Books like Dial A for Aunties

01

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 contemporary 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 contemporary fiction read.

03

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan · Literary fiction

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel told in thirteen chapters, each from a different point of view and sometimes in a radically different form — including one chapter composed entirely as a PowerPoint presentation.

A kindred contemporary fiction read.

04

Bel Canto

Ann Patchett · Literary fiction

Bel Canto opens at a birthday party in an unnamed South American country: a Japanese industrialist, Hosokawa, is celebrating in the private residence of the country's vice president, the sole attraction being a performance by his favorite soprano, Roxane Coss.

A kindred contemporary fiction read.

05

Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King

Lloyd Bradley · History

Lloyd Bradley's Bass Culture is the definitive popular history of Jamaican music from the late 1940s through the 1990s, tracing the full arc from mento and ska through rocksteady, reggae, dancehall, and ragga.

Both dig into cultural identity.

06

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides · Literary fiction

Cal Stephanides is a middle-aged man living in Berlin who decides to tell the whole story — not just his own life, but the lives of his Greek immigrant grandparents and parents, all the way back to the incest that introduced a recessive gene into his bloodline and the gene that made Cal intersex.

Both dig into immigrant experience.

07

Run

Ann Patchett · Literary fiction

Run is set over the course of a single night in Boston, threading through the lives of the Doyle family — Bernard Doyle, a former mayor and widower, and his two adopted Black sons, Tip and Teddy.

Both dig into family and obligation.

08

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Samuel P. Huntington · History

Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996, is an expansion of a 1993 Foreign Affairs essay that generated more response than almost any article in that journal's history.

Both dig into cultural identity.

09

The Giver of Stars

Jojo Moyes · Historical fiction

In Depression-era Kentucky, a group of women becomes part of Eleanor Roosevelt's Pack Horse Library project — riding mules and horses through mountain terrain to deliver books to isolated communities.

Both dig into female solidarity.

10

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka · Literary fiction

The Metamorphosis begins with one of the most famous sentences in world literature: Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant insect.

Both dig into family and obligation.

11

A Man Called Ove

Fredrik Backman · Contemporary fiction

A Man Called Ove opens in a Swedish suburb where a fifty-nine-year-old man named Ove has just been forced into early retirement.

A kindred contemporary fiction read.

12

Anxious People

Fredrik Backman · Contemporary fiction

Anxious People begins with a failed bank robbery.

A kindred contemporary fiction read.