AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

The Saffron Kitchen

Yasmin Crowther · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Secret Daughter

Shilpi Somaya Gowda · 352 pages

On the eve of the monsoons, in a remote Indian village, Kavita gives birth to a baby girl. But in a culture that favors sons, the only way for Kavita to save her newborn daughter's life is to give her away. It is a decision that will haunt her and her husband for the rest of their lives, even after the arrival of their cherished son.Halfway around the globe, Somer, an American doctor, decides to a

Mother and DaughterImmigrant ProtagonistEstranged FamilyCultural Identity
❤️

Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng · 300 pages

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl

Mother and DaughterImmigrant ProtagonistEstranged FamilyCultural Identity
❤️

The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · 332 pages

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve

Mother and DaughterEstranged FamilyImmigrant ProtagonistCultural Identity
❤️

Dreams of Joy

Lisa See · 354 pages

A continuation of "Shanghai Girls" finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation's intolerant Communist culture.

Immigrant ProtagonistMother and DaughterEstranged FamilyCultural Identity
❤️

Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri · 352 pages

These eight stories by beloved and bestselling author Jhumpa Lahiri take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Here they enter the worlds of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. Rich with the signature gifts that have established Jhumpa Lahiri as one of our most essential writers,

Estranged FamilyImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityFamily Secrets
❤️

Black Cake

Charmaine Wilkerson · 385 pages

Estranged FamilyImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
❤️

The Shell Seekers

Rosamunde Pilcher · 582 pages

The Shell Seekers is a novel of connection: of one family, and of the passions and heartbreak that have held them together for three generations. The Shell Seekers is filled with real people--mothers and daughters, husband and lovers--inspired with real values. The Shell Seekers centers on Penelope Keeling--a woman you'll always remember in world you'll never forget. The Shell Seekers is a magical

Estranged FamilyMother and DaughterFamily SecretsAtmospheric
🙂

Breath, Eyes, Memory

Edwidge Danticat · 234 pages

At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know and where she gains a legacy of shame that can only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape cha

Mother and DaughterImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityEstranged Family
🙂

The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

Jasmin Darznik · 330 pages

The author relates a wrenching hidden story of her family's true origins in Iran: her mother's troubled history of abuse and neglect, and a daughter, Sara, whom she was forced to abandon in order to escape that life.

Mother and DaughterImmigrant ProtagonistEstranged FamilyCultural Identity
🙂

Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

Cultural IdentityFamily SecretsMother and DaughterCharacter-Driven
🙂

Harmless Like You

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan · 290 pages

'"This brilliant debut novel by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is cause for celebration."--Lorrie Moore. Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Berlin, and Connecticut, following Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and Yuki's son Jay who, as an adult in the present day, is forced to confront the mother who abandoned him when he was only t

Estranged FamilyMother and DaughterImmigrant ProtagonistCultural Identity
🙂
Immigrant ProtagonistMother and DaughterCultural IdentityEstranged Family
🙂

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender · 345 pages

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t

Mother and DaughterEstranged FamilyAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
🙂

The Last Days of Café Leila

Donia Bijan · 381 pages

"When Noor returns to her native Iran for the first time in thirty years, with her very American daughter, Lily, so much about her homeland is different. But Café Leila--the restaurant Noor's family has run for three generations--hasn't changed. A neighborhood café in Tehran is at the center of this powerful and transporting story of love, family, friendship, and homecoming told against the backdr

Mother and DaughterImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
🙂

The Bastard of Istanbul

Elif Shafak · 368 pages

Cultural IdentityMother and DaughterEstranged FamilyFamily Secrets
🙂

The Agüero Sisters

Cristina Garcia · 336 pages

Estranged FamilyCultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistFamily Secrets
🙂

Girl in Translation

Jean Kwok · 293 pages

Mother and DaughterCultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
🙂

Boy, Snow, Bird

Helen Oyeyemi · 308 pages

This novel is a reimagining of the fairy tale Snow White recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity set in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty, the opposite of the life she has left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother

Estranged FamilyCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

Five Quarters of the Orange

Joanne Harris · 307 pages

When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy during the German occupation years ago. But the past and present are inextricably entwined, particularly in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise has inherited from her mother. And soon Framboise will reali

Estranged FamilyMother and DaughterCharacter-DrivenAtmospheric
🙂

And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini · 446 pages

Presents a story inspired by human love, how people take care of one another, and how choices resonate through subsequent generations. Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pari, as beaut

Estranged FamilyImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityFamily Secrets
🙂

The Book of Ruth

Jane Hamilton · 328 pages

"I learned slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it - to figure out whether, in fact, she's to blame for the mess." Pegged the loser in a small-town family that doesn't have much going for it in the first place. Ruth grows up in the shadow of her

Mother and DaughterEstranged FamilyFamily SecretsCharacter-Driven
🙂

Whistler

Ann Patchett

When Daphne Fuller and her husband, Jonathan, visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who was married to her mother for little more than a year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn't seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that change the direction

Estranged FamilyFamily SecretsCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 588 pages

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented li

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityLondonCharacter-Driven
🙂

Her Fearful Symmetry

Audrey Niffenegger · 400 pages

Estranged FamilyFamily SecretsLondonAtmospheric

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.