Books like The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

An experimental novel by William Faulkner that tells the same events from four distinct perspectives, each with a unique narrative style, charting the decline of a once‑wealthy Southern family.

Thomas Mann’s classic novel traces four generations of the wealthy Buddenbrook family in 19th‑century Lübeck, illustrating the rise and decline of German bourgeois society.

In pre‑World War II Vienna, Jewish violinist Elisa Lindheim, who uses an Aryan pseudonym, tours Germany despite a 1935 law banning Jewish musicians. New York Times reporter John Murphy, involved in a plot to topple Hitler, becomes entangled with the Jewish underground, weaving intrigue and danger.

In 1910 Vienna, a brutal murder of an 18‑year‑old girl spurs a rationalist inspector and his Hungarian wife to pursue a case driven by gendered intuition, using the absence of figs in the city as the key clue.

A post‑war Viennese drama that follows several exiles returning to a shattered city as Austria rebuilds its identity after the 1945 war.

"The Am Spiegelgrund clinic, in glittering Vienna, masqueraded as a well-intentioned reform school for wayward boys and girls and a home for chronically ill children. The reality, however, was very different: in the wake of Germany's annexation of Austria on the eve of World War II, its doctors, nurses, and teachers created a monstrous parody of the institution's benign-sounding brief. The Nazi regime's euthanasia program would come to determine the fate of many of the clinic's inhabitants.Through the eyes of a child inmate, Adrian Ziegler, and a nurse, Anna Katschenka, Steve Sem-Sandberg, the author of the award-winning The Emperor of Lies, explores the very meaning of survival. An absorbing, emotionally overwhelming novel, rich in incident and character, The Chosen Ones is obliquely illuminated by the author's sharp sense of the absurd. Passionately serious, meticulously researched, and deeply profound, this extraordinary and dramatic novel bears witness to oppression and injustice, and offers invaluable and necessary insight into an intolerable chapter in Austria's past"--

A 16th‑century voyage through war‑torn Europe, guided by an elephant named Solomon and his keeper Subhro, as they accompany Archduke Maximilian and his new bride from Portugal to Vienna.