Books like

Books like A Thousand Acres

12 books with a reading profile close to A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Deep, inward-looking and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

1

Bastard Out of Carolina

by Dorothy Allison

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Ruth Anne "Bone" Boatwright grows up in Greenville, South Carolina, within a family cycle of poverty, violence, and heavy drinking.
2

Home

by Toni Morrison

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Frank Money, a Black Korean War veteran, wakes up in a psychiatric ward in Seattle in the 1950s, haunted by what he saw in battle.
3

La tregua

by Mario Benedetti

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · narrative, classic literature

Martín Santomé, a widowed Montevideo office worker, is nearing retirement.
4

The Sun Also Rises

by Ernest Hemingway

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Jake Barnes, an American journalist living in Paris, lives with a physical wound from the Great War that leaves him impotent.
5

A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

John Wheelwright narrates the life of his best friend, Owen Meany, a boy with a high-pitched voice who accidentally kills John’s mother with a foul ball during a Little League game in 1953.
6

A Streetcar Named Desire

by Tennessee Williams

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Blanche DuBois, a displaced schoolteacher with a fragile mental state, arrives at the cramped New Orleans apartment of her sister, Stella, and brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.
7

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

by Anne Brontë

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · narrative, classic literature

Helen Graham arrives at a desolate Yorkshire estate under a shroud of secrecy, sparking intense local gossip and the unwanted attention of a neighboring farmer, Gilbert Markham.
8

The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · narrative, classic literature

Quoyle, a socially inept and physically ungainly third-rate newspaperman, retreats to his ancestral home in Newfoundland following the death of his unfaithful wife and the discovery of his parents’ double suicide.
9

Native Son

by Richard Wright, Richard Wright - undifferentiated

Also deep and thought-provoking · narrative, classic literature

Set in the segregated South Side of Chicago during the 1930s, the narrative follows Bigger Thomas, a young Black man trapped by systemic poverty and racial prejudice.
10

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

by Thomas Hardy, Margaret R. Higonnet

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Tess Durbeyfield, a young woman living in the rural English countryside, discovers her family descends from the aristocratic d’Urberville line.
11

The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Set in the early 1980s, the story follows three Brown University graduates navigating the transition to adulthood.
12

The Winter of Our Discontent

by John Steinbeck

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · narrative, classic literature

Ethan Allen Hawley, a scion of a formerly wealthy New England family, works as a grocery clerk for an immigrant shopkeeper in the fictional town of New Baytown.

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