Books like Water for Elephants
An old man in a nursing home remembers the Depression summer he jumped a train into a second-rate travelling circus and the wife and the elephant he helped steal from it.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Water for Elephants
Billy Bathgate
A boy in 1930s New York enters the orbit of the gangster Dutch Schultz and discovers that the underworld's glamour conceals a machinery of violence.
Memoirs of a Geisha
A Kyoto fisherman's daughter sold into the Gion geisha houses in 1929 narrates the long apprenticeship and the long war that together teach her what a woman of the flower-and-willow world is for.
Euphoria
In 1933 three young anthropologists, one of them modelled on Margaret Mead, work along the Sepik River in New Guinea, and their rivalry and attraction become as consuming as the cultures they have come to study.
Next Year in Havana
In 2017 Marisol Ferrera travels from Miami to Cuba to scatter the ashes of her grandmother Elisa, who in 1958, as a sugar baron's daughter in Havana, fell in love with a young revolutionary.
The Green Mile
In 1932, Paul Edgecombe, head guard on Louisiana's death row, comes to believe that John Coffey, a giant, gentle inmate convicted of murdering two girls, has a miraculous power to heal.
The Farming of Bones
Amabelle Désir, a Haitian orphan working as a maid in the Dominican Republic, is in love with Sebastien, a cane cutter, in 1937, as Trujillo's soldiers begin the massacre of Haitians.
The Postman Always Rings Twice
Frank Chambers, a drifter, stops at a roadside diner in California run by a Greek immigrant and his young wife, Cora, and takes a job there because of her.
The Giver of Stars
Alice Wright marries a handsome American to escape her stifling life in England, and in Baileyville, Kentucky, in 1937, she joins the Packhorse Library, riding into the Appalachian mountains with books under the lead of the fiercely independent Margery O'Hare.
Rules of Civility
A young woman in Depression-era New York navigates the city's elite hotels and speakeasies, building a life through wit, nerve, and a single evening's lucky encounter.
Half a Lifelong Romance
Shen Shijun, a young engineer in 1930s Shanghai, falls for Gu Manzhen, a colleague, and over the years their love is pulled apart by family and circumstance.
Zoya
Countess Zoya Ossupov, a cousin of the Romanov children, flees the 1917 revolution with her grandmother to Paris, where she dances in the ballet to survive, and her life carries her on to New York through the Jazz Age, the Depression and another world war.
The Calamity Club
In Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, Meg, an eleven-year-old left by her mother at the county orphan asylum for girls, and Birdie, who has come to town to beg her socialite sister for money to save the family home, find their lives tangling together in the depths of the Depression.