Books like Lila

01

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

Suzanne Simard · Science

Suzanne Simard is the forest ecologist who discovered that trees communicate and share resources through underground mycorrhizal fungal networks — the research that gave rise to the concept of the "mother tree" and, at several removes, Peter Wohlleben's popular writing on the subject.

A kindred literary fiction read.

02

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion · Memoir

Joan Didion's account of the year following the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, is the most rigorous and unflinching memoir of grief in American literature.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath · Memoir

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel, published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, one month before Plath's death.

A kindred literary fiction read.

04

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Azar Nafisi · Memoir

Azar Nafisi spent years teaching literature at universities in Tehran before the restrictions on what she could teach — and who she could teach — became intolerable.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

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 faith and doubt.

06

Home

Marilynne Robinson · Literary fiction

Jack Boughton has spent twenty years away from his family's home in Gilead, Iowa, in what amounts to an extended flight from himself — from the shame of an illegitimate child he abandoned, from his father's religion that he cannot believe but cannot stop needing, from a life that has accumulated more wreckage than repair.

Both dig into faith and doubt.

07

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 faith and doubt.

08

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.

Both dig into faith and doubt.

09

The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje · Literary fiction

The English Patient is set at the end of the Second World War, in a damaged Italian villa north of Florence.

Both dig into memory and identity.

10

The Sparrow

Mary Doria Russell · Literary fiction

The Sparrow opens with its ending: Father Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest and linguist, has returned to Earth as the sole survivor of humanity's first contact mission to the planet Rakhat, broken in body and will in ways the novel withholds until the final chapters.

Both dig into faith and doubt.

11

Elantris

Brandon Sanderson · Fantasy

Elantris was once a city of gods — a place where ordinary people were spontaneously transformed into magical beings of light and power, capable of healing and creation.

Both dig into faith and doubt.

12

Exhalation: Stories

Ted Chiang · Short stories

Exhalation: Stories is Ted Chiang's second collection, containing nine stories written between 2005 and 2019.

Both dig into memory and identity.