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Why Not Catch-21?: The Stories Behind the Titles

10 best books like Why Not Catch-21?: The Stories Behind the Titles (Gary Dexter): Middlemarch, Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World, Moloka'i, London Fields, Vanity Fair, The Wall, The Persian Pickle Club, What Belongs to You, Home for Erring and Outcast Girls, Burning Bright

Middlemarch
AuthorGeorge Eliot
ISBN0451529170
Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature:...
Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World
AuthorLawrence Goldstone
ISBN0312187688
When Nancy tracked down a ten-dollar copy of War and Peace in order to win a birthday bet with Larry, the Goldstones' love affair with old books began. Over the next three years they haunted every used and rare bookshop between New York and Boston that they could find, from dingy, dust-filled barns to elegant...
Moloka'i
AuthorAlan Brennert
ISBN0312304358
This richly imagined novel, set in Hawai'i more than a century ago, is an extraordinary epic of a little-known time and place---and a deeply moving testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.

Rachel Kalama, a spirited seven-year-old Hawaiian girl, dreams of visiting far-off lands like...
London Fields
AuthorMartin Amis
ISBN0099748614



Samson Young, first-person narrator of this Martin Amis novel, is a somewhat jaded, frequently sarcastic and acerbic 40-something intellectual literary writer from, not surprisingly, New York City. But his hard-edged Big Apple voice is absolutely pitch-perfect for the story he...
Vanity Fair
AuthorWilliam Makepeace Thackeray
ISBN0141439831
Here I am, 54 years old, and for the very first time reading William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. "Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero." I disagree with Thackeray. The 'Hero' of Vanity Fair is the steadfast and stalwart William Dobbin; of that there is no doubt. This novel is not the coming of age,...
The Wall
AuthorJohn Lanchester
ISBN1324001631
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2019

Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very like our own has built the Wall―an enormous concrete barrier around its entire coastline. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate...
The Persian Pickle Club
AuthorSandra Dallas
ISBN0312147015
It is the 1930s, and hard times have hit Harveyville, Kansas, where the crops are burning up, and there's not a job to be found. For Queenie Bean, a young farm wife, a highlight of each week is the gathering of the Persian Pickle Club, a group of local ladies dedicated to improving their minds, exchanging...
What Belongs to You
AuthorGarth Greenwell
ISBN0374288224
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk,...
Home for Erring and Outcast Girls
AuthorJulie Kibler
An emotionally raw and resonant story of love, loss, and the enduring power of friendship, following the lives of two young women connected by a home for “fallen girls,” and inspired by historical events.

In turn-of-the-20th century Texas, the Berachah Home for the Redemption and Protection...
Burning Bright
AuthorRon Rash
ISBN0061804118
New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Ron Rash is "a storyteller of the highest rank" (Jeffrey Lent) and has won comparisons to John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, and Gabriel García Márquez. It is rare that an author can capture the complexities of a place as though it were a person, and...
Ashenden
AuthorW. Somerset Maugham
ISBN0099289709
A celebrated writer by the time the war broke out in 1914, Maugham had the perfect cover for living in Switzerland. Multilingual and knowledgeable about many European countries, he was dispatched by the Secret Service to Lucerne - under the guise of completing a play. An assignment whose danger and...
The Summer that Melted Everything
AuthorTiffany McDaniel
ISBN1250078067
Fielding Bliss has never forgotten the summer of 1984:
the year a heatwave scorched the small town of Breathed, Ohio.
The year he became friends with the devil.


When local prosecutor Autopsy Bliss publishes an invitation to the devil to come to the country town of Breathed, Ohio,...
Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew
AuthorMax Egremont
ISBN0374280320
The story of World War I, through the lives and words of its poets

The hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of what many believed would be the war to end all wars is in 2014. And while World War I devastated Europe, it inspired profound poetry—words in which the atmosphere and landscape of battle...
Highly Illogical Behavior
AuthorJohn Corey Whaley
ISBN0525428186
Sixteen-year-old Solomon is agoraphobic. He hasn’t left the house in three years, which is fine by him.

Ambitious Lisa desperately wants to get into the second-best psychology program for college (she’s being realistic). But is ambition alone enough to get her in?

Enter Lisa.

Determined...
The Four Just Men
AuthorEdgar Wallace
When the Foreign Secretary Sir Philip Ramon receives a threatening, greenish-grey letter signed FOUR JUST MEN, he remains determined to see his Aliens Extradition Bill made law. A device in the members' smokeroom and a sudden magnesium flash that could easily have been nitro-glycerine leave Scotland...
Rosa
AuthorJonathan Rabb
ISBN0307336190
In the last days of the First World War, socialist revolution swept across Germany, sending Kaiser Wilhelm into exile and transforming Berlin into a battleground. But for Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner and his young assistant, Hans Fichte, the revolution is a mere inconvenience. Four women...
Pieces: A Collection of New Voices
AuthorStephen Chbosky
ISBN0671001957
MTV has discovered the authors of tomorrow. Read them today in Pieces.

This unique short-story collection is more than a good read—it's an exciting glimpse into the future of fiction. The winners of MTV's "Write Stuff" competition share their voices and visions in tales that are endearingly...
The Ship
AuthorC.S. Forester
ISBN1931313172
One vital convoy can break Mussolini’s stranglehold on Malta – but it is intercepted in the Mediterranean by enemy warships … Five light British cruisers are left to beat back the armed might of the Italian battle fleet and C.S. Forester – creator of Horatio Hornblower – takes us aboard HMS...
Bombay Time
AuthorThrity Umrigar
ISBN0312286236
At the wedding of a young man from a middle-class apartment building in Bombay, the men and women of this unique community gather together and look back on their youthful, idealistic selves and consider the changes the years have wrought. The lives of the Parsi men and women who grew up together in Wadi...
After Darkness
AuthorChristine Piper
ISBN1743319886
It is early 1942 and Australia is in the midst of war.

While working at a Japanese hospital in the pearling port of Broome, Dr Ibaraki is arrested as an enemy alien and sent to Loveday internment camp in a remote corner of South Australia. There, he learns to live among a group of men divided by culture...
Vietnam
AuthorLarry Burrows
In the heat of battle, in the devastated countryside, among troops and civilians equally hurt by the
savagery of war, Larry Burrows photographed the conflict in Vietnam from 1962, the earliest days of American involvement, until 1971, when he died in a helicopter shot down on the Vietnam–Laos...
I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual
AuthorLuvvie Ajayi
ISBN1627796061
Comedian, activist, and hugely popular culture blogger at AwesomelyLuvvie.com, Luvvie Ajayi, serves up necessary advice for the common senseless in this hilarious book of essays

With over 500,000 readers a month at her enormously popular blog, AwesomelyLuvvie.com, Luvvie Ajayi has...
Rogue Male
AuthorGeoffrey Household
Rogue Male is one of the classic thrillers of the 20th century. An Englishman plans to assassinate the dictator of a European country. But he is foiled at the last moment and falls into the hands of ruthless and inventive torturers. They devise for him an ingenious and diplomatic death but, for once, they...
The Selfish Society: How We All Forgot to Love One Another and Made Money Instead
AuthorSue Gerhardt
ISBN1847375715
Best-selling author and respected psychologist Sue Gerhardt goes to the heart of the causes of broken Britain   Sue Gerhardt has the backing and support of a number of politicians and psychologists including best-selling author Oliver James. .Extensive publicity and serialisation in major...
A Spy's Life
AuthorHenry Porter
ISBN0752848062
Robert Cope Harland ended his career as a British spy in an Austrian hospital, after being tortured and beaten by Czech security agents in the last days of the communist regime. He was young enough then to find a new life with the Red Cross and then with the UN. Twelve years later his UN plane crashes in mysterious...
Between a Wolf and a Dog
AuthorGeorgia Blain
ISBN1925321118
Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Estranged from both her sister, April, and her ex-husband,...
House of Straw
AuthorMarc Scott
Traumatised by the tragic death of her twin brother, Brianna falls into a state of deep depression, isolating herself from the world and all those that care about her. When a twist of fate reveals that she has a half-sister she finds a new purpose in her life and sets out to find her sibling, desperately...
She Must Be Mad
AuthorCharly Cox
ISBN0008291667
‘Poetry meets mental health in Charly Cox’s brave and beautiful She Must Be Mad.’ Stylist Magazine

‘Reading this book made me feel less alone.’ Mashable

She Must be Mad explores coming-of-age: the pain and beauty of love, the relief and the agony of turning from girl to...
The English Civil War: A People’s History
AuthorDiane Purkiss
ISBN0007150628
This popular history of the English Civil War tells the story of the bloody conflict between Oliver Cromwell and Charles I from the perspectives of those involved.


The compelling narrative draws on new sources such as letters, memoirs, ballads and plays to bring to life the Roundheads...
The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature
AuthorJohn Whittier Treat
ISBN0226811700
The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature tells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and...
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