Books like

Books like If Beale Street Could Talk

12 books with a reading profile close to If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin. Deep, inward-looking and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

1

The Lover

by Marguerite Duras

Also deep and inward-looking · romance, literary

Set in 1930s French Indochina, the narrative centers on a fifteen-year-old French girl from a financially destitute family who begins a clandestine affair with a wealthy Chinese heir.
2

Love in the Time of Cholera

by Gabriel García Márquez

Also deep and inward-looking · romance, literary

In the twilight of the nineteenth century, Florentino Ariza falls into a lifelong obsession with Fermina Daza, a woman who eventually rejects his youthful advances to marry Dr.
3

Lettres portugaises

by Gabriel de Guilleragues, Mariana Alcoforado

Also deep and inward-looking · romance, literary

Published anonymously in 1669, this epistolary novel consists of five letters written by a Portuguese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, to an absent French officer named Noël Bouton de Chamilly.
4

Bilinmeyen Bir Kadının Mektubu

by Stefan Zweig

Also deep and inward-looking · romance, literary

A famous Viennese novelist receives a long letter on his birthday from a woman he does not remember.
5

The House of Mirth

by Edith Wharton

Also deep and inward-looking · romance, literary

Lily Bart is a beautiful but impoverished socialite navigating the rigid hierarchy of Gilded Age New York.
6

Corinne

by Germaine de Staël, Isabel Hill

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · romance, literary

Set against the backdrop of an eighteenth-century Grand Tour, this novel centers on the intense intellectual and emotional connection between Lord Oswald Nelvil, a grieving Scottish aristocrat, and Corinne, a celebrated…
7

This Side of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Also deep and inward-looking · romance, literary

Set in the years surrounding World War I, the narrative follows Amory Blaine, a wealthy and egoistic Midwesterner, from his pampered childhood through his education at Princeton University.
8

Maurice

by E.M. Forster

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · romance, literary

Maurice Hall is a middle-class young man who goes to Cambridge, where he falls in love with Clive Durham, a fellow student.
9

Bonjour tristesse

by Françoise Sagan

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · romance, literary

Seventeen-year-old Cécile spends a restless summer on the French Riviera with her widowed father, Raymond, and his current mistress, Elsa.
10

The Painted Veil

by W. Somerset Maugham

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · romance, literary

In 1920s Hong Kong, Kitty Fane enters a loveless marriage with Walter, a reserved bacteriologist, to escape her demanding mother.
11

A Farewell to Arms

by Ernest Hemingway

Also deep and inward-looking · romance, literary

Frederic Henry, an American paramedic serving with the Italian army during World War I, experiences the collapse of the front following the retreat from Caporetto.
12

Brokeback Mountain

by Annie Proulx

Also inward-looking and thought-provoking · romance, literary

Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are two young ranch hands who spend a summer in 1963 herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming.

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