Books like The Life of Arseniev
Alexei Arseniev, the last son of a declining gentry family, recalls his childhood on a Russian estate, his schooling and his first love, in a novel close to Bunin's own life.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Life of Arseniev
Dark Avenues
Bunin's late stories of love, almost all of it brief, secret or ruined, set in the Russia of country estates, inns and railway stations he had lost.
Cosima
Deledda's late novel of her own girlhood in Nuoro, Sardinia, where a girl from a strict, conventional household secretly writes stories and dreams of a life in literature.
Speak, Memory
Nabokov remembers his St. Petersburg childhood and émigré youth, from butterfly summers on the family estate to Cambridge and Berlin, in prose built like a chess problem.
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
Seventy very short stories Kawabata wrote across his life, few longer than two pages, of chance meetings, love, death and the turning seasons.
The First Man
Jacques Cormery, forty, visits the grave in France of the father he never knew, killed in the First World War, and goes back to the poor Algiers neighbourhood where he grew up.
My Sister, Life
The poems Pasternak wrote in the summer of 1917, between the two revolutions, of love, rain, gardens and trains.
Ru
In short, luminous fragments, a woman remembers her childhood in Saigon, her flight from Vietnam by boat, a refugee camp in Malaysia and her new life in Quebec.
The Maid Silja
Silja, the last daughter of a ruined Finnish farming family, goes into service on farms and estates in the years around 1918, a young woman of quiet grace in hard times.
People in the Summer Night
Over one summer night in the Finnish countryside, a birth, a death and a few chance meetings pass among the people of a village.
The Issa Valley
Thomas, a boy growing up with his grandparents in a river valley in the Lithuanian countryside after the First World War, learns about nature, faith and death.
Tinkers
George Washington Crosby, an old repairer of clocks dying in his living room in Maine, remembers his father, an epileptic tinker who sold goods from a mule cart.
One Man's Bible
A Chinese writer in exile, in a Hong Kong hotel room with a German lover, remembers his life through the Cultural Revolution.