Loved ita beautiful historical novel set in early twentieth century New York giving you an idea of how it was to live in the city back then both if you were incredibly rich and if you were very poor
Ragtime (1974)
Others: Positive Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, NY, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. Almost magically, the line between fantasy & historical fact, between real & imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud & Emiliano Zapata slip in & out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family & other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler & a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
- ISBN:
- 9780613174626
- Length:
- 270 pages
Genres: historical fiction
Lists: …
Similar books
1 of 6
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
2009 · 653 pages · 7 reviews
Others: MixedWolf Hall (2009) is a historical novel by English author Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate, named after the Seymour family's seat of Wolfhall, or Wulfhall, in Wiltshire. Set in the period from 1500 to 1535, Wolf Hall is a sympathetic fictionalised biography documenting the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII through to the death of Sir Thomas More. The novel won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of "The 10 best historical novels". The book is the first in a trilogy; the sequel Bring Up the Bodies was published in 2012. The last book in the trilogy is The Mirror and the Light (2020), which covers the last four years of Cromwell's life.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also historical fiction79%TheBookchemist loved both13%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations8%Train dreams
Denis Johnson
2006 · 122 pages · 3 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveDenis Johnson’s Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. Robert Grainer is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also historical fiction80%TheBookchemist loved both13%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations7%Mason & Dixon
Thomas Pynchon
1997 · 773 pages · 3 reviews
Others: PositiveTold from the focal point of one Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke – a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy – who attempts to entertain and divert his extended family on a cold December evening (partly for amusement, and partly to keep his coveted status as a guest in the house). Claiming to have accompanied Mason and Dixon throughout their journeys, Cherrycoke tells a tale intermingling Mason and Dixon's biographies with history, fantasy, legend, speculation, and outright fabrication.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also historical fiction80%TheBookchemist loved both13%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations7%La storia
Elsa Morante
1974 · 564 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveThe central character in this powerful and unforgiving novel is Ida Mancuso, a schoolteacher whose husband has died and whose feckless teenage son treats the war as his playground. A German soldier on his way to North Africa rapes her, falls in love with her, and leaves her pregnant with a boy whose survival becomes Ida's passion. Around these two other characters come and go, each caught up by the war which is like a river in flood. We catch glimpses of bombing raids, street crimes, a cattle car from which human cries emerge, an Italian soldier succumbing to frostbite on the Russian front, the dumb endurance of peasants who have lived their whole lives with nothing and now must get by with less than nothing.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also historical fiction81%TheBookchemist loved both13%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations6%The path to the nest of spiders
Italo Calvino
1947 · 185 pages · 1 review
Others: Positive"Italo Calvino was only twenty-three when he first published this bold and imaginative novel. It tells the story of Pin, a cobbler's apprentice in a town on the Ligurian coast during World War II. He lives with his sister, a prostitute and spends as much time as he can at a seedy bar where he amuses the adult patrons. After a mishap with a Nazi soldier, Pin becomes involved with a band of partisans. Calvino's portrayal of these characters, seen through the eyes of a child, is not only a revealing commentary on the Italian resistance but an insightful coming-of-age story. Updated to include changes from Calvino's definitive Italian edition, previously censored passages, and his newly translated, unabridged preface - in which Calvino brilliantly critiques and places into historical context his own youthful work - The Path to the Spiders' Nests is animated by the formidable imagination that has made Italo Calvino one of the most respected writers of our time."--BOOK JACKET.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also historical fiction81%TheBookchemist loved both14%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations5%The Color Purple
Alice Walker
1976 · 264 pages · 8 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveThe Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence. In 2003, the book was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novels."
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also historical fiction82%TheBookchemist loved both14%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations4%
Loved it