Books like Life & Times of Michael K
Michael K, a gardener with a harelip and a slow way of speaking, sets out across a South Africa torn by civil war to take his sick mother back to the countryside where she grew up, and keeps trying to live on his own terms, outside every camp.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Life & Times of Michael K
The Tartar Steppe
A young Italian officer is posted to a remote fortress on the edge of a desert where the enemy has been expected for a century, and he learns how to wait.
Disgrace
A disgraced South African professor retreats to his daughter's farm, where a violent attack forces both of them to reckon with the country's new power dynamics.
Age of Iron
In Cape Town in the late 1980s, Mrs Curren, a retired classics lecturer, learns she has terminal cancer on the day a homeless man moves into the alley beside her house, and begins a long letter to her daughter in America.
All the Names
A clerk in a municipal registry office becomes obsessed with finding the person behind a name, and the search leads him out of bureaucracy and into the world.
The Plague
When plague strikes the Algerian city of Oran, the town is sealed off, and Dr Rieux and a handful of others fight the epidemic, in a parable about how people behave when catastrophe strips away pretence.
The Silence
Five people gather in a Manhattan apartment on Super Bowl Sunday when the screens go black and the digital world stops, leaving only silence and each other.
The Light Pirate
Wanda is born during a hurricane in a small Florida town, and as she grows up the water keeps rising and the state, and her family, start to come apart.
The Wall
Five stories, among them a Republican prisoner in the Spanish Civil War spending the night before his execution, and a bourgeois boy who grows up to be a fascist.
July's People
When revolution breaks out in South Africa, the Smales, a liberal white family from Johannesburg, flee to the remote village of their servant, July, and must depend on him.
The Moviegoer
A young man in 1960s New Orleans drifts through movies, affairs, and existential malaise, searching for something real in a world of surfaces.
The Vaster Wilds
A colonial-era woman flees into the Virginia wilderness and must survive alone, carrying the weight of everything she's running from.
I Who Have Never Known Men
Thirty-nine women are held in an underground bunker, watched by silent guards, with no idea how they got there, and the youngest, who has never known anything else, narrates what happens when an alarm sounds one day and the guards vanish.