Books like Cutting for Stone

01

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.

A kindred literary fiction read.

02

Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt · Memoir

Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's memoir of a catastrophically impoverished Irish Catholic childhood, first in Brooklyn and then in Limerick, during the 1930s and 1940s.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

Educated: A Memoir

Tara Westover · Memoir

Educated is Tara Westover's memoir about growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and eventually earning a PhD in history from Cambridge University.

A kindred literary fiction read.

04

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot · Science

In 1951, a Black woman named Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

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.

A kindred literary fiction read.

06

My Struggle: Book 1

Karl Ove Knausgaard · Literary fiction

My Struggle: Book 1 opens with a long meditation on death — the image of a dead face on television, the cultural rituals that hide corpses from view — before settling into what the book is actually about: Knausgaard's childhood in Norway in the 1970s and early 80s, and his adult journey to clean out the house where his alcoholic father died.

Both dig into father and son.

07

The Covenant of Water

Abraham Verghese · Literary fiction

The Covenant of Water follows three generations of a South Indian Christian family from 1900 to 1977, centered on a community on the backwaters of Kerala.

Both dig into medicine and healing.

08

The Sellout

Paul Beatty · Literary fiction

The Sellout opens with its unnamed narrator — Me, a Black farmer from the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Dickens — appearing before the Supreme Court of the United States, charged with reintroducing slavery and segregation.

Both dig into father and son.

09

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.

10

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry · Literary fiction

A Fine Balance is set in an unnamed Indian city during Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977, a period of suspended democracy, forced sterilization, and slum clearances that is barely taught in the West and barely taught in India.

A kindred literary fiction read.

11

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.

12

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce · Literary fiction

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man traces the intellectual and spiritual development of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to the edge of adulthood, when he leaves Ireland to pursue life as an artist.

A kindred literary fiction read.