What to read after “The Train Was on Time” by Heinrich Böll: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Paul Baumer and his classmates enlist in the German army straight from school, urged on by a patriotic teacher. Trench life strips away everything they were taught, and the friends cling to each other as the war grinds them down.
Stevens, a butler at an English country house, sets out on a motoring trip in 1956 and looks back over decades of service. Recalling his employer's political misjudgements and his own missed chances with the housekeeper, he begins to see what a life given to duty has cost him.
Between 1941 and 1943 the German and French police arrested hundreds of women who had worked for the Resistance. Drawn from interviews and archives, this book follows 230 of them from prison in France onto the trains to Auschwitz, and the friendships that sustained them.
A doctor and poet grows up in late imperial Moscow and lives through revolution and civil war. Between his wife and Lara, whose path keeps crossing his, he tries to hold on to ordinary life and to his writing.
Port and Kit Moresby travel from New York to North Africa with their friend Tunner, hoping the trip will mend their marriage. As they move deeper into the Sahara, the heat, illness and emptiness of the landscape strip away the habits that held them together, and each of them drifts toward a different kind of loss.
A young woman in colonial Korea, Sunja, leaves home for Japan with a husband she barely knows and raises a family that lives as outsiders for generations. Through war and poverty, the household holds on to its dignity and its secrets.
Narrated by Death, the story follows Liesel Meminger, a girl sent to live with a foster family in Nazi Germany. She steals books, shares them with a Jewish man hiding in the basement, and grows up amid bombs, loss and small acts of kindness.
A Finnish student leaves Moscow by train for Mongolia, hoping to study ancient rock carvings and escape a failed affair. She shares compartment six with a loud, hard-drinking former soldier, and the long ride across Russia becomes an uneasy companionship.
On the Don steppe, a Cossack family is torn apart by war and revolution. Grigory's love for another man's wife and his shifting loyalties carry him through the First World War and the civil war that follows.
After Kristallnacht, a Jewish businessman escapes his Berlin apartment and begins moving from train to train across Germany. Unable to leave the country, he tries to hide his identity while the network of trains becomes both shelter and trap.
A plague kills nearly everyone on Earth. An ecologist emerges from the mountains to find empty cities and a few survivors, and spends the rest of his life watching a new, smaller society take shape without the old world's machinery.
Laid up in hospital with a broken leg, Inspector Alan Grant is bored until he is given a portrait of Richard III. Wondering whether the king really murdered the princes in the Tower, he reopens a five-hundred-year-old case from his bed, working only from books.
A middle-aged loner who feels half man and half wolf drifts through a city he despises, until a chance encounter leads him to a strange magic theatre. There he confronts the many selves inside him. A novel about alienation, desire and finding one's way back to life.
Ursula Todd is born in 1910 and dies, then is born again in the same English house. Over many lives she survives accidents, war and bad choices, and begins to sense that her repetitions might be leading somewhere.
Arkady Kirsanov returns from university to his father's country estate with his friend Bazarov, a self-declared nihilist. Bazarov's rejection of art, romance and authority clashes with the older generation, and a stay with the widowed Anna Odintsova and a duel force both friends to test the ideas they preach.
Across the years of Napoleon's campaigns, the lives of several Russian families intertwine. Pierre searches for a purpose, Prince Andrei for glory and love, and Natasha grows up amid courtship and loss, while the war moves steadily toward the burning of Moscow.
Expelled from prep school and drifting through New York before going home, teenager Holden Caulfield narrates a few days of restless encounters. He rails against adults he calls phonies while quietly grieving a brother and his own place in the world.
During the German occupation of France, a blind girl and her father flee Paris for the walled city of Saint-Malo, carrying a valuable jewel. In Germany, an orphan with a gift for radio repairs is drawn into the war machine. Their separate paths move slowly toward the same besieged town in August 1944.
Alexias comes of age in Athens during the Peloponnesian War. He trains in the palaestra, competes at the Olympic games, fights for his city, and falls in love with Lysis, a young man shaped by Socrates. Their bond is tested by war, politics, and the demands of Athenian society.
An aging Cuban fisherman, Santiago, has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. When a huge marlin finally takes his line far out to sea, he must hold on through a long, painful contest of endurance and will.
A young man joins the mobile infantry and is shaped into a soldier through brutal training and interstellar war. Told as his reflections on duty, citizenship and violence, the novel follows his rise from recruit to officer against an enemy unlike humanity.
In the imperial capital of 1905, a student is drawn into a plot to kill a high official who is his own father. Over a few feverish days, the city's streets and the characters' minds come apart.
Okonkwo, a respected wrestler and farmer in a Nigerian village, builds his standing on a fear of appearing weak. When he is exiled and, years later, British missionaries and officials arrive, the customs that shaped him begin to collapse around him and his people.
Mariam and Laila, born a generation apart in Afghanistan, are forced together by marriage to the same violent man. Through decades of war and loss, the two women become each other's only home and take great risks for the chance of a different life.
Start with “All Quiet on the Western Front”, “The Remains of the Day”, “A Train in Winter”: they are the closest to “The Train Was on Time” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “The Train Was on Time” these are Train Journey, War Fiction, Melancholic), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “A Train in Winter”, “Pachinko”, “The Book Thief”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
