Books like The Joy Luck Club

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.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides · Literary fiction

Cal Stephanides is a middle-aged man living in Berlin who decides to tell the whole story — not just his own life, but the lives of his Greek immigrant grandparents and parents, all the way back to the incest that introduced a recessive gene into his bloodline and the gene that made Cal intersex.

A kindred literary fiction read.

04

American Pastoral

Philip Roth · Literary fiction

American Pastoral opens with a narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, learning at a high school reunion about the life and death of Seymour "the Swede" Levov — a man who embodied postwar American success so completely he seemed almost allegorical.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

A Grief Observed

C. S. Lewis · Memoir

A Grief Observed is C.

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

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz · Literary fiction

Oscar Wao is an overweight Dominican American nerd from New Jersey who wants nothing more than to find love and write fantasy novels.

Both dig into generational trauma.

09

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.

10

White Teeth

Zadie Smith · Literary fiction

White Teeth begins with two men — Archie Jones, a Englishman of no particular distinction, and Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi immigrant and his oldest friend — who met during the last days of the Second World War.

Both dig into immigration and identity.

11

Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner · Memoir

Crying in H Mart is Michelle Zauner's memoir of her mother's death from cancer and the loss it made her confront: not just of a parent but of the Korean half of her identity.

Both dig into mother-daughter relationships.

12

Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi · Historical fiction

Homegoing begins in eighteenth-century Ghana with two half-sisters who never meet.

Both dig into generational trauma.