melody Carlson also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović
Rated: 4.55 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsDeath and the Dervish is an acclaimed novel by Bosnian writer Mesa Selimovic. It recounts the story of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish residing in an Islamic monastery in Sarajevo in the eighteenth century during the Ottoman Turk hegemony over the Balkans. When his brother is arrested, he must descend into the Kafkaesque world of the Ottoman authorities in his search to discover what happened to him...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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Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, Edwin O. Reischauer
Rated: 4.48 of 5 stars · 37 ratingsThe classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsman. Musashi is a novel in the best tradition of Japanese story telling. It is a living story, subtle and imaginative, teeming with memorable characters, many of them historical...Categorized as:
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The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura
Rated: 4.45 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsA gripping novel about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940In The Man Who Loved Dogs, Leonardo Padura brings a noir sensibility to one of the most fascinating and complex political narratives of the past hundred years: the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader...Categorized as:
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The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
Rated: 4.41 of 5 stars · 42 ratings"Nothing quite like this has ever been published before," proclaimed The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance...Categorized as:
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Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 83 ratingsNew footnotes have been added, based on discoveries by the leading Soviet Dostoevsky scholar, Sergei Belov. Backgrounds and Sources, highly praised in the Second Edition, remains unaltered. Included are a detailed map of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, selections from Dostoevsky's notebooks and letters, and a crucial passage from an early draft of his novel...Categorized as:
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The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 66 ratingsAlternative cover for ISBN: 978-0-00-746123-3C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce is a classic Christian allegorical tale about a bus ride from hell to heaven. An extraordinary meditation upon good and evil, grace and judgment, Lewis’s revolutionary idea in the The Great Divorce is that the gates of Hell are locked from the inside...Categorized as:
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The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
Rated: 4.26 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsIn their remote mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. For the Akha people, ensconced in ritual and routine, life goes on as it has for generations—until a stranger appears at the village gate in a jeep, the first automobile any of the villagers has ever seen...Categorized as:
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Death Is My Trade by Robert Merle
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe story begins in 1913, when Rudolf Lang is 13 years old. His parents give him a harsh catholic education, which is very badly accepted by Rudolf. His unstable father, with whom the young Lang has an awkward relationship, wants Rudolf to become priest. At the age of fifteen, Lang starts his military career which eventually leads him to the post of commandant of Auschwitz in 1943...Categorized as:
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Never Kiss Goodbye by Laura Haley-McNeil
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA cowboy haunted by his past. A woman stalked by a deadly secret.Pregnant and on the run, Lily Harkin will do anything to protect her unborn child, but no one can know her secret – a secret so horrific it could destroy her and anyone she meets.Bronc rider Josh Merrick can’t forget the mistake that cost a woman her life... -
Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsChess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological... -
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsA big, powerful saga of men in combat, written over the course of thirty-five years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran.Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line...Categorized as:
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The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
Rated: 4.23 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsUpon its original publication in 1951, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was immediately embraced as one of the first serious works of fiction to help readers grapple with the human consequences of World War II...Categorized as:
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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... -
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Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsNarcissus and Goldmund tells the story of two medieval men whose characters are diametrically opposite: Narcissus, an ascetic monk firm in his religious commitment, and Goldmund, a romantic youth hungry for knowledge and worldly experience. First published in 1930, Hesse's novel remains a moving and pointed exploration of the conflict between the life of the spirit and the life of the flesh...Categorized as:
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Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThis novel considers the effects of Soviet rule on a single individual. The central character in the story tries to follow her calling as a doctor. But then the state steps in. She is deprived first of her professional future, then of her identity and finally of her relationship with her daughter. Banished to a village in the Latvian countryside, her sense of isolation increases...Categorized as:
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Sophie's Choice by William Styron
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsIn this extraordinary novel, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner, takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb. There, he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual; and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Stingo is drawn into the heart of their passionate and destructive relationship as witness, confidant and supplicant... -
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 65 ratingsReturning to Russia from a sanitarium in Switzerland, the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin finds himself enmeshed in a tangle of love, torn between two women—the notorious kept woman Nastasya and the pure Aglaia—both involved, in turn, with the corrupt, money-hungry Ganya. In the end, Myshkin’s honesty, goodness, and integrity are shown to be unequal to the moral emptiness of those around him...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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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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The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 42 ratingsAn alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here.The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England...Categorized as:
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Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz, Naguib Mahfouz
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSugar Street is the third and concluding volume of the celebrated Cairo Trilogy, which brings the story of Al-Sayid Ahmad and his family up to the middle of the twentieth century.Aging and ill, the family patriarch surveys the world from his housewares's latticed balcony, as his long-suffering wife once did...Categorized as:
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The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsA mesmerizing tale of love-from the author of The Bastard of Istanbul Elif Shafak, the most widely read female writer in Turkey, has earned a growing fan base all over the world with her bestselling The Bastard of Istanbul...Categorized as:
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The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsElla Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara...Categorized as:
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War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 45 ratingsIn Russia's struggle with Napoleon, Tolstoy saw a tragedy that involved all mankind. Greater than a historical chronicle, War and Peace is an affirmation of life itself, `a complete picture', as a contemporary reviewer put it, `of everything in which people find their happiness and greatness, their grief and humiliation'... -
The Color of Our Sky by Amita Trasi
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsIn the spirit of Khaled Hosseini, Nadia Hashimi and Shilpi Somaya Gowda comes this powerful debut from a talented new voice—a sweeping, emotional journey of two childhood friends in Mumbai, India, whose lives converge only to change forever one fateful night...Categorized as:
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Venom by Colin Falconer
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsFrom Saigon to Paris, from Bangkok to the Ganges, this thriller is the story of Michel Christian. Abandoned on the streets of Saigon when he is only a child, he grows up with a fatal attraction for women and an insatiable desire for revenge... -
Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz, Naguib Mahfouz
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThis is a sweeping and evocative portrait of both a family and a country struggling to move toward independence in a society that has resisted change for centuries. Set against the backdrop of Britain's occupation of Egypt immediately after World War I, Palace Walk introduces us to the Al Jawad family...Categorized as:
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The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsHailed as a masterpiece by critics worldwide, The Last Temptation of Christ is a monumental reinterpretation of the Gospels that brilliantly fleshes out Christ’s Passion. This literary rendering of the life of Jesus Christ has courted controversy since its publication by depicting a Christ far more human than the one seen in the Bible...Categorized as:
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Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 53 ratingsIn this timeless tale of two mortal princesses- one beautiful and one unattractive- C.S. Lewis reworks the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche into an enduring piece of contemporary fiction. This is the story of Orual, Psyche's embittered and ugly older sister, who posessively and harmfully loves Psyche... -
The Good Doctor of Warsaw by Elisabeth Gifford
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSet in the ghettos of wartime Warsaw, this is a sweeping, poignant and heartbreaking tale, based on the true story of one of World War II's quiet heroes - Dr Janusz Korczak.'You do not leave a sick child alone to face the dark and you do not leave a child at a time like this.'Deeply in love and about to marry, students Misha and Sophia flee a Warsaw under Nazi occupation for a chance at freedom...Categorized as:
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The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsHailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality...Categorized as:
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A Girl Is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn her twelfth year, Kirabo, a young Ugandan girl, confronts a piercing question that has haunted her childhood: who is my mother? Kirabo has been raised by women in the small village of Nattetta—her grandmother, her best friend, and her many aunts, but the absence of her mother follows her like a shadow... -
The Unwilling by John Hart
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSet in the South at the height of the Vietnam War, The Unwilling combines crime, suspense and searing glimpses into the human mind and soul in New York Times bestselling author John Hart's singular style. Gibby's older brothers have already been to war. One died there. The other came back misunderstood and hard, a decorated killer now freshly released from a three-year stint in prison... -
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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:
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A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, Gary Shteyngart
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsIn its adventurous happenings–its abductions, duels, and sexual intrigues–A Hero of Our Time looks backward to the tales of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, so beloved by Russian society in the 1820s and ’30s...Categorized as:
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The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsBased on the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is W. Somerset Maugham's ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius. Charles Strickland is a staid banker, a man of wealth and privilege. He is also a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art...Categorized as:
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Only Time Will Tell by Jeffrey Archer
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 39 ratingsFrom the internationally bestselling author of Kane and Abel and A Prisoner of Birth comes Only Time Will Tell, the first in an ambitious new series that tells the story of one family across generations, across oceans, from heartbreak to triumph. The epic tale of Harry Clifton’s life begins in 1920, with the words “I was told that my father was killed in the war...Categorized as:
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The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 44 ratingsThis depicts the men of Alpha Company. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home... -
The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsThe internationally renowned novel about the life and death of Jesus Christ.Hailed as a masterpiece by critics worldwide, The Last Temptation of Christ is a monumental reinterpretation of the Gospels that brilliantly fleshes out Christ’s Passion...Categorized as:
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Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 85 ratingsSiddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse is a deceptively simple, intense, and lyrical allegorical tale of a man in ancient India striving for enlightenment at the time of Buddha. Siddhartha is a man whose life journey runs in parallel and who may or may not be another version of Buddha himself...Categorized as:
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A Rose for Emily and Other Stories by William Faulkner, Washington Irving
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsEmily is a member of a family in the antebellum Southern aristocracy; after the Civil War, the family has fallen on hard times... -
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsThe classic novel, international sensation, and inspiration for the film starring Anthony Quinn explores the struggle between the aesthetic and the rational, the inner life and the life of the mind.The classic novel Zorba the Greek is the story of two men, their incredible friendship, and the importance of living life to the fullest...Categorized as:
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Phenomena: The Lost and Forgotten Children by Susan Tarr
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsTHIS IS AN EXTRA LARGE PRINT COPY PAPERBACK - SHOULD YOU REQUIRE NORMAL SIZE PLEASE SEARCH OTHER SIZE OPTION. As a child I knew Malcolm, who was then a young man, since Dad often invited him home for meals. He was one of the 'lost children' forgotten or abandoned by their families... -
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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:
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Dina's Book by Herbjørg Wassmo
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOn the scale of Gone with the Wind and War and Peace, this grand, sweeping epic will enthrall readers just as Dina bewitches everyone she meets.Set in Norway in the mid-nineteenth century, Dina's Book presents an extraordinary heroine. Beautiful, eccentric, and tempestuous, Dina carries a terrible burden: at the age of five she accidentally causes her mother's death...Categorized as:
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The Charioteer by Mary Renault
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAfter enduring an injury at Dunkirk during World War II, Laurie Odell is sent to a rural veterans’ hospital in England to convalesce. There he befriends the young, bright Andrew, a conscientious objector serving as an orderly. As they find solace and companionship together in the idyllic surroundings of the hospital, their friendship blooms into a discreet, chaste romance...Categorized as:
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The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon, as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort...Categorized as:
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Fatelessness by Imre Kertész
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsAt the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew...Categorized as:
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Silence by Shūsaku Endō
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 26 ratings"In my opinion one of the finest novels of our time." - Graham GreeneShusaku Endo is Japan's foremost novelist, and Silence is generally regarded to be his masterpiece. In a perfect fusion of treatment and theme, this powerful novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest in Japan at the height of the fearful persecution of the small Christian community...Categorized as:
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