What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorEverything Sad Is Untrue
Daniel Nayeri · 356 pages
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
Little Bee
Chris Cleave · 288 pages
A haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers--one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.
The Emigrants
W.G. Sebald · 240 pages
The road to exile of four men. One is a teacher, fired by the Nazis from his job for having a Jewish ancestor, then inducted into the German army. Of the others, all Jews, one is a surgeon who commits suicide as he is unable to assimilate into British society, a second is an artist, a third becomes a butler in New York.
The Buddha in the Attic
Julie Otsuka · 129 pages
Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.
A Distant Shore
Caryl Phillips · 294 pages
Dorothy has taken early retirement and walked away from a bad marriage, an affair gone sour and a dangerous obsession. She moves to a small English village where she soon learns that England itself is changing beyond measure as the world outside its borders encroaches and intrudes.
We Need New Names
NoViolet Bulawayo · 304 pages
Whenever foreigners visit Paradise they always ask Darling and her friends to smile for the camera. Here are some of the things Darling and her friends have to smile about: stealing guavas, gifts from NGOs, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices. But they all want to go to the real paradise in America or Britain.
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Dinaw Mengestu · 234 pages
Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents' jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of f
Shanghai Girls
Lisa See · 417 pages
In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father's prosperous rickshaw business, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Th
Brixton Beach
Roma Tearne · 409 pages
A Girl in Winter
Philip Larkin · 248 pages
Minaret
Leila Aboulela · 276 pages
On Canaan's Side
Sebastian Barry · 264 pages
Een 89-jarige vrouw, die al vanaf haar 16e in Amerika woont, ziet in de dood van haar kleinzoon aanleiding om haar herinneringen te noteren.
Exit West
Mohsin Hamid · 231 pages
"In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet-- sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors-- doo
The Ministry of Pain
Dubravka Ugresic · 264 pages
Having fled the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucic is now a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches a class filled with other young Yugoslav exiles, most of whom earn meager wages assembling leather and rubber S&M clothing at a sweatshop they call the "Ministry." Abandoning literature, Tanja encourages her students to indulge their "Yugonostalgia" in essay
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong · 256 pages
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once
The House at Tyneford
Natasha Solomons
Sound of One Hand Clapping
Richard Flanagan · 425 pages
In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja's mother walked into a blizzard never to return. Some thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunkard father, the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present - changing forever his livin
The Arrival
Shaun Tan · 128 pages
In this wordless graphic novel, a man leaves his homeland and sets off for a new country, where he must build a new life for himself and try to support his family back home. His new country is full of strange arquitectural wonders, fantastic animals and other immigrants with stories of why they left home.
The Best We Could Do
Thi Bui · 335 pages
The author describes her experiences as a young Vietnamese immigrant, highlighting her family's move from their war-torn home to the United States in graphic novel format.
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
What Is the What
Dave Eggers · 475 pages
*What Is the What* is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children--the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the Un
My Ántonia
Willa Cather · 246 pages
My Antonia, first published 1918, is one of Willa Cather's greatest works. It is the last novel in the Prairie trilogy, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.My Antonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Antonia. The book'
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,