Books like The Passenger
In 1980, Bobby Western, a salvage diver in New Orleans, dives on a crashed private jet and finds that one passenger is missing, and soon men in suits come asking questions, while he is haunted by his brilliant dead sister.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Passenger
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.
When We Cease to Understand the World
Linked narratives enter the interior lives of 20th-century scientists and mathematicians at the edge of what knowledge can bear.
Nausea
A philosopher in 1930s France discovers that the sheer existence of objects fills him with revulsion, and his diary charts the horror of a world without meaning.
The Passion According to G.H.
G.H., a well-off sculptor in Rio de Janeiro, goes to tidy the room her maid has just left, finds a cockroach in the wardrobe, and in the hours that follow loses hold of everything she thought she was.
The Brothers Karamazov
Three brothers, the passionate Dmitri, the intellectual Ivan and the devout Alyosha, are drawn into their father's murder, in a novel that puts God, free will and Russia itself on trial.
The Childhood of Jesus
A man called Simón and a boy called David arrive by boat in Novilla, a city whose people have been washed clean of their memories, and Simón sets out to find the boy's mother.
Ishmael
A man answers a newspaper advertisement from a teacher seeking a pupil with an earnest desire to save the world, finds that the teacher is a gorilla, and listens as he explains, by question and answer, the story his culture has been living.
The Echo Maker
After a truck crash on a Nebraska road, a young man wakes believing his sister is an impostor, and a famous neurologist arrives as sandhill cranes gather on the Platte River.
The Gold Bug Variations
In 1957 a young geneticist tries to crack the genetic code, and in the 1980s a librarian and an art historian piece together his story, in a novel built on Bach's Goldberg Variations.
Jean Barois
Told largely in dialogue and documents, the life of Jean Barois, raised a Catholic, who loses his faith to science, founds a crusading review during the Dreyfus Affair and faces death.
Mr. Sammler's Planet
Artur Sammler, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust by climbing out of a mass grave, now in his seventies, watches the Upper West Side of the late 1960s through one good eye.
The Age of Reason
Over two days in Paris in the summer of 1938, Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher who prizes his freedom above everything, tries to raise the money for his mistress's abortion.