What are the top book recommendations for 'a novel of despair'?

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#1

"Jude Fawley, an intelligent and sensitive young Wessex schoolboy, dreams of studying at the famous university in Christminster, Hardy's fictional representation of Oxford. He embarks on years of private study, but his plans are thrown into disarray ... View details

ON AN EVENING IN the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried hi...
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#2

New York Times Notable Book of the Year

"An imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork" that vividly captures the Palestinian experience following the creation of the Israeli state ( New York Times Book Review )

After Palestine is ... View details

Umm Hassan came from al-Kweikat, her village in Galilee, to become the only midwife in Shatila – a woman of uncertain age and without children. I only knew her when she was old, with stooped shoulders...
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#3

A stunning "portrait of the enduring grace of friendship" (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.

A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

A MAN BOOKER PRIZE ... View details

THE ELEVENTH APARTMENT had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and ...
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#4

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

The searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. I... View details

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone be...
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#5

We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ulti... View details

ON JANUARY 27, 2006, the sixty-first anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, where 1.5 million people died, nations around the world observed the first International Holocaust Remem...
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#6

Sylvia Plath's groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel offers an intimate, honest and often wrenching glimpse into mental illness. The Bell Jar broke the boundaries between fiction and reality and helped cement Sylvia Plath's place as an enduring ... View details

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, a...
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#7

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west."

Based on historical events that took place on the ... View details

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few ...
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#8

Orwell's classic dystopian fiction warns us of our future, and deals with issues that speak to multiple dangers faced by many nations today.

Winston Smith is a member of 'the party' and subject to constant surveillance by the eyes of Big Brother, th... View details

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors ...
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#9

#1 New York Times bestseller

An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from "the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction" (New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss.

In Margaret Atwood's dystopia... View details

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets ...
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#10

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential... View details

3 E.T.A. is laid out as a cardioid, with the four main inward-facing bldgs. convexly rounded at the back and sides to yield a cardioid's curve, with the tennis courts and pavilions at the center and t...
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