Books like

Books like The Testament of Mary

12 books with a reading profile close to The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín. Deep, inward-looking, contemplative, open-ended and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

1

Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

Gustav von Aschenbach, a disciplined German writer who has prioritized rigorous intellect over sensory pleasure, travels to Venice to escape a creative drought.
2

The Stranger

by Albert Camus

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

In Algiers, a clerk named Meursault receives news of his mother’s death and attends her funeral with complete emotional detachment.
3

Poems by John Keats

by John Keats

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

John Keats’s debut collection, published in March 1817 rather than 1800, organizes lyrical meditations on the restorative capacity of the natural world and the permanence of classical mythology.
4

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

A cynical protagonist, convinced that nothing in the universe possesses objective value, decides to commit suicide.
5

The Tartar Steppe

by Dino Buzzati

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

Giovanni Drogo, a young officer, is posted to the Bastiani Fortress, an isolated outpost on the northern frontier overlooking a barren plain.
6

Songs of innocence and of experience

by William Blake

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

William Blake’s hand-colored collection contrasts two differing states of the human soul.
7

Rubāʻīyāt

by Omar Khayyam

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

This 1870 edition presents a collection of quatrains attributed to the eleventh-century Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam, translated into English verse by Edward FitzGerald.
8

The power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

Set in 1930s Mexico during the Cristero War, the narrative follows a nameless whiskey priest fleeing a paramilitary police force.
9

The Metamorphosis

by Franz Kafka

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman and his family’s sole financial provider, wakes up one morning to find he has become a giant, literal insect.
10

Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

After receiving a prophecy from three witches that he will become King of Scotland, a general named Macbeth murders King Duncan to seize the throne.
11

The Razor’s Edge

by W. Somerset Maugham

Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, classic literature

Larry Darrell returns to Chicago from the battlefields of World War I, but find himself unable to settle into a conventional social life or a marriage with his fiancée, Isabel Bradley.
12

Alcestis

by Euripides

Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, classic literature

In this tragedy, King Admetus is granted a reprieve from his impending death on the condition that someone else dies in his place.

Get picks matched to your own reading on papr.

Get papr

Your library, beautifully understood.