Books like A Fine Balance

01

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell · Memoir

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's firsthand account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, which he joined in late 1936 as a volunteer with the POUM militia — a Trotskyist revolutionary organization that was later suppressed by the Soviet-backed Stalinist wing of the Republican forces.

A kindred literary fiction read.

02

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy · Literary fiction

War and Peace follows five aristocratic Russian families across fifteen years of Napoleonic war and peace, from the drawing rooms of St.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

A kindred literary fiction read.

04

The Warmth of Other Suns

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's account of the Great Migration — the movement of six million Black Americans from the South to the North and West between 1915 and 1970 — is one of the most important works of narrative nonfiction published in the twenty-first century.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

White Teeth

Zadie Smith · Literary fiction

White Teeth begins with two men — Archie Jones, a Englishman of no particular distinction, and Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi immigrant and his oldest friend — who met during the last days of the Second World War.

Both dig into friendship across difference.

06

Good Omens

Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman · Fantasy

Good Omens is a comic fantasy novel about the impending apocalypse and the attempts of an angel and a demon — Aziraphale and Crowley, who have been stationed on Earth since the Beginning — to prevent it.

Both dig into friendship across difference.

07

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir · Science fiction

Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, where he is, or why he's there.

Both dig into friendship across difference.

08

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee · Science

The Emperor of All Maladies is Siddhartha Mukherjee's account of cancer from antiquity to the present — its biology, its treatments, its false dawns, and the scientists and patients caught in the middle of each.

Both dig into human resilience.

09

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin · Science fiction

The Left Hand of Darkness follows Genly Ai, an envoy from a loose interstellar federation called the Ekumen, who has been sent alone to the planet Gethen — also called Winter — to persuade its nations to join.

Both dig into friendship across difference.

10

The Paris Library

Janet Skeslien Charles · Historical fiction

The Paris Library moves between two timelines: Paris in 1939–1944, where young Odile Souchet becomes a librarian at the American Library of Paris just as war is approaching; and rural Montana in the 1980s, where a teenage girl named Lily befriends her French neighbor, the now-elderly Odile, and slowly uncovers the history Odile has never spoken about.

Both dig into friendship across difference.

11

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway · Literary fiction

A Farewell to Arms is set during the First World War in northern Italy and follows Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps, who falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse.

A kindred literary fiction read.

12

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · Literary fiction

A Little Life follows four men from college into middle age and beyond — Willem, an actor; JB, a painter; Malcolm, an architect; and Jude, a lawyer with a past that is revealed in increasingly devastating detail as the novel progresses.

A kindred literary fiction read.