18 books like The Chosen
The Chosen
Xcor, leader of the Band of Bastards, convicted of treason against the Blind King, is facing a brutal interrogation and torturous death at the hands of the Black Dagger Brotherhood. Yet after a life marked by cruelty and evil deeds, he accepts his soldier’s fate, his sole regret the loss of a sacred female who was never his: the Chosen Layla.
Layla alone knows the truth that will save Xcor’s…
Shares: Community pick
Fathers; a novel in the form of a memoir
Shares: Jewish fiction, Jewish families, Fathers and sons, Domestic fiction
The Wonder Spot
Follows the quest of Sophie Applebaum for her own identity--who she is, what she loves, whom she loves, and occasionally whom she feels others should love--over the course of 25 years.
Shares: Jewish fiction, Jewish families, Jews, Bildungsromans
The Fortress of Solitude
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, Teenage boys, Bildungsromans, New york
Last Days of Summer Updated Ed
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, Jews, Bildungsromans, New york
Bread givers
A young Jewish girl from New York's Lower East Side rebels against the tyranny and chauvinism of her immigrant father, determined to assert her freedom and independence.
Shares: Jewish fiction, Jewish families, Jews, Bildungsromans
Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve (Library of Wales)
Widely acclaimed for its warm humor, lyricism, and honesty, this accurate evocation of the 1930s has become a classic. In this delightful autobiographical novel, Dannie Abse skilfully interweaves public and private themes, setting the fortunes of a Jewish family in Wales against the troubled backdrop of the times: unemployment, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and the Spanish Civil War.
Shares: Jewish families, Jews, Coming-of-age
The Voice of the Night
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, Teenage boys, Friendship
Eden Hill
Nothing seems to change in Eden Hill, Kentucky, and that's just fine with Virgil T. Osgood. He's been content to raise his family and run the only service station in town. But when a new station is set to open right across the road from Virgil's pumps, he suddenly faces obstacles in his career, his marriage, and his self-worth that he's never even dreamed of.Cornelius Alexander wants his new…
Shares: Religious Fiction, Domestic fiction
Everyday Jews
“Hailed as a modern Yiddish masterpiece . . . Explor[es] the harsh reality of life for a poor family in a provincial Polish town around the year 1900” (The Huffington Post). When Everyday Jews was first published in Poland in 1935, the Jewish Left was scandalized by the sex scenes, and I. B. Singer complained that the novel was too bleak to be psychologically credible. Yet within two years,…
Shares: Jews, Bildungsromans
Brighton Beach memoirs
A comedy built around the Jerome family during the Depression and focusing on fifteen-year-old, Eugene, preoccupied with sex and the Yankees.
Shares: Jewish families, Teenage boys, Coming-of-age
Imago bird
"This novel examines the contradictions between the public face and the private experience. Nephew to the prime minister of England, Bert tries to make sense of the grown-up world around him, a colorful crowd of television personalities, politicians, young Trotskyites, pop stars, and eccentric relatives. With the help of his laconic psychoanalyst, Bert questions the relation between exterior and…
Shares: Teenage boys, Bildungsromans
Leave Myself Behind
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO NOAH YORK:
"Anybody who tells you he doesn't have mixed feelings about his mother
is either stupid or a liar."
"Real life seldom makes me cry. The only thing that gets to me is
the occasional Kodak commercial."
"Sometimes I feel like Michelangelo, chiseling away at all the crap until nothing is left but the exquisite thing in the middle that no one else sees until it's…
Shares: Male friendship, Teenage boys, Friendship
Something Wicked This Way Comes
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, Fathers and sons, Friendship
Windy McPherson's son
This is a Historical Fiction Book. The bookl tells that A young boy grows up in rural Iowa. "At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson, a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a…
Shares: Fathers and sons, Coming-of-age
By a Spider's Thread
The winner of every major literary award in crime fiction, Laura Lippman brings back her complex and vulnerably human Baltimore P.I., Tess Monaghan, in a tense, expertly spun tale of a family torn asunder by forces it can barely comprehend.Mark Rubin's family is missing -- and the police can't do a thing because all the evidence indicates that his wife left willingly. So the successful furrier…
Shares: Jewish families, Jews
A Prayer for Owen Meany
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." So begins John Irving's new novel.
In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys - best friends - are playing ina…
Shares: Religious Fiction, Male friendship, Friendship
Telegraph Avenue
The new novel from Michael Chabon, his first in 5 years, is a lovingly painted pop-culture epic. One street, two families. As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, longtime friends, band mates and co-regents of Brokeland Records. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary nurse…
Shares: Male friendship, Domestic fiction