Books like Giovanni's Room
An American in 1950s Paris confronts his homosexuality through a love affair with an Italian man, and the novel's claustrophobic intensity mirrors the impossibility of the closet.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Giovanni's Room
The Dud Avocado
A 21-year-old American heiress loosed on Paris with pink-dyed hair and an evening dress before breakfast blunders through affairs, parties, and a budding self-knowledge.
Nightwood
In Paris and Berlin between the wars, a circle of exiles orbits the restless, unreachable Robin Vote, and her abandoned lover Nora pours out her grief to a garrulous, unlicensed doctor in a novel of baroque, incantatory prose.
Another Country
After the suicide of Rufus Scott, a Black jazz drummer, his friends in late-1950s New York, Black and white, gay and straight, try to love one another across every line America draws.
The Paris Wife
Hadley Richardson, a shy twenty-eight-year-old from St. Louis, marries the young Ernest Hemingway after a whirlwind courtship and sails with him to Paris, where among the expatriate writers of the 1920s their marriage comes under strain.
The Sun Also Rises
American expatriates drink, fight, and fall apart in 1920s Paris and Pamplona, trying to find meaning after the war took it all away.
Sophie's Choice
In 1947 Brooklyn, Stingo, a young Southern writer, befriends his neighbours Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz, and her brilliant, unstable lover Nathan, and slowly learns the story Sophie has not been able to tell.
Jenny
In Rome, Jenny Winge, a twenty-eight-year-old Norwegian painter, accepts a proposal from a younger admirer she doesn't love, and back home in Kristiania his father comes into her life.
Atonement
A thirteen-year-old girl tells a lie that destroys two lives, then spends decades trying to atone through the only tool she has: writing.
Last Words from Montmartre
Twenty letters written by a young Taiwanese woman in Paris to the lover who has left her.
Hopscotch
An Argentine intellectual drifts through bohemian 1950s Paris with his lover La Maga and then returns to Buenos Aires, in a novel that can be read straight through or by hopping among its chapters.
Tender Is the Night
An American couple on the French Riviera watches their marriage disintegrate under the weight of alcoholism, infidelity, and the impossibility of recovering the past.
In the Café of Lost Youth
Four narrators circle the mystery of a young woman who vanished from a Paris café.