Books like Skylark
An ageing provincial couple send their plain daughter to relatives for a week and discover, in her absence, a life they had hidden even from themselves.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Skylark
Iza's Ballad
After her father's death, a well-meaning Budapest doctor brings her widowed mother to live in her modern flat and slowly dissolves the old woman's place in the world.
Embers
Two old friends meet after 41 years to confront betrayal, love, and a night that ended everything.
The Sound of the Mountain
An ageing patriarch in postwar Japan listens to the mountain and contemplates his family's slow dissolution, beauty, and the nearness of death.
The Cherry Orchard
An aristocratic family's estate is sold to a merchant, and the cherry orchard they can't save becomes a symbol of everything that changes when a social order dies.
No One Writes to the Colonel
In a Colombian river town in 1956, an old colonel and his asthmatic wife wait in poverty for the veteran's pension he was promised long ago, and keep alive the fighting cock that belonged to their dead son.
Extinctions
Frederick Lothian, a retired engineer, has moved into a retirement village to be left alone, and his neighbour Jan refuses to let him.
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.
Olive Kitteridge
Thirteen linked stories circle Olive Kitteridge, a fierce, difficult maths teacher in coastal Maine, whose small cruelties and unexpected tenderness touch a whole town.
The Optimist's Daughter
A woman returns to Mississippi after her father's death and has to contend with his young second wife and her own memories of home.
Strange Weather in Tokyo
A woman develops a tender relationship with her former high school teacher over sake and seasonal food.
The Desert of Love
In a Paris bar, Raymond Courrèges, now in his thirties, sees again Maria Cross, the kept woman both he and his father, a Bordeaux doctor, fell for years before.
Whistler
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fifty-three-year-old Daphne Fuller's husband thinks they are being followed, and the man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, whom she has not seen in almost forty-five years; their reunion takes her back to the year she was nine.