Books like Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

01

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri · Literary fiction

The Namesake follows the Ganguli family across three decades, beginning with Ashoke and Ashima's arranged marriage and their immigration from Calcutta to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and extending into the American adulthood of their son, Gogol.

A kindred literary fiction read.

02

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Katherine Boo · History

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is Katherine Boo's account of three years spent in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum built on reclaimed land next to the international airport.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

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.

04

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.

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

Rules of Civility

Amor Towles · Literary fiction

Rules of Civility opens in 1966, when Katey Kontent — now in her early forties — encounters a series of photographs at a gallery show.

Both dig into class and ambition.

07

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Thomas Hardy · Literary fiction

The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with an act so audacious it takes a moment to process: a drunken hay-trusser named Michael Henchard sells his wife and infant daughter at a country fair for five guineas.

Both dig into class and ambition.

08

The Story of the Lost Child

Elena Ferrante · Literary fiction

The Story of the Lost Child is the fourth and final volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, covering roughly thirty years of Elena Greco's life from the late 1970s through the early 2010s.

Both dig into female friendship.

09

Big Little Lies

Liane Moriarty · Thriller

Big Little Lies begins with a death at a school trivia night and then spends its entire length working backward to explain how it happened.

Both dig into female friendship.

10

Firefly Lane

Kristin Hannah · Contemporary fiction

Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey meet in the summer of 1974 as fourteen-year-olds on Firefly Lane in rural Washington State, and their friendship spans three decades — through high school, college, careers in television journalism, marriages, and heartbreak.

Both dig into female friendship.

11

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 class and ambition.

12

Me Before You

Jojo Moyes · Romance

Louisa Clark is twenty-six, cheerfully aimless, and loses her job at the local café on the same day.

Both dig into class and ambition.