Oops. Serves me right for correcting you when I hadn't even recalled Dame Judi was in the movie!

Been recommending this book for years; this is a quiet, subtle gem, and the charm of it, is its sincerity and warmth.

The movie is absolutely true to the book, though it's Anne Bancroft, not Judi Dench - Hopkins is wonderful in it.

No! Do read it - or at least, try a few chapters. I didn't like it but I don't regret reading it, and lots of people do like it. It's all a matter of taste and preference.

They wouldn't need to have an attraction - that might complicate it too much - but it would be good if they had some sort of relationship...there didn't seem to be any reason, apart from a mix of ego and boredom, as to why they were 'duelling' anyway.

Morgenstern can't 'do' character, the only character who had a slight bit of personality was Friedrich, and she killed him off!

Read it in my bookclub recently, and we all disliked it [I really disliked it, had to force myself to read it.]

I don't like books with circuses, clowns etc in anyway, so I started with a prejudice...

Like wading through a sticky sea of sugary, sickly frosting. Too much description, too elaborate, 1-dimensional boring characters, insta-love, anti-climatic ending, I could go on but you get the idea. A lot of people like it though, so that's fine. Just don't ask me to read it again, I'd rather stick pins in my eyeballs.

Of Clarke's two novels to date, one - Jonathan Strange - is sort of placed in the Napoleonic era [ but it is not an 'historical' novel] and Piranesi is contemporary [again, sort of.]

LOTR isn't really slice of life, but it's well-written. And of course, is the classic 'quest' story. So - it's whatever you want to go for!

As a very rough guide, the more 'literary' the book is [rather than a book that's been designed to sit very happily on the fantasy shelf], the more unusual the book is and more willing it is to avoid the epic cliches/quest etc tropes.

So you could try 'literary fantasy/scifi'?

I know you don't want specific titles, but as I'm the same as you in that I don't want to read the same old cliches over and over, I'd go for an author like Susanna Clarke [eg Piranesi] which goes off on its own path. It's certainly slice of life but a very, very odd life!