Books like Heaven
Two 14-year-olds in a Tokyo school, both targets of relentless bullying, find each other and argue about whether suffering has meaning.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Heaven
Beneath the Wheel
Hans Giebenrath, the gifted son of a Black Forest merchant, is pushed by his father and teachers into the elite Maulbronn seminary, where a rebellious friend shows him another way to live.
Kokoro
A student in Meiji-era Tokyo befriends a withdrawn older man he calls Sensei, whose long final letter reveals the betrayal that hollowed out his life.
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
Near the end of the Second World War, a group of reformatory boys evacuated to a remote mountain village are left behind there when the villagers flee a plague.
A Separate Peace
A New England boys' school in the last summer of the Second World War, and a narrator who lives the rest of his life trying to understand what he did on a tree branch to the boy he loved.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
A gang of boys worship a sailor for embodying the heroic ideal, but when the sailor softens into domesticity, they decide he must be punished.
The Changeling
Kogito Choko, an ageing novelist, listens night after night to the tapes left by his brother-in-law, a famous film director who has jumped from a building, and tries to understand why.
The Nickel Boys
Two Black boys at a reform school in Jim Crow Florida endure systematic brutality, told in spare prose based on a real institution's buried history.
Confessions
On her last day of teaching, middle-school teacher Yuko Moriguchi tells her class that her four-year-old daughter's death at the school pool was no accident, that two of the students in the room killed her, and that she has already taken her revenge.
Hear the Wind Sing
Murakami's debut: in the summer of 1970, a college student home on break drinks beer with his friend the Rat at J's Bar, meets a girl with nine fingers and listens to the radio, learning how to be alone.
Breasts and Eggs
Natsuko, a writer in Tokyo, hosts her older sister Makiko, who wants breast enlargement surgery, and Makiko's silent daughter Midoriko; years later, single and childless, Natsuko considers having a child by sperm donor.
Dear Martin
Justyce McAllister, a Black honour student at a mostly white Atlanta prep school, is handcuffed by a police officer while trying to help his drunk ex-girlfriend, and starts writing letters to Martin Luther King Jr. to work out how to live by his teachings.
Sweet Bean Paste
Sentaro, an ex-convict working off a debt at a Tokyo dorayaki stall, reluctantly hires Tokue, a woman in her seventies with misshapen hands, and her homemade bean paste starts drawing customers to his counter.