Books like The Lacuna

01

The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · Literary fiction

In 1959, Baptist missionary Nathan Price moves his wife and four daughters from Georgia to a remote village in the Belgian Congo.

A kindred literary fiction read.

02

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.

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

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

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 identity and self-invention.

06

My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante · Literary fiction

My Brilliant Friend is the first volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, following Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo from their childhood in a poor Naples neighborhood in the 1950s into early adolescence.

Both dig into identity and self-invention.

07

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.

08

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.

09

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.

10

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce · Literary fiction

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man traces the intellectual and spiritual development of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to the edge of adulthood, when he leaves Ireland to pursue life as an artist.

A kindred literary fiction read.

11

A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley · Literary fiction

A Thousand Acres retells King Lear on a thousand-acre Iowa farm in the 1970s.

A kindred literary fiction read.

12

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan · Literary fiction

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel told in thirteen chapters, each from a different point of view and sometimes in a radically different form — including one chapter composed entirely as a PowerPoint presentation.

A kindred literary fiction read.