Books like Cancer Ward
In 1955, in the cancer ward of a hospital in Soviet Central Asia, Oleg Kostoglotov, a former prisoner exiled for life, argues with his doctors and fellow patients about how to live and die.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Cancer Ward
In the First Circle
Over three days in December 1949, imprisoned scientists in a special prison outside Moscow work on secret projects for Stalin's police while a diplomat makes a dangerous phone call.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
From reveille to lights out, one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a peasant soldier serving ten years in a Soviet labour camp in the Kazakh steppe.
The Idiot
Prince Myshkin, a gentle epileptic returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, is drawn into the passions of a society he cannot read, caught between the beautiful, damaged Nastasya Filippovna and the proud Aglaya Yepanchin.
Fathers and Sons
A young nihilist clashes with his traditionalist host in pre-reform Russia, and the generational conflict becomes a portrait of an entire society on the verge of transformation.
Life and Fate
A Soviet physicist and his extended family move through Stalingrad, a German camp, the Lubyanka, and the Soviet state in a book Grossman wrote knowing it would be suppressed.
Darkness at Noon
Rubashov, an old Bolshevik who helped build the revolution, is arrested by the regime he served and interrogated in his cell, and the novel follows the logic that leads loyal men to confess to crimes they never committed.
The Thibaults
Two brothers, Antoine, a dutiful young doctor, and Jacques, a rebel who runs away from school, grow up under their overbearing Catholic father in Paris in the years before the First World War.
Anna Karenina
A married aristocrat's affair with a dashing officer unravels her life, her family, and her sanity against the backdrop of Russian high society.
Demons
A provincial Russian town is thrown into chaos by a small cell of revolutionaries, led by a manipulative young radical and orbiting the magnetic, hollow nobleman Stavrogin.
The Joke
A young Czech man plays a joke that gets him expelled from the Communist Party, and the consequences unfold across decades in Kundera's darkly comic debut.
Doctor Zhivago
A poet and a woman torn between him and a Bolshevik commander live through the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and the landscape of Russia becomes a character.
Ravelstein
Chick, an ageing writer, sets down the memoir he promised his friend Abe Ravelstein, a brilliant, extravagant Chicago professor whose book about the decline of the American mind has made him rich.