Books like Shame
In a country that is and is not Pakistan, two feuding politicians' families are bound by marriage to a girl whose blushes of shame turn into violence.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Shame
Midnight's Children
Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight as India became independent, discovers that he is telepathically linked to the other children born in that hour, and his life becomes tangled with the nation's.
The Autumn of the Patriarch
A decaying Caribbean dictator whose reign has lasted over a century recalls his lovers, his enemies, and the loneliness of absolute power.
Glory
In the animal kingdom of Jidada, the Old Horse who has ruled for decades is overthrown by his own deputy, and Destiny, a young goat back from exile, watches what happens next.
A Case of Exploding Mangoes
In 1988 Ali Shigri, a junior officer in the Pakistani air force whose father was found hanged, plots to kill President Zia, who is about to die in a plane crash anyway.
The Satanic Verses
Two Indian actors survive a terrorist attack on their plane over the English Channel, and Gibreel begins turning into the archangel Gabriel while Saladin turns into a goatish devil, in a novel about migration, identity and faith.
Seeing
The sequel to Blindness: the city holds an election where every ballot is cast blank, and the government's response reveals that democracy's greatest threat is its own defenders.
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
Ximen Nao, a landowner executed in the land reform of 1950, protests his innocence in hell and is sent back to his village as a donkey, then an ox, a pig, a dog and a monkey, to watch China change over fifty years.
The President
In a Central American capital ruled by a nameless dictator, the murder of an army officer sets off a wave of persecution that reaches the president's own favourite.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar de León, an overweight Dominican-American nerd in New Jersey who dreams of love and of being the next Tolkien, may be suffering under the fukú, a curse that has haunted his family for generations.
The House of the Spirits
Four generations of the Trueba family across a thinly-veiled twentieth-century Chile, from a telepathic grandmother to the military coup that takes her granddaughter into a basement.
Conversation in the Cathedral
Santiago Zavala, a journalist, runs into his father's old chauffeur Ambrosio in Lima, and over four hours in a bar called La Catedral they go back over the Odría dictatorship and what it did to them both.
Praiseworthy
In the small northern town of Praiseworthy, under a haze cloud that won't lift, Cause Man Steel dreams of moving goods across a warming world by donkey, while his son Tommyhawk dreams of a white future.