Books like Hello Beautiful

01

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.

A kindred literary fiction read.

02

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.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz · Literary fiction

Oscar Wao is an overweight Dominican American nerd from New Jersey who wants nothing more than to find love and write fantasy novels.

Both dig into generational trauma.

04

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 literary fiction read.

05

Normal People

Sally Rooney · Literary fiction

Normal People follows Connell and Marianne from their small-town Irish secondary school through their years at Trinity College Dublin.

A kindred literary fiction read.

06

East of Eden

John Steinbeck · Literary fiction

East of Eden is Steinbeck's self-declared masterwork, a long and ambitious novel published in 1952 that traces two families — the Trasks and the Hamiltons — across two generations in California's Salinas Valley.

Both dig into generational trauma.

07

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.

Both dig into forgiveness.

08

Memorial

Bryan Washington · Literary fiction

Memorial begins with a swap: Benson, a Black American childcare worker in Houston, and his Japanese boyfriend Mike are in a troubled relationship when Mike's estranged father calls from Japan — he is dying.

Both dig into race and family.

09

The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende · Literary fiction

The House of the Spirits begins with Clara del Valle, a clairvoyant child who stops speaking for nine years after a family tragedy and grows up to become the center of a sprawling Chilean family chronicle.

Both dig into generational trauma.

10

The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · Literary fiction

The Joy Luck Club is structured around a mahjong game.

Both dig into generational trauma.

11

Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi · Historical fiction

Homegoing begins in eighteenth-century Ghana with two half-sisters who never meet.

Both dig into generational trauma.

12

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.

Both dig into generational trauma.