Fiction that causes friction
Explore gripping fiction that causes friction with our curated list of thought-provoking books. Discover stories that challenge norms and spark debate—perfect for avid readers seeking impactful narratives.
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Plicul Negru
by Norman Manea
Attempting to clear up the mystery of his father's death forty years later, Tolea, an eccentric intellectual, is drawn into a web of suspicion as …
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly …
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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
by Milan Kundera
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international …
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Identity
by Milan Kundera
There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is …
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The Winter of Our Discontent
by John Steinbeck
A New Englander learns the bitter lesson that it is not possible to be a little dishonest
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The North China Lover
by Marguerite Duras
A young woman growing up in Indochina experiences the humiliations and the passions of her poverty-ridden world and, like her friends, grows impatient for the …
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Laughable Loves
by Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she …
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
The notorious and celebrated novel that established modern realism For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically …
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The JOKE
by Milan Kundera
All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The …
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The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
Here, in an astonishing debut by a gifted storyteller, is the magnificent saga of proud and passionate men and women and the turbulent times through …
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Compulsory Happiness
by Norman Manea
In cool, precise prose, and with an unerring sense of the absurd, Norman Manea's four novellas create a picture of everyday life in a grotesque …
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As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across …
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Love, etc.
by Julian Barnes
Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Julian Barnes continues to reinvigorate the novel with his pyrotechnic verbal skill and playful manipulation of plot and character. …
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The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African …
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Nightwood
by Djuna Barnes
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times …
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Nadja
by André Breton
"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude …
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Women in Love
by David Herbert Lawrence
Two of D. H. Lawrence's most renowned novels-now with new packages and new introductions Widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence's greatest novel, "Women in Love" …
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Sons and Lovers
by David Herbert Lawrence
D.H. Lawrence's great autobiographical novel is a provocative portrait of an artist torn between love for his possessive mother and desire for two young beautiful …
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Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham
A masterpiece of modern literature that mirrors Maugham’s own career. Of Human Bondage is the first and most autobiographical of Maugham's novels. It is the …
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The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
New chronology and updated further reading. Edited with an Introduction by A. S. Byatt.
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To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
The novel that established Virginia Woolf as a leading writer of the twentieth century, To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions …
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Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
The account of a young writer and his friends in free-wheeling Paris.
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Henry and June
by Anaïs Nin
A year in the life (1931-1932) of writer Anais Nin when she met Henry Miller and his wife June.
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The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION—WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL AND A NEW AFTERWORD BY CHARLIE JANE ANDERS Ursula K. Le Guin’s groundbreaking work of science …