Books like Beloved

01

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

Both dig into identity.

02

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Ibram X. Kendi · History

Stamped from the Beginning is Ibram X.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander · Politics

Michelle Alexander's central argument is stark: the United States has not ended racial caste, it has merely redesigned it.

A kindred literary fiction read.

04

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Ishmael Beah · Memoir

Ishmael Beah was twelve years old when the Sierra Leone civil war reached his village and he was separated from his family.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

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.

06

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain · Literary fiction

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins where Tom Sawyer left off — Huck Finn, the outcast son of the town drunk, has been taken in and given a respectable life he doesn't want.

Both dig into identity.

07

In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust · Literary fiction

In Search of Lost Time is a seven-volume novel published between 1913 and 1927 in which the unnamed narrator, looking back from late middle age, attempts to recover a life that has slipped away.

Both dig into identity.

08

Life of Pi

Yann Martel · Literary fiction

Life of Pi opens in Pondicherry, India, where Pi Patel grows up as the son of a zookeeper, accumulating an unorthodox religious education — he practices Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam simultaneously, to the bafflement of the adults around him.

Both dig into identity.

09

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri · Literary fiction

The Namesake follows the Ganguli family across three decades, beginning with Ashoke and Ashima's arranged marriage and their immigration from Calcutta to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and extending into the American adulthood of their son, Gogol.

Both dig into identity.

10

The Story of the Lost Child

Elena Ferrante · Literary fiction

The Story of the Lost Child is the fourth and final volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, covering roughly thirty years of Elena Greco's life from the late 1970s through the early 2010s.

Both dig into motherhood.

11

Ulysses

James Joyce · Literary fiction

Ulysses takes place on a single day — June 16, 1904 — in Dublin, following three characters: Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser; his wife Molly; and Stephen Dedalus, the young writer from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Both dig into identity.

12

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers · Memoir

Dave Eggers's debut memoir about losing both parents to cancer within five weeks and raising his younger brother Toph while trying to start a literary magazine in San Francisco in the mid-1990s arrived in 2000 with unusual self-consciousness about its own nature.

Both dig into identity.