18 books like The perfect gentleman
Ayyām
Shares: Childhood and youth, Social life and customs, Biography & Memoir
Becoming Maria
Set in the 1950s in the Bronx, this is the story of a girl with a dream. Emmy award-winning actress and writer Sonia Manzano plunges us into the daily lives of a Latino family that is loving--and troubled. This is Sonia's own story rendered with an unforgettable narrative power. When readers meet young Sonia, she is a child living amidst the squalor of a boisterous home that is filled with noisy…
Shares: Childhood and youth, Coming-of-age, Biography & Memoir
Mosaic
A love story, a detective story, a book of secrets, a beautifully written journey into a forest of family trees.
After writing the definitive biographies of Lytton Strachey and George Bernard Shaw, Michael Holroyd turned his hand to a more personal subject: his own family. The result was Basil Street Blues, published in 1999. But rather than the story being over, it was in fact only beginning. As…
Shares: Childhood and youth, Great Britain, Social life and customs, Biography & Memoir
Appointment in Samarra
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian English is a man who squanders what fate gave him. He lives on the right side of the tracks, with a country…
Shares: Ethnic relations, Social life and customs
Adolphe
Adolphe is a privileged and refined young man, bored by the stupidity he perceives in the world around him. After a number of meaningless conquests, he at last encounters Ellenore, a beautiful and passionate older woman. Adolphe is enraptured and gradually wears down her resistance to his declarations of love. But as they embark on an intense and tortured affair, Ellenore gives way to a flood of…
Shares: Childhood and youth, Social life and customs, Biography & Memoir
Boy
Boy is an autobiographical book by British writer Roald Dahl. This book describes his life from birth until leaving school, focusing on living conditions in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, the public school system at the time, and how his childhood experiences led him to writing as a career. It ends with his first job, working for Royal Dutch Shell. His autobiography continues in the book Going…
Shares: Childhood and youth, Social life and customs, Biography & Memoir
War Boy
An English artist writes and illustrates a memoir of his own wartime childhood.
Shares: Childhood and youth, Social life and customs, Biography & Memoir
Детство; Отрочество; Юность
Written from 1852 to 1856, this autobiographical novel was Tolstoy's first publication. The early life of Nikolai, the son of wealthy landowner in Russia, is fully explored, slowly revealing this young boy's inner mind, relationships, and social standing. As he describes his tutor, angelic mother, aloof father, worldly brother, and later his moralistic friend, Nikolai displays a mind given to…
Shares: Childhood and youth, Social life and customs, Biography & Memoir
Coming of Age in Mississippi
Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South.
In this now classic autobiography, she details the sights, smells, and suffering of growing up in a racist society and candidly reveals the soul of the black girl who had the courage to challenge it. The result is a…
Shares: Childhood and youth, Coming-of-age, Biography & Memoir
Sovereign
The third installment of C. J. Sansom's acclaimed Matthew Shardlake mystery seriesC. J . Sansom has garnered a wider audience and increased critical praise with each new novel published. His first book in the Matthew Shardlake series, Dissolution, was selected by P. D. James in The Wall Street Journal as one of her top-five all-time favorite books. Now in Sovereign, Shardlake and his loyal…
Shares: London, Great Britain
Belinda
Maria Edgeworth won the admiration of her contemporaries Jane Austen and Walter Scott as well as later writers such as Thackeray and Turgenev. In Belinda (1801) she tackles issues of gender and race in a manner at once comic and thought-provoking. Braving the perils of the marriage market, Belinda learns to think for herself as the examples of her friends prove singularly unreliable.
Edgeworth's…
Shares: London, Coming-of-age
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
She was born Marguerite, but her brother Bailey nicknamed her Maya ("mine"). As little children they were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Their early world revolved around this remarkable woman and the Store she ran for the black community. White people were more than strangers - they were from another planet. And yet, even unseen they ruled.
The Store was a microcosm…
Shares: Childhood and youth, Social life and customs, Biography & Memoir
Angela's Ashes
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish…
Shares: Childhood and youth, Social life and customs, Biography & Memoir
London Belles
London Belles is a tale of four very different young women thrown together by war. Finding freedom and independence – as well as love, passion and heartbreak – for the very first time, a unique bond is formed as the hostilities take their toll on Britain.United by chance, bound together in times of needWhen tragedy strikes, Olive is forced to seek lodgers. Three girls come knocking at her door,…
Shares: London, Social life and customs
Stand before your God
Watkins re-creates the joy and pain of growing up as he recalls his own experiences at two of Britain's greatest boarding schools, Dragon and Eton.
Shares: Childhood and youth, Biography & Memoir
Les confessions
Je forme une entreprise qui n'eut jamais d'exemple, et dont l'execution n'aura point d'imitateur. Je veux montrer a mes semblables un homme dans toute la verite de la nature; et cet homme, ce sera moi. Moi seul. Je sens mon coeur, et je connais les hommes. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai vus; j'ose croire n'etre fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent. Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins…
Shares: Childhood and youth, Biography & Memoir
Seven Years in Tibet (Sieben Jahre in Tibet)
An account of an Austrian mountain climber's escape from a British internment camp in India during World War II and his twenty-one-month journey through the Himalayas to safety in the Forbidden City of Lhasa in Tibet.
Shares: Childhood and youth, Social life and customs, Biography & Memoir
The Immorality Engine
On the surface, life is going well for Victorian special agent Sir Maurice Newbury, who has brilliantly solved several nigh-impossible cases for Queen Victoria with his indomitable assistant, Miss Veronica Hobbes, by his side. But these facts haven't stopped Newbury from succumbing increasingly frequently to his dire flirtation with the lure of opium. His addiction is fueled in part by his…
Shares: London, Great Britain