Books like Oscar and Lucinda

01

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens · Classics

Great Expectations follows Pip, an orphan boy on the Kent marshes who is yanked from modest obscurity into the orbit of wealth and social aspiration when an anonymous benefactor funds his move to London.

A kindred historical fiction read.

02

The Moor's Last Sigh

Salman Rushdie · Literary fiction

The Moor's Last Sigh is narrated by Moraes Zogoiby — the Moor — a man who ages at twice the normal rate and has only months to live.

A kindred historical fiction read.

03

The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien · Memoir

Tim O'Brien served as a foot soldier in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970.

A kindred historical fiction read.

04

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy · Literary fiction

War and Peace follows five aristocratic Russian families across fifteen years of Napoleonic war and peace, from the drawing rooms of St.

A kindred historical fiction read.

05

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.

06

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.

07

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.

08

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.

09

Lila

Marilynne Robinson · Literary fiction

Lila is the third novel set in Gilead, Iowa, and it arrives as a prequel and companion to both Gilead and Home.

Both dig into faith and doubt.

10

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.

11

The Chosen

Chaim Potok · Religion & Spirituality

The Chosen is set in Brooklyn in the 1940s and follows two Jewish boys — Reuven Malter, modern Orthodox and the son of a Talmud scholar, and Danny Saunders, the brilliant son of a Hasidic rebbe — who meet during a baseball game that turns violent and becomes an unlikely friendship.

Both dig into faith and doubt.

12

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.