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Recommendations based on The Summer Without Menby Siri Hustvedt
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What I Loved
by Siri Hustvedt
A story of two friends, their families, and the art world in New York City. A tale of love, loss, and the complexities of human relationships.
What I Loved opens with a painting of a woman 'wearing only a man's T-shirt', with the artist's shadow across the canvas. The protagonist , art historian Leon Hertzberg (Leo), purchases the painting ... (Wikipedia)
The Music of Chance
by Paul Auster
Two men's struggle for survival in a world of wealth and privilege.
Jim Nashe is a fireman with a two-year-old daughter and wife who has just left him. Knowing he cannot work and raise a child at the same time, he sends her to live with his sister. Six months of ... (Wikipedia)
The Hour of the Star
by Clarice Lispector
A poor Brazilian girl's life story, illustrating the struggles of the working class.
The novel starts with the narrator, Rodrigo S.M., discussing what it means to write a story. He addresses the reader directly and spends a lot of time talking about his philosophical beliefs. After ... (Wikipedia)
Old Filth
by Jane Gardam
The life story of Sir Edward Feathers, a retired judge known as "Old Filth" (Failed In London Try Hong Kong), and his complex relationships.
Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) ... (Goodreads)
Mr Salary
by Sally Rooney
A short story about a young woman's relationship with her older, wealthier lover.
My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all. Years ago, Sukie moved in with Nathan because her mother was dead and her father was ... (Goodreads)
Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War
by Sebastian Faulks
A poignant love story set during World War I, exploring the impact of war on human relationships and the human psyche.
Birdsong has an episodic structure, and is split into seven sections which move between three different periods of time before, during and after the war in the Stephen Wraysford plot, and three ... (Wikipedia)
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
A haunting story of loss and resilience in the aftermath of slavery.
Beloved begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio , where the protagonist Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, has been living with her eighteen-year-old daughter Denver at 124 Bluestone Road. The book ... (Wikipedia)
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
by Alison Bechdel
Collection of comics exploring the lives of queer women in all their complexity.
From the author of Fun Home – the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others For twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes ... (Goodreads)
The New York Trilogy
by Paul Auster
A series of interconnected stories exploring the hidden mysteries of New York City.
A 2006 reissue by Penguin Books is fronted by new pulp magazine -style covers by comic book illustrator Art Spiegelman . The first story, City of Glass , features an author of detective fiction who ... (Wikipedia)
Oracle Night
by Paul Auster
A writer's life is changed after finding a mysterious notebook. Reality and fiction blur as he becomes obsessed with its contents.
The discovery of a mysterious notebook turns a man's life upside-down in this compulsively readable novel by 'one of the great writers of our time' ( San Francisco Chronicle ). Several months into ... (Goodreads)
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)
The Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields
A woman's life story told through a series of vignettes, examining the joys and sorrows of life.
The book is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirth. Through ... (Wikipedia)
The World According to Garp
by John Irving
A humorous and heart-wrenching journey of life, love and literature.
This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a ... (Goodreads)
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
A dark and mysterious tale about the mysterious suicides of five teenage sisters in a suburban town.
As an ambulance arrives for the body of Cecilia Lisbon, a group of anonymous adolescent neighborhood boys recalls the events leading up to her death. The Lisbons are a Catholic family living in the ... (Wikipedia)
Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
An exploration of race, identity, and belonging as two Nigerian immigrants experience life in America and beyond.
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to ... (Goodreads)
The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A butler reflects on his past, grappling with the lost opportunities of a life devoted to service.
The novel tells, in first-person narration , the story of Stevens, an English butler who has dedicated his life to the loyal service of Lord Darlington (who is recently deceased, and whom Stevens ... (Wikipedia)
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
A day in the life of a high-society woman, delving into her inner thoughts and feelings.
Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes her wonder about ... (Wikipedia)
On Love
by Alain de Botton
A philosophical exploration of love, exploring its nature and forms.
"The longing for a destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life" we are told at the outset of Alain de Botton's On Love, a hip, charming, and devastatingly witty rumination on the thrills ... (Goodreads)
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
by Melissa Bank
A young woman's exploration of relationships, learning to navigate the modern dating world.
Generous-hearted and wickedly insightful, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing maps the progress of Jane Rosenal as she sets out on a personal and spirited expedition through the perilous terrain ... (Goodreads)
The Nix
by Nathan Hill
A middle-aged man's quest to discover the truth about his mother and his own identity.
The Nix is an American epic novel in 10 parts that follows community college professor of English, Samuel Andresen-Anderson who is struggling to find meaning in his life in the years following his ... (Wikipedia)
Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
A journey into the depths of the human psyche, exploring the darkness of colonialism.
Aboard the Nellie , anchored in the River Thames near Gravesend , Charles Marlow tells his fellow sailors how he became captain of a river steamboat for an ivory trading company. As a child, Marlow ... (Wikipedia)
The Children Act
by Ian McEwan
A family court judge must make a difficult decision between the law and her conscience.
Fiona Maye is a respected High Court Judge specialising in Family Law and living in Gray's Inn Square. While reviewing a case, she is approached by her husband, Jack, who tells her that because of ... (Wikipedia)
Slade House
by David Mitchell
A supernatural thriller involving mysterious doorways that lead to a mysterious house with a sinister secret.
In 1979, Nathan Bishop and his mother are invited to the house of the respected Lady Grayer. Nathan is quickly acquainted with her son Jonah, and the two spend the afternoon in the garden of Slade ... (Wikipedia)
State of Wonder
by Ann Patchett
A journey in the Amazon rainforest to find a missing colleague and unlock the secrets of a mysterious drug.
In a narrative replete with poison arrows, devouring snakes, scientific miracles, and spiritual transformations, "State of Wonder" presents a world of stunning surprise and danger, rich in emotional ... (Goodreads)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
by Richard Flanagan
A man's journey to reconcile his past and make sense of his actions during the Japanese occupation of Burma.
Dorrigo Evans has found fame and public recognition as a war veteran in old age, but inwardly he is plagued by his own shortcomings and considers his numerous accolades to be a “failure of perception ... (Wikipedia)
The Chosen
by Chaim Potok
Story of two boys from different backgrounds learning to understand each other and their place in the world.
In 1944 Brooklyn, fifteen-year-old Reuven Malter prepares to play a baseball game: his own Modern Orthodox school against a team from an ultra-orthodox Hasidic yeshiva. It becomes apparent that the ... (Wikipedia)
The Summer Book
by Tove Jansson
A grandmother and her granddaughter explore a remote summer island together, learning about life, love, and nature.
An elderly artist and her six-year-old granddaughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. Gradually, the two learn to adjust to each other's fears, whims and ... (Goodreads)
Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
Interconnected stories of ordinary lives in 1970s New York, inspired by a high-wire artist's death-defying feat.
The events of the story are told in a largely non-linear fashion, with several different narrators telling the story from different perspectives. The story is interspersed with fictionalized accounts ... (Wikipedia)
The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Interwoven stories of three women and the impact of Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway.
Note: This Summary does not contain the whole book, nor end at the ending. The stream-of-consciousness style being so prominent in this work, a summary of the plot based on physical action does not ... (Wikipedia)
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
by Elena Ferrante
Two friends navigate the changing relationships of their youth and adulthood, and the consequences of their choices.
In this third Neapolitan novel, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend, have become women. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her abusive ... (Goodreads)
