18 books like A fine dark line

What to read after A fine dark line — books similar to it, matched on shared themes.

Cross Ken Bruen · 2008 · ★ 4.3 · 288p · ≈ 9h · Moderate A boy has been crucified in Galway city. People are shocked; the broadsheets debate how the brutal death reflects the state of the nation; the Irish Church is scandalized. No further action is taken. Then the sister of the murdered boy is burned alive and PI Jack Taylor decides to take matters into his own hands. Taylor's investigations take him to old city haunts where he encounters ghosts –… Shares: Ex-police officers, Boys, Mystery

Last Days of Summer Updated Ed Steve Kluger · 1998 · ★ 4.4 · 368p · ≈ 12h · Moderate From Goodreads: The hilarious and heart–warming story about a down–and–out kid who finds inspiration in his favourite baseball hero. In Brooklyn, 1940, a wisecracking, baseball loving twelve–year–old boy, Joey Margolis, is in desperate need of a hero. His rich father has recently divorced his mother, leaving her all but penniless, and she is forced to move herself and her son to an Italian… Shares: Male friendship, Boys, Bildungsromans

Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway · 1952 · ★ 3.8 · 87p · ≈ 2h · Moderate Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements. Shares: Older men, Male friendship, Friendship

Dont Ever Look Back Daniel Friedman · 2014 DON'T EVER GET OLD was one of mystery-publishing's biggest critical successes last year, earning starred reviews from every major trade publication, garnering nominations for the Edgar, Thriller, and Anthony awards, and winning the Macavity Award for Best First Novel. The producer of four Harry Potter films and the Sherlock Holmes sequel, Lionel Wigram, is set to produce the film version. In… Shares: Older men, Ex-police officers

The Voice of the Night Dean Koontz · 1980 · ★ 4.0 · 277p · ≈ 9h · Moderate No one could understand why Colin and Roy were best friends. They were complete opposites. Colin was fascinated by Roy--and Roy was fascinated by death. Then one day Roy asked: "You ever killed anything?" And from that moment on, the two were bound together in a game to terrifying to imagine. Shares: Male friendship, Friendship, Thriller

Something Wicked This Way Comes Ray Bradbury · 1962 · ★ 3.9 · 272p · ≈ 9h · Moderate Few American novels written this century have endured in the heart and memory as has Ray Bradbury's unparalleled literary classic SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES. For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. The… Shares: Male friendship, Boys, Friendship

The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini · 2003 · ★ 4.4 · 386p · ≈ 12h · Moderate The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their… Shares: Male friendship, Boys

World's fair E. L. Doctorow · 1985 · ★ 3.9 · 288p · ≈ 9h · Moderate Recalls a certain New York City boyhood in the 1930s, through the eyes of the child himself and then him as an adult trying to reconstruct the past. Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans

The Fortress of Solitude Jonathan Lethem · 2003 · ★ 3.8 · 511p · ≈ 17h · Moderate This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification." This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most… Shares: Male friendship, Bildungsromans, Friendship

The Neon Bible John Kennedy Toole · 1989 · ★ 3.8 · 176p · ≈ 5h · Moderate The first novel by the Pulizer Prize-winning author of A Confederacy Of Dunces. David is a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. From his porch, David can see the whole valley, including the neon Bible that lights up the sky, emblem of the God-fearing folk who snub his family because Poppa can't afford the church dues. Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans

His Whole Life Elizabeth Hay · 2015 · 352p · ≈ 11h · Moderate 1 volume ; 20 cm Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans

Mystic river Dennis Lehane · 2001 · ★ 4.2 · 496p · ≈ 16h · Moderate When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to… Shares: Male friendship, Friendship, Thriller, Mystery

Gods and beasts Denise Mina · 2012 · ★ 4.0 · 291p · ≈ 9h · Moderate "It's the week before Christmas when a lone robber bursts into a busy Glasgow post office carrying an AK-47. An elderly man suddenly hands his young grandson to a stranger and wordlessly helps the gunman fill bags with cash, then carries them to the door. He opens the door and bows his head; the robber fires off the AK-47, tearing the grandfather in two. DS Alex Morrow arrives on the scene and… Shares: Older men, Mystery

Mr. Vertigo Paul Auster · 1994 · ★ 3.9 · 304p · ≈ 10h · Moderate In Mr. Vertigo, his dazzling eighth novel, Paul Auster introduces a quintessentially American hero who, early in his life, masters the art of the unimaginable, and then must live out his days long after the magic has been lost and forgotten. It is 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh - and of Walter Claireborne Rawley, a streetwise orphan from Saint Louis who becomes "Walt the Wonder… Shares: Older men, Bildungsromans

Day of the Dead J. A. Jance · 2004 · ★ 4.4 · 384p · ≈ 12h · Moderate E-Book Extra: More about J.A. Jance's Thrillers and More about J.A. JanceFor more than thirty years, the case has remained stone cold -- the brutal murder of a local Papago girl, her butchered body found stuffed into a large cooler that was left on the side of Highway 86. No one ever paid for the horrific crime... except, that is, the victim's loved ones, who suffer to this day.Brandon Walker,… Shares: Ex-police officers, Thriller, Mystery

The Guards Ken Bruen · 2001 · ★ 3.9 · 304p · ≈ 10h · Moderate An Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel.Praised by authors and critics around the globe, The Guards is the first novel in the Jack Taylor series and heralded the arrival of prominent Irish writer Ken Bruen as an essential voice in contemporary crime fiction.Still stinging from his unceremonious ouster from the Garda Siochana--The Guards, Ireland's police force--and staring at the world through the… Shares: Ex-police officers, Mystery

Bicycle days John Burnham Schwartz · 1989 · 253p · ≈ 8h · Moderate When Alec Stern arrives in Japan, he discovers a land of opportunity. For only in Tokyo could an impressionable young man fresh out of college find, in one stroke, a new job, a new family, and a society that lavishes attention on Japanese-speaking gaijin. Yet, even as Alec claims a place in this new world, he is haunted by memories of the one he left behind—a world once infinitely secure but… Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans

Boy Swallows Universe Trent Dalton · 2018 · ★ 4.3 · 472p · ≈ 15h · Moderate Raw, whimsical, existential, heartbreaking, modern mythology Shares: Boys, Bildungsromans, Friendship

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