Books like The Namesake

01

Educated: A Memoir

Tara Westover · Memoir

Educated is Tara Westover's memoir about growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and eventually earning a PhD in history from Cambridge University.

Both dig into identity.

02

Becoming

Michelle Obama · Memoir

Becoming is Michelle Obama's account of how a girl from a modest house on Chicago's South Side became one of the most recognized people in the world — and what that journey cost and revealed.

Both dig into identity.

03

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

Both dig into identity.

04

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · Memoir

Born a Crime is Trevor Noah's memoir about growing up mixed-race in South Africa during the final years of apartheid and its chaotic aftermath.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain · Literary fiction

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins where Tom Sawyer left off — Huck Finn, the outcast son of the town drunk, has been taken in and given a respectable life he doesn't want.

Both dig into identity.

06

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.

Both dig into generational conflict.

07

Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · Literary fiction

Americanah follows Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman who leaves Lagos for America as a university student and spends fifteen years navigating a country that insists on categorizing her in ways Nigeria never did.

Both dig into immigration and belonging.

08

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.

Both dig into identity.

09

Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev · Literary fiction

Fathers and Sons opens with a young medical student, Bazarov, arriving at a country estate alongside his friend Arkady.

Both dig into generational conflict.

10

In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust · Literary fiction

In Search of Lost Time is a seven-volume novel published between 1913 and 1927 in which the unnamed narrator, looking back from late middle age, attempts to recover a life that has slipped away.

Both dig into identity.

11

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 identity.

12

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen · Literary fiction

Jonathan Franzen's third novel, published in 2001 and winner of the National Book Award, follows the Lambert family across three adult children and their aging parents, Alfred and Enid, through the late 1990s.

Both dig into generational conflict.