Books like White Teeth

01

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.

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

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

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.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

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.

Both dig into friendship across difference.

06

The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · Literary fiction

The Joy Luck Club is structured around a mahjong game.

Both dig into immigration and identity.

07

Good Omens

Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman · Fantasy

Good Omens is a comic fantasy novel about the impending apocalypse and the attempts of an angel and a demon — Aziraphale and Crowley, who have been stationed on Earth since the Beginning — to prevent it.

Both dig into friendship across difference.

08

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir · Science fiction

Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, where he is, or why he's there.

Both dig into friendship across difference.

09

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin · Science fiction

The Left Hand of Darkness follows Genly Ai, an envoy from a loose interstellar federation called the Ekumen, who has been sent alone to the planet Gethen — also called Winter — to persuade its nations to join.

Both dig into friendship across difference.

10

The Paris Library

Janet Skeslien Charles · Historical fiction

The Paris Library moves between two timelines: Paris in 1939–1944, where young Odile Souchet becomes a librarian at the American Library of Paris just as war is approaching; and rural Montana in the 1980s, where a teenage girl named Lily befriends her French neighbor, the now-elderly Odile, and slowly uncovers the history Odile has never spoken about.

Both dig into friendship across difference.

11

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.

12

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.