Books like Ishmael
A man answers a newspaper advertisement from a teacher seeking a pupil with an earnest desire to save the world, finds that the teacher is a gorilla, and listens as he explains, by question and answer, the story his culture has been living.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Ishmael
Sophie's World
Fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen starts receiving anonymous letters that walk her, one philosopher at a time, through the history of Western thought, and discovers that she may be inside someone else's book.
The Childhood of Jesus
A man called Simón and a boy called David arrive by boat in Novilla, a city whose people have been washed clean of their memories, and Simón sets out to find the boy's mother.
The Overstory
Nine Americans, among them an artist whose family has photographed the same chestnut tree for generations and a scientist who discovers that trees communicate, are drawn together by trees and into a last stand to save the old-growth forests.
Atlas Shrugged
America's industrialists go on strike against a creeping socialist state, and a railroad heiress and a copper magnate chase the man pulling them off the grid in an enormous novel that is also a philosophical manifesto.
The Measure
One morning everyone in the world over twenty-two wakes to find a box at the door holding a string, and the length of each string turns out to show how long its owner will live.
The Passenger
In 1980, Bobby Western, a salvage diver in New Orleans, dives on a crashed private jet and finds that one passenger is missing, and soon men in suits come asking questions, while he is haunted by his brilliant dead sister.
The Man with the Compound Eyes
As a vast island of rubbish crashes into the east coast of Taiwan, Alice, a grieving academic, meets Atile'i, a young man from a mythical island who arrived on it.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A prophet comes down from ten years alone on a mountain, convinced that God is dead, to teach the crowds that humanity is something to be overcome, in a book of speeches, parables and songs.
Black Beauty
A well-bred English carriage horse narrates his own life across every station of Victorian horse ownership, from country estate to London cab, in the book that rewrote British animal-welfare law.
Playground
Four strangers on a Pacific island confront their pasts and each other, and the ocean becomes a stage for Powers' latest meditation on human connection and ecological grief.
Elizabeth Costello
Elizabeth Costello, an ageing Australian novelist, travels to give lectures and receive prizes, and in each place argues about animals, evil and the life of the mind.
The Alchemist
An Andalusian shepherd boy travels from Spain to the Egyptian pyramids following a recurring dream, learning that the treasure he seeks was always within reach.