Books like Palace of Desire
In 1920s Cairo, the Abd al-Jawad children are growing up, and Kamal, the youngest son, falls hopelessly in love with the daughter of a rich, Westernised family.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Palace of Desire
The Harafish
The saga of the al-Nagi family, generations of champions and villains who rise and fall as protectors of a Cairo alley, beginning with Ashur, a foundling raised by a blind sheikh.
Miramar
At a faded pension in Alexandria kept by an old Greek woman, four men take turns telling the story of Zohra, the young country girl who works as the maid.
Celestial Bodies
Three sisters in the Omani village of al-Awafi, Mayya, Asma and Khawla, marry and live through their country's changes, from the last years of slavery to the coming of oil money.
The Family Moskat
The wealthy Moskat family of Warsaw and its old patriarch Meshulam, from the turn of the century to the German bombardment of 1939.
Lucky Per
Per Sidenius, the rebellious son of a provincial Lutheran pastor, goes to Copenhagen to become an engineer with a grand scheme of canals and harbours, and wins a rich Jewish family's daughter.
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.
Go Tell It on the Mountain
On his fourteenth birthday in 1930s Harlem, John Grimes struggles with his stern preacher father, the church and his own desires, while the prayers of his family reveal the histories that shaped them.
Familiaris
In the years after the First World War, John Sawtelle, a tinkerer fired from a Wisconsin car factory, and his wife, Mary, buy a farm in the forests of northern Wisconsin, where John begins to breed dogs.
The Woman from Tantoura
A Palestinian woman narrates her life from the 1948 Nakba through decades of displacement.
Growth of the Soil
Isak, a huge, silent man, walks into the empty Norwegian uplands and clears a farm from nothing, and a woman with a harelip comes to live with him.
Madonna in a Fur Coat
Raif Efendi, a meek clerk in Ankara, leaves behind a notebook that tells of his youth in Berlin in the 1920s and his love for Maria Puder, a painter.
The Forsyte Saga
Three novels following the Forsytes, a wealthy London family of the late Victorian age, beginning with Soames, a solicitor who treats his beautiful wife Irene as one more of his possessions.