Books like The smell of apples

A disgraced professor's retreat to his daughter's farm becomes a reckoning with post-apartheid South Africa, when an act of violence overturns every belief he brought with him.

A lyrical, sorrow-steeped novel of a Zulu pastor's search for his son through a country broken by racial injustice — prose that reads like scripture, grief braided with hope.

A sweeping coming-of-age epic tracking a young boy's survival and self-invention across wartime South Africa, buoyed by an unforgettable ensemble of mentors.

A world-weary Indian merchant witnesses the unraveling of post-colonial order, experiencing deepening estrangement from both the collapsing society around him and his own displaced identity.

A boy's-eye account of wartime Shanghai and internment, filtered through a fictionalized autobiographical lens that turns survival and displacement into a study of childhood under empire's collapse.

A close literary relative — matched on how it reads, with unhurried, immersive pacing.

A quiet, devastating account of the 1937 Parsley Massacre told through a Haitian maid's love and loss on the Dominican border — intimate in scale, historical in weight, and built on endurance rather than plot momentum.

A shattering meditation on how desire blinds us to complicity, and how memory becomes a site of ethical reckoning across generations.

A somber, unflinching account of Hiroshima survivors coping with radiation sickness and the slow erosion of their futures — quiet devastation rather than dramatic incident.

A fairy tale and a Holocaust history braid together as a granddaughter unravels what her grandmother's Briar Rose story really meant.