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Recommendations based on Barney's Versionby Mordecai Richler
* statistically, based on millions of data-points provided by fellow humans
Dubliners
by James Joyce
Collection of stories about everyday life in Dublin, exploring the Irish psyche.
This work of art reflects life in Ireland at the turn of the last century, and by rejecting euphemism, reveals to the Irish their unromantic realities. Each of the 15 stories offers glimpses into the ... (Goodreads)
High Fidelity
by Nick Hornby
A man reflects on his past relationships while trying to understand the nature of love.
Rob Fleming is a 35-year-old man who owns a record shop in London called Championship Vinyl. His lawyer girlfriend, Laura, has just left him and now he's going through a crisis. At his record shop, ... (Wikipedia)
The Orenda
by Joseph Boyden
An exploration of the spiritual bonds between a small Huron tribe and their European invaders.
In the remote winter landscape a brutal massacre and the kidnapping of a young Iroquois girl violently re-ignites a deep rift between two tribes. The girl’s captor, Bird, is one of the Huron Nation’s ... (Goodreads)
No Great Mischief
by Alistair MacLeod
A saga tracing a family's journey through generations of displacement and displacement.
Alistair MacLeod musters all of the skill and grace that have won him an international following to give us No Great Mischief , the story of a fiercely loyal family and the tradition that drives it. ... (Goodreads)
Memoirs of Hadrian
by Marguerite Yourcenar
Reflections of the Roman Emperor Hadrian on his life, death and the nature of existence.
Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite ... (Barnes & Noble)
The Tartar Steppe
by Dino Buzzati
A young Italian soldier stationed at a remote fort in a desolate landscape, waiting for a mythical enemy.
The plot of the novel is Drogo's lifelong wait for a great war in which his life and the existence of the fort can prove its usefulness. The human need for giving life meaning and the soldier's ... (Wikipedia)
The Late Mattia Pascal
by Luigi Pirandello
A man's journey to reclaim his identity and freedom from a life of dullness and unhappiness.
The protagonist, Mattia Pascal, finds that his promising youth has, through misfortune or misdeed, dissolved into a dreary dead-end job and a miserable marriage. His inheritance and the woman he ... (Wikipedia)
A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
A gripping story of four unlikely lives intertwined in the tumult of India's caste system.
The book exposes the changes in Indian society from independence in 1947 to the Emergency called by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi . Mistry was generally critical of Indira Gandhi in the book. ... (Wikipedia)
Cathedral
by Raymond Carver
An unexpected encounter changes a man's outlook on life and his relationships.
Raymond Carver’s third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. These ... (Goodreads)
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
A tale of the consequences of a child's mistake, and how its effects ripple through generations.
Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old English girl with a talent for writing, lives at her family's country estate with her parents Jack and Emily Tallis. Her older sister Cecilia has recently graduated from ... (Wikipedia)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
Two cousins create a comic book superhero and find success and adventure in 1940s New York.
The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City , where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin, Sammy Klayman. With the help of his ... (Wikipedia)
Fall on Your Knees
by Ann-Marie MacDonald
A multi-generational saga of secrets, tragedy, and resilience in a family of sisters.
At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother’s piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live. Working as a piano tuner, he meets and ... (Wikipedia)
Fifteen Dogs
by André Alexis
A group of dogs gain human intelligence and experience the highs and lows of life.
Over drinks at Toronto's Wheat Sheaf Tavern, Hermes and Apollo get into a debate about whether animals could live happily if they had the same cognitive and speech abilities as humans. , They decide ... (Wikipedia)
The Baron in the Trees
by Italo Calvino
A young boy's journey of self-discovery as he lives among the trees, away from society.
A landmark new translation of a Calvino classic, a whimsical, spirited novel that imagines a life lived entirely on its own terms Cosimo di Rondó, a young Italian nobleman of the eighteenth century, ... (Barnes & Noble)
The Trial
by Franz Kafka
A man is arrested and put on trial for a crime that remains unclear throughout the novel.
On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Josef K., the chief cashier of a bank, is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents from an unspecified agency for an unspecified crime. Josef is not ... (Wikipedia)
The Burgess Boys
by Elizabeth Strout
Siblings reunite to help a small Maine town overcome its dark past.
Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly ... (Goodreads)
Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
An American couple's struggle to stay afloat in suburban conventions and expectations.
Set in 1955, the novel focuses on the hopes and aspirations of Frank and April Wheeler, self-assured Connecticut suburbanites who see themselves as very different from their neighbors in the ... (Wikipedia)
Fifth Business
by Robertson Davies
A story of redemption, exploring the power of the past and its effects on the present.
Dunstan Ramsay, an aging history teacher at Colborne College, becomes enraged by the patronizing tone of a newspaper article announcing his recent retirement, which appears to portray him as an ... (Wikipedia)
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
A Franciscan friar investigates a series of murders in a medieval monastery, uncovering a sinister plot.
In 1327, Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk , a Benedictine novice travelling under his protection, arrive at a Benedictine monastery in Northern Italy to attend a theological ... (Wikipedia)
419
by Will Ferguson
A Nigerian email scam spirals into a global web of deceit, revealing the dark side of the internet and human nature.
A startlingly original tale of heartbreak and suspense A car tumbles down a snowy ravine. Accident or suicide? On the other side of the world, a young woman walks out of a sandstorm in sub-Saharan ... (Goodreads)
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
by Mario Vargas Llosa
A young writer falls in love with his aunt's maid while working at a radio station with a chaotic scriptwriter.
Set in Peru during the 1950s, it is the story of an 18-year-old student who falls for a 32-year-old divorcee. The novel is based on the author's real life experience. Mario, an aspiring writer, works ... (Wikipedia)
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
A satirical tale of an eccentric slacker's misadventures in New Orleans.
Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found, here, "A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles ... (Goodreads)
Pulp
by Charles Bukowski
A collection of short stories and poems that explore the gritty, raw, and often vulgar side of life.
Pulp is a pulp fiction novel which acts also as a meta-pulp. Pulp comments on the obsessions of the pulp fiction genre, making fun of itself as stereotypical of the genre in the grimiest form. ... (Wikipedia)
The Child in Time
by Ian McEwan
A father's struggle to come to terms with the sudden disappearance of his daughter.
Stephen Lewis is, by his own admission, an accidental author of children's books. One Saturday, on a routine visit to the supermarket, during a momentary distraction, he loses his only daughter, ... (Wikipedia)
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
by Margaret Atwood
An exploration of the lives of characters in a small Canadian town, delving into their stories of joy, sorrow, and moral ambiguity.
Margaret Atwood is acknowledged as one of the foremost writers of our time. In Moral Disorder she has created a series of interconnected stories that trace the course of a life and also the lives ... (Goodreads)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
by Robert M. Pirsig
A philosophical exploration of the meaning of life, seen through the lens of a cross-country motorcycle journey.
Robert M. Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's ... (Goodreads)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
An exploration of a young man's struggle to find his identity and place in the world.
The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an ... (Goodreads)
The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes
An exploration of memory and its impact on the present, looking at the choices we make in life.
By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be ... (Goodreads)
Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A darkly comic, nihilistic journey of self-discovery, following a man into the heart of an absurd world.
Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper-realistic, boiling over with black humor Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic—boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at ... (Barnes & Noble)
The Innocent
by Ian McEwan
A young British man in post-WWII Berlin gets caught up in a web of espionage and betrayal.
Leonard Marnham is "The Innocent" of the novel, a Post Office engineer who is employed by the Americans to install monitoring equipment in the tunnel they are building specifically to tap the ... (Wikipedia)
