Books like Twelve bar blues by Patrick Neate

Never Let Me Go is a contemplative study of friendship, identity, and the ethical limits of science as it follows the lives of a group of students growing up in a quiet English boarding school.

A love story set in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, where Anne Elliot finds herself amidst the Regency era as her sister rents Miss Elliot's father's house, leading to an unexpected reunion with Captain Frederick Wentworth and the return of her beloved.

James Ellroy’s hard‑boiled crime novel follows detectives as they unravel Los Angeles’s darkest mystery, the unsolved murder of the Black Dahlia, blending gritty police work with atmospheric noir.

Thomas Hardy’s bleak final novel follows Jude Fawley, a stonemason from rural Wessex, whose search for faith, love and independence collides with society’s harsh conventions and leads to tragedy.

Samuel Butler’s 1903 novel, The Way of All Flesh, sharply critiques Victorian domestic life through a sardonic portrayal of a Christian family across generations.

Barchester Towers, the second novel of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire series, follows the clash of ambition, love and clerical politics in the cathedral city of Barchester.

A foundling named Tom Jones is raised by a benevolent landowner, growing into a kind-hearted young man whose love affair with a well-born daughter sparks class conflict. The novel, one of the first English-language works, explores themes of prostitution and promiscuity.

A collection of the Forsyte family novels by John Galsworthy, exploring middle‑class English life, social customs, and family dynamics through the saga of the fictitious Forsyte family.

Mickey Haller, a cynical Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer, tackles a high‑paying case that turns out to be far more dangerous than it first appears.

A gripping psychological suspense novel set in Dublin, focusing on two detectives investigating a series of murders in the woods.

Trilby follows Trilla O'Ferrall, a naïve artist's model in Paris who falls under the hypnotic spell of the sinister musician Svengali, who transforms her into Europe’s most dazzling soprano.

In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950--and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia's family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. "I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn't. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life."To Flavia the investigation is the stuff of science: full of possibilities, contradictions, and connections. Soon her father, a man raising his three daughters alone, is seized, accused of murder. And in a police cell, during a violent thunderstorm, Colonel de Luce tells his daughter an astounding story--of a schoolboy friendship turned ugly, of a priceless object that vanished in a bizarre and brazen act of thievery, of a Latin teacher who flung himself to his death from the school's tower thirty years before. Now Flavia is armed with more than enough knowledge to tie two distant deaths together, to examine new suspects, and begin a search that will lead her all the way to the King of England himself. Of this much the girl is sure: her father is innocent of murder--but protecting her and her sisters from something even worse....An enthralling mystery, a piercing depiction of class and society, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a masterfully told tale of deceptions--and a rich literary delight.From the Hardcover edition.

Generational saga of the Italian‑American Castelluca family in Roseto, Pennsylvania, where the village’s annual "Big Time" Queen pageant and the tides of love shape a young woman's dream and her enduring first love.

Hank Mitchell’s calm routine shatters when he, his brother Jacob, and their cynical accomplice Lou uncover an astonishing treasure that threatens to consume them with greed and danger.