When I Lived in Modern Times
10 best books like When I Lived in Modern Times (Linda Grant): The Idea of Perfection, Larry's Party, Fugitive Pieces, The Ventriloquist's Tale, A Spell of Winter, Ice Road, The Road Home, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, Spirits of the Ordinary: A Tale of Casas Grandes, Homestead
| Author | Kate Grenville |
| ISBN | 0330490656 |
Harley Savage is a plain woman, a part-time museum curator and quilting expert with three failed marriages and a heart condition. Douglas Cheeseman is a shy, gawky engineer with jug-handle ears, one marriage gone sour, and a crippling lack of physical courage. They meet in the little Australian town...
| Author | Carol Shields |
| ISBN | 0679309519 |
Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator's perception, irony and tenderness. Carol Shields gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997 that flash back and forward seamlessly. As Larry journeys toward the millennium, adapting...
| Author | Anne Michaels |
| ISBN | 0679776591 |
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award
In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer....
| Author | Pauline Melville |
| ISBN | 1582340269 |
Pauline Melville conjures up vivid pictures both of savanna and forest and of city life in South America where love is often trumped by disaster. Unforgettable characters illuminate theme and plot: Sonny, the strange, beautiful and isolate son of Beatrice and Danny, the brother and sister who have...
| Author | Helen Dunmore |
| ISBN | 0871137828 |
Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary gothic set in turn-of-the-century England. Catherine and Rob Allen, siblings two years apart, grow up in a world of shameful secrets. Their mother creates a public outcry, abandoning her family...
| Author | Gillian Slovo |
| ISBN | 1844080595 |
Leningrad. 1933. Loyalties, beliefs, love and family ties: all are about to be tested to the limit in a fight to see who will survive one of the most crushing moments the world will ever know. Boris Ivanov, the father who understands politics and pragmatism; his daughter Natasha, a carefree, delightful...
| Author | Rose Tremain |
| ISBN | 0701177934 |
Fiction so convincing that it could be a true story.
The journey begins with Lev's bus journey from his home in Eastern Europe to the loneliness of impersonal London. Lev is into his early forties, has recently lost his wife to cancer and believes that the only way that he can support his very young...
| Author | Carrie Tiffany |
| ISBN | 0743286375 |
In this sensual, witty, and startlingly original first novel, Jean Finnegan searches for her place in a tumultuous world wracked by the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II. Carrie Tiffany captures the frailty and beauty of the human condition and vividly evokes the hope and disappointment...
Spirits of the Ordinary: A Tale of Casas Grandes
| Author | Kathleen Alcalá |
| ISBN | 0156005689 |
This “strong and finely rendered book” (Larry McMurtry) takes us to the Mexican-American border in the 1870s, conjuring up a magical tale of faith, gold, and family passions that “echoes the style of Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel” (Washington Post Book World). Winner of the Pacific Northwest...
| Author | Rosina Lippi |
| ISBN | 0395977711 |
Each life has its place, and every variation ripples the surface of the tiny alpine village called Rosenau. Be it a mysteriously misaddressed love letter or a girl's careless delivery of two helpless relatives into Nazi hands, the town's balance is ever tested, and ever tender. Here is a novel spanning...
| Author | Pagan Kennedy |
| ISBN | 1852424052 |
It?s 1968, and Frannie and Doris, sisters and spinsters, are finally freed from family ties and constraints when their father dies. Taking off in their Plymouth Valiant they hit the road on a journey through the changing cultural landscape of America - civil rights marches, the assasinations of Martin...
| Author | Michèle Roberts |
| ISBN | 1408816008 |
A stunning war-time novel set in France from Booker-shortlisted author Michèle Roberts.
After every war there are stories that are locked away like bluebottles in drawers and kept silent. But sometimes the past can return: in the smell of carbolic soap, in whispers darting through a village...
| Author | Ellen Feldman |
| ISBN | 0393064905 |
Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and fast as anyone can say Jim Crow, the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and...
| Author | Maggie Gee |
| ISBN | 0863563805 |
“Outstanding . . . tender, sexy and alarming.”—Jim Crace
When Alfred White, patriarch of the White family, collapses at work, his wife, May, and their three disparate children find themselves confronting issues they would rather ignore. Maggie Gee skillfully weaves a narrative...
| Author | Éilís Ní Dhuibhne |
| ISBN | 0856406503 |
In a Donegal Gealtacht in 1972, four teenage girls from different sides of the border immerse themselves in Irish language and dance while also learning more about their own personal liberation. I finished this novel in a single sitting, I was so drawn in. At times I felt this narrative loomed right on...
| Author | Jill Dawson |
| ISBN | 0340751673 |
In the winter of 1922 Edith Thompson and her younger lover, Freddy Bywaters, were found guilty of murdering Percy Thompson, Edith's boorish husband. The two lovers were executed in a whirl of publicity in 1923. The case caused a sensation, a crime of passion that gripped the nation's imagination and...
| Author | Deirdre Madden |
| ISBN | 0571175511 |
Home
I grew up in Northern Ireland, in the quiet seaside town of Bangor, County Down. Although I had moved away before the Troubles started in 1968, I came back occasionally, and happened to be shopping in downtown Belfast during the bombings on "Bloody Friday" in July 1972. My wife and...
| Author | Suzanne Berne |
| ISBN | 0805055800 |
An auspicious debut novel by a young writer who will remind readers of Anne Lamott and Anne Tyler
Crime in the Neighborhood centers on a headline event-- the molestation and murder of a twelve-year-old boy in a Washington, D.C., suburb. At the time of the murder, 1973, Marsha was nine years old...
| Author | Manda Scott |
| ISBN | 0755325478 |
OK, Goodreads, that's like the worst blurb in the world. I really like Kellen’s first-person voice, although the habit she has of responding to dialogue with a thought before a new line for the actual response is confusing. I often had to go back and say, no she didn’t really say that. This is first...
Valerie Martin’s Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion...
The shattering and darkly funny debut novel from the author of Milkman, winner of the Man Booker Prize.
This is a book about feelings, family, sex, and Ireland—but don't tell Amelia that. She's the one growing up in the mad family, in the mad society, who doesn't want to know what's going on....
| Author | Chloe Hooper |
| ISBN | 0743225139 |
With the dark suspense of Donna Tartt's The Secret History and the frank and shocking eroticism of Josephine Hart, this debut novel tells the story of a young teacher's illicit affair and obsession with a historical murder.
Tasmanian schoolteacher Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father...
| Author | Amy Sackville |
| ISBN | 1846272297 |
At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and vanishes into the icy landscape without a trace. He leaves behind a young wife, Emily, who awaits his return for decades, her dreams and devotion gradually freezing into rigid widowhood. A hundred...
Stevie comes from a long line of people who have cut and run. Just like he has.
Only he’s not so sure he was right to go. He’s been to London, taught himself to get by, and now he’s working as a laborer not so far from his childhood home in Glasgow. But Stevie hasn’t told his family—what’s...
| Author | Rebecca Goldstein |
| ISBN | 0299181243 |
Mazel means luck in Yiddish, and luck is the guiding force in this magical and mesmerizing novel that spans three generations. Sasha Saunders is the daughter of a Polish rabbi who abandons the shtetl and wins renown as a Yiddish actress in Warsaw and New York. Her daughter Chloe becomes a professor of...
