Sophie's World
Sophie gets philosophy lessons by mail, then finds she is fiction in a father birthday book for Hilde.
2,013-word summary · 9 min read
Tag: literary fiction
307 books with this tag.
Page 10 of 13
Breakfast of Champions
A Pontiac dealer breaks down while a broke sci-fi writer brings the book that tells him others are robots.
2,013-word summary · 9 min read
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
An unemployed Tokyo man hunts a lost cat, then his missing wife, and slips from quiet suburbs into wells and wartime memory.
3,344-word summary · 15 min read
The Thirteenth Tale
A dying novelist tells her true story at last to a bookseller's daughter, and the mystery of the Angelfield twins comes into the open.
2,928-word summary · 13 min read
The Remains of the Day
Stevens, the perfect English butler, drives west in 1956 and looks back on Darlington Hall, Miss Kenton, and a life spent serving.
2,971-word summary · 13 min read
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri follows Gogol Ganguli from a hated namesake to adult loss, marriage, and family reckoning between Calcutta and Boston.
2,878-word summary · 13 min read
The Lincoln Highway
Emmett and Billy plan California in 1954, but two escapees steal their car and drag them east to New York.
2,954-word summary · 13 min read
The God of Small Things
Twins Rahel and Estha grow up in Kerala in 1969, where family rules and caste lines shape a loss that follows them into adulthood.
2,646-word summary · 12 min read
Piranesi
Piranesi lives alone in an endless House of statues and tides until chalk messages hint at another visitor and a buried past.
2,992-word summary · 13 min read
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
A son writes to the mother who cannot read him: war, migration, first love, and loss in one Vietnamese American family in Hartford.
3,113-word summary · 14 min read
Mrs. Dalloway
Clarissa Dalloway gives a London party across one June day while veteran Septimus Smith faces shell shock in the same city.
2,935-word summary · 13 min read
I Know This Much Is True
A housepainter fights to free his schizophrenic twin from a locked ward while a grandfather's memoir and a lost marriage resurface. Long, heavy, hard to forget.
2,533-word summary · 11 min read
Hamnet
Agnes Hathaway holds her Stratford family together while her husband works in London, until plague takes eleven-year-old Hamnet in 1596.
3,164-word summary · 14 min read
Go Set a Watchman
Jean Louise Finch returns to Maycomb and finds her father changed: Lee's contested 2015 draft about family loyalty and race in Alabama.
3,478-word summary · 15 min read
Convenience Store Woman
At 36, Keiko has worked at a Tokyo convenience store for 18 years and loves it. Family pressure to marry pushes her toward a strange fake partnership.
2,989-word summary · 13 min read
Blindness
A white blindness sweeps a city, and an eye doctor's wife who can still see guides seven strangers through camp and ruin.
2,772-word summary · 12 min read
Bel Canto
An opera singer and a Japanese executive are taken hostage at a birthday party, and months of captivity turn into music, routine, and love.
3,864-word summary · 17 min read
A Prayer for Owen Meany
John Wheelwright believes in God because of Owen Meany, the tiny friend whose foul ball killed his mother.
3,046-word summary · 14 min read
A Confederacy of Dunces
Ignatius J. Reilly, jobless and full of opinions in New Orleans, meets work, his mother, and the law in Toole's posthumous Pulitzer winner.
3,089-word summary · 14 min read
1Q84
Aomame slips into a Tokyo with two moons while Tengo rewrites a strange girl's novel, and their childhood bond pulls tight.
3,056-word summary · 14 min read
White Oleander
Astrid cycles foster homes after mother Ingrid murders boyfriend.
2,569-word summary · 11 min read
Tom Lake
Lara tells daughters about young love with actor Peter Duke at Tom Lake.
2,600-word summary · 12 min read
Things Fall Apart
Proud Igbo wrestler Okonkwo rises in 1890s Umuofia, then loses standing through hard exile, a son's conversion, and British missionaries and courts remaking…
2,518-word summary · 11 min read
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford tells Pheoby about Eatonville life with Logan Killicks, Joe Starks called Jody, and Tea Cake.
2,230-word summary · 10 min read