Books like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

01

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 literary fiction read.

02

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Maxine Hong Kingston · Memoir

The Woman Warrior is not a conventional memoir.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

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.

04

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.

05

The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien · Memoir

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

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

Hello Beautiful

Ann Napolitano · Literary fiction

Hello Beautiful follows four generations of the Padavano family, beginning in Chicago in the 1920s and ending in the early 2000s.

Both dig into generational trauma.

08

Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez · Literary fiction

Love in the Time of Cholera begins with the death of Dr.

Both dig into love and obsession.

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 love and obsession.

10

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.

11

The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · Literary fiction

The Joy Luck Club is structured around a mahjong game.

Both dig into generational trauma.

12

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.

Both dig into love and obsession.