Books like The Inheritance of Loss

01

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.

02

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Maxine Hong Kingston · Memoir

The Woman Warrior is not a conventional memoir.

Both dig into immigration.

03

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou · Memoir

Maya Angelou's first volume of autobiography covers her childhood and adolescence in Stamps, Arkansas and San Francisco during the 1930s and 1940s, ending with the birth of her son at age sixteen.

A kindred literary fiction read.

04

Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt · Memoir

Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's memoir of a catastrophically impoverished Irish Catholic childhood, first in Brooklyn and then in Limerick, during the 1930s and 1940s.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

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.

06

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt · Literary fiction

The Goldfinch begins with a bombing in a New York museum.

Both dig into belonging and displacement.

07

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

J. D. Vance · Memoir

Hillbilly Elegy is J.

Both dig into class.

08

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell · Memoir

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's firsthand account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, which he joined in late 1936 as a volunteer with the POUM militia — a Trotskyist revolutionary organization that was later suppressed by the Soviet-backed Stalinist wing of the Republican forces.

Both dig into class.

09

Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng · Contemporary fiction

In Shaker Heights, Ohio — a meticulously planned, deliberately integrated suburb — two families collide.

Both dig into class.

10

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon · History

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Jewish cousins — Josef Kavalier, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague, and Sam Clay (born Sammy Klayman), a Brooklyn dreamer — who together create one of the golden age's great superhero franchises in late-1930s New York.

Both dig into immigration.

11

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Daniel James Brown · History

The Boys in the Boat is the story of the University of Washington crew team that won the gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, defeating Nazi Germany's squad on Hitler's home course.

Both dig into class.

12

The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother

James McBride · Memoir

James McBride grew up in Brooklyn and Queens as one of twelve children raised by a white Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity and married a Black minister.

Both dig into immigration.