Books like Middlesex

01

The Virgin Suicides

Jeffrey Eugenides · Literary fiction

Five sisters.

A kindred literary fiction read.

02

The Warmth of Other Suns

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's account of the Great Migration — the movement of six million Black Americans from the South to the North and West between 1915 and 1970 — is one of the most important works of narrative nonfiction published in the twenty-first century.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

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.

04

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · Memoir

Born a Crime is Trevor Noah's memoir about growing up mixed-race in South Africa during the final years of apartheid and its chaotic aftermath.

A kindred literary fiction read.

06

Blindsight

Peter Watts · Science fiction

Blindsight follows a crew of post-human specialists sent to intercept an alien object at the edge of the solar system in 2082.

Both dig into identity and selfhood.

07

Dark Matter

Blake Crouch · Science fiction

Jason Dessen is a physics professor in Chicago, content with his career, his marriage to Daniela, and his teenage son.

Both dig into identity and selfhood.

08

Dial A for Aunties

Jesse Q. Sutanto · Contemporary fiction

Medeline Meddelin — Meddelin Chan — accidentally kills her blind date and calls her mother.

Both dig into immigrant experience.

09

Washington Black

Esi Edugyan · Historical fiction

Washington Black opens on a Barbados sugar plantation in the 1830s, where George Washington Black — Wash — is an eleven-year-old enslaved boy.

Both dig into identity and selfhood.

10

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.

11

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.

12

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.