Historical fiction · Similar reads

Books like The Book Thief

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is about words and power, death and grief, human kindness in extremity. If that's what drew you in, here are 6 books that share its DNA — each summarized on Superbook, and ready to chat with in the app.

  1. All Quiet on the Western Front
    All Quiet on the Western Front

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    All Quiet on the Western Front

    Erich Maria Remarque · History

    All Quiet on the Western Front follows Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier who enlists with his classmates during the First World War after being swept up in patriotic speeches.

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  2. Angela's Ashes
    Angela's Ashes

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    Angela's Ashes

    Frank McCourt · Memoir

    Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's memoir of a catastrophically impoverished Irish Catholic childhood, first in Brooklyn and then in Limerick, during the 1930s and 1940s.

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  3. Homage to Catalonia
    Homage to Catalonia

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    Homage to Catalonia

    George Orwell · Memoir

    Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's firsthand account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, which he joined in late 1936 as a volunteer with the POUM militia — a Trotskyist revolutionary organization that was later suppressed by the Soviet-backed Stalinist wing of the Republican forces.

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  4. The Bell Jar
    The Bell Jar

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    The Bell Jar

    Sylvia Plath · Memoir

    The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel, published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, one month before Plath's death.

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  5. Beloved
    Beloved

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    Beloved

    Toni Morrison · Literary fiction

    Beloved is set in post-Civil War Ohio, where Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, lives with her daughter Denver in a house shadowed by the ghost of a baby she killed rather than let be taken back into slavery.

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  6. A Gentleman in Moscow
    A Gentleman in Moscow

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    A Gentleman in Moscow

    Amor Towles · Historical fiction

    In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced by a Bolshevik tribunal — not to death, but to permanent house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel.

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