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Noah's avatar

Some novels I think would seem real to you.

A Gentleman in Moscow: Amor Towels

A Soldier of the Great War: Mark Helprin

The Leopard: Giuseppe Lampedusa (not sure how contemporary this is to you but it is based off the authors lived experience/family history)

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Katy Carl's avatar

Have you tried any Zadie Smith? Now there is a novelist whose characters are connected, to place and to relation (so much so that her protagonists sometimes show up as minor characters in other novels) and who recognizes that actions have consequences. She was just 21 when her first novel was published and it has all the liveliness (and more) of the earliest writers of the English tradition--Defoe, Richardson--when “the novel” was still an odd creature caught halfway between the drama and the literary-journalistic account. She read everything in the tradition precociously and vibrantly--and it shows to advantage. I wonder what you’d make of White Teeth or Swing Time or NW.

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