Books like A dictionary of mutual understanding by Jackie Copleton

The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. “The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —The New York Times

Louisa May Alcotts classic novel, set during the Civil War, has always captivated even the most reluctant readers. Little girls, especially, love following the adventures of the four March sisters--Meg, Beth, Amy, and most of all, the tomboy Jo--as they experience the joys and disappointments, tragedies and triumphs, of growing up. This simpler version captures all the charm and warmth of the original.

Despite their differences, sisters Vianne and Isabelle have always been close. Younger, bolder Isabelle lives in Paris while Vianne is content with life in the French countryside with her husband Antoine and their daughter. But when the Second World War strikes, Antoine is sent off to fight and Vianne finds herself isolated so Isabelle is sent by their father to help her. As the war progresses, the sisters' relationship and strength are tested. With life changing in unbelievably horrific ways, Vianne and Isabelle will find themselves facing frightening situations and responding in ways they never thought possible as bravery and resistance take different forms in each of their actions.

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

The classic tale of Hawkeye—Natty Bumppo—the frontier scout who turned his back on "civilization," and his friendship with a Mohican warrior as they escort two sisters through the dangerous wilderness of Indian country in frontier America.

The Orphan Master's Son is a 2012 novel by American author Adam Johnson. It deals with intertwined themes of propaganda, identity, and state power in North Korea. The novel was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

De dochter van een Griekse dokter wordt tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog gescheiden van haar geliefde, een kapitein in het Italiaanse leger.

Vigorous, self-reliant, amazingly resourceful, and moral, Natty Bumppo is the prototype of the Western hero. A faultless arbiter of wilderness justice, he hates middle-class hypocrisy. But he finds his love divided between the woman he has pledged to protect on a treacherous journey and the untouched forest that sustains him in his beliefs. A fast-paced narrative full of adventure and majestic descriptions of early frontier life, Indian raiders, and defenseless outposts, The Pathfinder set the standard for epic action literature.

"On a mountain above the clouds, in the central highlands of Malaya lived the man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.” Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about him, but a war would come, and a decade would pass before she travels up to the Garden of Evening Mists to see him, in 1951. A survivor of a brutal Japanese camp, she has spent the last few years helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, she asks the gardener, Nakamura Aritomo, to create a memorial garden for her sister who died in the camp. He refuses, but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice ‘until the monsoon’ so she can design a garden herself. Staying at the home of Magnus Pretorius, the owner of Majuba Tea Estate and a veteran of the Boer War, Yun Ling begins working in the Garden of Evening Mists. But outside in the surrounding jungles another war is raging. The Malayan Emergency is entering its darkest days, the communist-terrorists murdering planters and miners and their families, seeking to take over the country by any means, while the Malayan nationalists are fighting for independence from centuries of British colonial rule. But who is Nakamura Aritomo, and how did he come to be exiled from his homeland? And is the true reason how Yun Ling survived the Japanese camp connected to Aritomo and the Garden of Evening Mists? ([source][1]) [1]: http://www.tantwaneng.com/

The Deerslayer is the last book in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy, but acts as a prequel to the other novels. It begins with the rapid civilizing of New York, in which surrounds the following books take place. It introduces the hero of the Tales, Natty Bumppo, and his philosophy that every living thing should follow its own nature. He is contrasted to other, less conscientious, frontiersmen.

This work is called a 'romance,' because the incidents, characters, time, and scenery, are alike romantic. And in shaping this old tale, the Writer neither dares, nor desires, to claim for it the dignity or cumber it with the difficulty of an historic novel.

Polly visits her wealthy friend Fanny Shaw in the city and is overwhelmed by the fashionable and urban life they live--but also left out because of her "countrified" manners and outdated clothes.

Inspired by accusations of venality leveled at the men who captured Major Andre (Benedict Arnold's co-conspirator, executed for espionage in 1780), Cooper's novel centers on Harry Birch, a common man wrongly suspected by well-born Patriots of being a spy for the British. Even George Washington, who supports Birch, misreads the man, and when Washington offers him payment for information vital to the Patriot's cause, Birch scorns the money and asserts that his action were motivated not by financial reward, but by his devotion to the fight for independence. A historical adventure tale reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, The Spy is also a parable of the American experience, a reminder that the nation's survival, like its Revolution, depends on judging people by their actions, not their class or reputations.

When the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima, the Nakamura family lived at ground zero. Miraculously, the entire family of ten survived. The father stopped at a friend’s house for tea before going to work. … That saved him. One daughter was late for work hanging laundry. … That saved her. One son was working in the hull of a ship. … That saved him. You’ll read how the others were saved, often told by the twins and other family members in their own words. And remember this … Even the most impossible parts of the story, really happened.

The story of a Chinese mother and her daughter, who has been adopted by an American couple, tracing the very different cultural factors that compel them to consume a rare native tea that has shaped their family's destiny for generations.

A breathless adventure based on the real life story of Yoshiko Kawashima, Chinese princess turned Japanese spy Peking, 1914. Eight-year-old Eastern Jewel peers from behind a screen as her father, Prince Su makes love to a servant girl. Caught spying by her thirteenth sister, Eastern Jewel's sexual curiosity sees her banished to live with distant relatives in Tokyo, then forced into a passionless marriage in freezing Mongolia. Increasingly isolated, at night she is plagued by disturbing fantasies and unsettling dreams. But she refuses to be pinned down by anyone – least of all a man – and in the dazzling city of Shanghai she puts her thrill-seeking nature to work spying for the Japanese, spurning everything she once held dear... Based on the real-life story of Yoshiko Kawashima, Chinese princess turned ruthless Japanese spy, The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel is an intoxicating tale of sexual manipulation and self-discovery that spans three countries and a world war.