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Recommendations based on The Rachel Papersby Martin Amis
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Money
by Martin Amis
A satirical look at the power of money and the cut-throat world of 1980s high finance.
Money tells the story of, and is narrated by, John Self, a successful director of adverts who is invited to New York City by Fielding Goodney, a film producer, to shoot his first film. Self is an ... (Wikipedia)
London Fields
by Martin Amis
A female artist's exploration of life and death, told through the lens of an apocalyptic setting.
London Fields is set in London in 1999 against a backdrop of environmental, social and moral degradation, and the looming threat of world instability and nuclear war (referred to as "The Crisis"). ... (Wikipedia)
Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
A story of a young lecturer struggling to make it in academia, while learning the importance of self-discovery.
Jim Dixon is a lecturer in medieval history at a red brick university in the English Midlands . He has made an unsure start and, towards the end of the academic year, is concerned about losing his ... (Wikipedia)
Any Human Heart
by William Boyd
A man's life journey, chronicling his loves, losses, and adventures.
Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, writer, was born in 1906, and died of a heart attack on October 5, 1991, aged 85. William Boyd's novel Any Human Heart is his disjointed autobiography, a massive tome ... (Goodreads)
Time's Arrow
by Martin Amis
A story told in reverse as a Holocaust doctor confronts his past and his role in the atrocities.
The novel recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in reverse chronology. The narrator, together with the reader, experiences time passing in reverse. The narrator is not exactly the ... (Wikipedia)
Saturday
by Ian McEwan
A doctor's life is changed forever after witnessing a terrorist attack that takes place on a Saturday in London.
Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good ... (Goodreads)
Hopscotch
by Julio Cortázar
A surrealist journey of self-exploration and imaginative play.
Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La ... (Goodreads)
Ulysses
by James Joyce
Epic narrative following a day in the life of an Irishman living in Dublin.
It is 8 a.m. Buck Mulligan , a boisterous medical student, calls Stephen Dedalus (a young writer encountered as the principal subject of, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ) up to the roof of ... (Wikipedia)
Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
A story of two sisters navigating their lives in a small town, and the matriarchal figure that unites them.
Ruthie narrates the story of how she and her younger sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho (some details are similar to Robinson's ... (Wikipedia)
The Elementary Particles
by Michel Houellebecq
Story of two half-brothers, exploring the depths of humanity and the emptiness of modern life.
Despite the essentially elaborate scope of the plot revealed in the novel's conclusion, the narrative focuses almost exclusively on the bleak and unrewarding day-to-day lives of the protagonists, two ... (Wikipedia)
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
A young woman's struggle to navigate New York high society, in pursuit of financial security and true love.
Lily Bart, a beautiful but impoverished socialite, is on her way to a house party at Bellomont, the country home of her best friend, Judy Trenor. Her pressing task is to find a husband with the ... (Wikipedia)
The Spy Who Loved Me
by Ian Fleming
A young woman's life is turned upside down when she becomes entangled in a dangerous world of espionage and must rely on James Bond for protection.
Fleming structured the novel in three sections—"Me", "Them" and "Him" to describe the phases of the story. Vivienne "Viv" Michel, a young Canadian woman narrates her own story, detailing her past ... (Wikipedia)
The Ambassadors
by Henry James
A wealthy American is sent to Paris to convince his friend's son to return home, but he becomes entangled in the city's social scene.
Graham Greene and E.M. Forster marvelled at it, but F.R. Leavis considered it to be 'not only not one of his great books, but to be a bad one.' As for the author, he held The Ambassadors as the ... (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)
Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami
A young man's journey of love and loss set against the backdrop of the 1960s.
Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of ... (Goodreads)
Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
A gripping tale of justice, following the story of a man falsely accused of a heinous crime.
As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later—one ... (Goodreads)
Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
A darkly comic and philosophical exploration of art, sanity, and the nature of reality.
Shade's poem digressively describes many aspects of his life. Canto 1 includes his early encounters with death and glimpses of what he takes to be the supernatural. Canto 2 is about his family and ... (Wikipedia)
A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
A mosaic of characters, lives, and relationships as they intertwine and evolve over time.
Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. ... (Goodreads)
The Castle
by Franz Kafka
Townspeople's surreal struggle against a mysterious ruling power.
The protagonist, K., arrives in a village governed by a mysterious bureaucracy operating in a nearby castle. When seeking shelter at the town inn, he claims to be a land surveyor summoned by the ... (Wikipedia)
The Buddha of Suburbia
by Hanif Kureishi
A coming-of-age story of a young man's journey to find acceptance and identity in a multicultural Britain.
The Buddha of Suburbia is said to be very autobiographical. It is about Karim, a mixed-race teenager, who is desperate to escape suburban South London and to have new experiences in London in the ... (Wikipedia)
Restless
by William Boyd
A thrilling spy novel of international espionage, secrets, and espionage.
Eva, a young Russian woman, is recruited after her brother's death to work for the British secret service . During this time she falls for her mentor and boss, Lucas Romer. But all is not as it seems ... (Wikipedia)
Solar
by Ian McEwan
A Nobel Prize-winning physicist navigates personal and professional challenges while attempting to solve the world's energy crisis.
Michael Beard is an eminent, Nobel Prize –winning physicist whose own life is chaotic and complicated. The novel takes the reader chronologically through three significant periods in Beard's life: ... (Wikipedia)
Scoop
by Evelyn Waugh
A humorous and satirical look at journalistic misadventures in Africa.
Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of the "Daily Beast", has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, ... (Goodreads)
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
by Vladimir Nabokov
An epic novel of forbidden love between a brother and sister, set against a backdrop of family secrets.
Ada tells the life story of a man named Van Veen, and his lifelong love affair with his sister Ada. They meet when she is eleven (soon to be twelve) and he is fourteen, believing that they are ... (Wikipedia)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
by Salman Rushdie
A fantastical journey to the depths of the imagination, reclaiming the power of storytelling.
At the beginning of the story, protagonist Haroun Khalifa lives with his father Rashid, a famous storyteller and doctor, and his mother Soraya, until the latter is seduced by their neighbor 'Mr. ... (Wikipedia)
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
by Henry Fielding
A story of a young man's adventures and misadventures in pursuit of love and fortune.
The novel's events occupy eighteen books. The book opens with the narrator stating that the purpose of the novel will be to explore "human nature". The kindly and wealthy Squire Allworthy and his ... (Wikipedia)
For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
A soldier's story of courage and survival in the Spanish Civil War.
The novel graphically describes the brutality of the Spanish Civil War. It is told primarily through the thoughts and experiences of the protagonist, Robert Jordan. It draws on Hemingway's own ... (Wikipedia)
Skinny Legs and All
by Tom Robbins
A tale of love, loss, and mystery that revolves around a small diner in the American Southwest.
This is a gutsy, fun-loving, and provocative novel in which a bean can philosophises, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers ... (Goodreads)
Our Man in Havana
by Graham Greene
A humorous tale of espionage in Cold War Cuba, as a vacuum cleaner salesman attempts to outwit the British Secret Service.
Graham Greene's classic Cuban spy story, now with a new package and a new introduction, First published in 1959,, Our Man in Havana, is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a ... (Goodreads)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1
by Alan Moore
A band of Victorian-era misfits join forces to protect the British Empire.
In 1898, one year after her encounter with Dracula , Mina Murray has divorced her husband and now works for the British government. She meets with MI5 agent Campion Bond (the grandfather of James ... (Wikipedia)
