Books like Ways of Dying
Toloki, a professional mourner in a South African city in the violent years before democracy, meets Noria, a woman from his village, at the funeral of her son.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Ways of Dying
The Promise
Four funerals, each in a different decade, mark the decline of the Swarts, a white South African family, and their failure to keep the promise to give their Black maid, Salome, the house she lives in.
Harold and Maude
Harold Chasen, a rich nineteen-year-old who stages fake suicides to shock his mother and goes to strangers' funerals, meets Maude, a seventy-nine-year-old who goes to funerals too and loves being alive.
The Pickup
Julie, a white woman from a wealthy Johannesburg family, falls for the Arab mechanic who fixes her car, an illegal immigrant, and when he is ordered out of the country she goes with him.
My Son's Story
Will, the teenage son of a coloured schoolteacher turned activist, sees his father coming out of a cinema with his white mistress.
Cry, the Beloved Country
Stephen Kumalo, an elderly Zulu priest in the hills of Natal, travels to Johannesburg to look for his sister, who has stopped writing, and his son Absalom, who went to the city and never came back.
Love in the Big City
A young gay writer in Seoul makes his way through flatmates, flings, and illness, in a novel-in-stories about finding and losing love in the city.
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
In the minutes after her murder, as her brain slowly shuts down, Leila, a sex worker in Istanbul, remembers her life, and her five friends set out to give her a proper burial.
The Bread of Those Early Years
Walter Fendrich, who went hungry in the bombed-out cities after the war and now has money and a girlfriend, is sent to meet a girl from his home town at the station and falls for her on sight.
We Need New Names
Darling, ten, roams a Zimbabwean shantytown called Paradise with her friends, stealing guavas, until she goes to live with her aunt in Michigan.
Family Lore
Flor Marte, who has always known when people are about to die, announces that she wants a living wake, and over the three days before it her sisters and their daughters gather in New York and wonder what she has foreseen.
Dreaming in Cuban
Three generations of women of the del Pino family, a grandmother loyal to Castro in Cuba and her daughters and granddaughter in Brooklyn and Havana, are divided by politics and the sea.
Simpatía
A film writer in a collapsing Caracas inherits his father-in-law’s mansion on the condition that he turn it into a shelter for the dogs the exiled middle class has left behind.