Books like East of Eden

01

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck · Literary fiction

The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's 1939 novel about the Joad family, Oklahoma sharecroppers forced off their land by the Dust Bowl and bank foreclosure, who load everything they own onto a truck and drive Route 66 to California in search of work and a decent life.

Steinbeck's other American epic, a family driven west and tested to breaking, the natural next step once East of Eden shows what he does at full scale.

02

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literary fiction

Three brothers — Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha Karamazov — orbit around their contemptible, sensuous father Fyodor, who is also a rival with Dmitri for the affections of a local woman.

Dostoevsky's brothers, a vile father, and the question of whether we are free to choose good, the philosophical engine of East of Eden running even hotter.

03

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez · Literary fiction

One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the founding, flourishing, and eventual obliteration of Macondo, a fictional Colombian town, through six generations of the Buendía family.

Garcia Marquez builds a family dynasty across generations, patterns of sin and love repeating down the bloodline exactly as they do for the Trasks.

04

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson · Literary fiction

Gilead is written as a long letter from John Ames, a 76-year-old Congregationalist minister in Iowa, to his seven-year-old son — a letter the boy will not read until he is grown and his father is long dead.

Marilynne Robinson writes fathers, sons, grace, and inheritance with a moral tenderness that lands hard for anyone moved by timshel and Adam's last word to Cal.

05

American Pastoral

Philip Roth · Literary fiction

American Pastoral opens with a narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, learning at a high school reunion about the life and death of Seymour "the Swede" Levov — a man who embodied postwar American success so completely he seemed almost allegorical.

Roth takes one family and the American dream and watches both come apart, sharing Steinbeck's nerve to make a single household carry a nation's moral weight.

06

A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley · Literary fiction

A Thousand Acres retells King Lear on a thousand-acre Iowa farm in the 1970s.

Jane Smiley replants King Lear in an Iowa farm family, doing what East of Eden does, rooting an ancient story of inheritance and evil in real American soil.

07

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · Historical fiction

Pachinko follows four generations of a Korean family from a small fishing village in early twentieth-century Korea to Osaka and Yokohama in postwar Japan.

Min Jin Lee's four-generation saga of fate, sacrifice, and identity hands you another whole family to live inside for hundreds of absorbing pages.

08

The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · Literary fiction

In 1959, Baptist missionary Nathan Price moves his wife and four daughters from Georgia to a remote village in the Belgian Congo.

Kingsolver sends a family and a certain-of-himself father into the Congo, a biblically framed novel about the moral cost of one man's conviction.

09

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck · Literary fiction

Of Mice and Men is a short novel — really a novella — published in 1937, two years before The Grapes of Wrath, and it covers much of the same Depression-era California ground in concentrated form.

Back to Steinbeck's Salinas Valley, distilled to its most tender and tragic, the same compassion for the doomed in a fraction of the pages.

10

Beloved

Toni Morrison · Literary fiction

Beloved is set in post-Civil War Ohio, where Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, lives with her daughter Denver in a house shadowed by the ghost of a baby she killed rather than let be taken back into slavery.

Toni Morrison gives generational trauma and America's original sin the mythic, haunted weight Steinbeck gives good and evil, morally enormous and unforgettable.

11

The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner · Literary fiction

The Sound and the Fury is widely considered Faulkner's greatest novel, and it is genuinely one of the most formally radical works in American fiction.

Faulkner charts a Southern family's slow ruin across generations, Steinbeck's great peer working the same seam of land, blood, and moral decay.

12

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy · Literary fiction

Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West is set along the Texas-Mexico border in the 1840s and loosely follows a teenage runaway known only as the kid, who falls in with the Glanton gang — a historical band of scalp hunters hired by the Mexican government to kill Apache raiders.

McCarthy stares straight at whether evil is simply innate, the Cathy Ames question written in blood across the American West.