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🧲 Books like this

Every Day is for the Thief

Teju Cole · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides · 544 pages

A unique coming of age story. While the main character in this novel is dealing with gender identity issues the main focus of this brilliantly written story is the confusion we all face as we grow into the person we were meant to be. The reader finds himself identifying with the main character's experiences. This is a brilliantly written story. The prose is honest in a way that few authors dare t

Identity FormationImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
❤️

Bless Me, Ultima

Rudolfo Anaya · 252 pages

Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.

Identity FormationCultural IdentityAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
❤️

'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 pages

Cultural IdentitySparse ProseImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
❤️

Little Jewel

Patrick Modiano · 176 pages

Sparse ProseIdentity FormationAtmosphericLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri · 304 pages

"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, c

Identity FormationCultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
❤️

Canada

Richard Ford · 420 pages

After his parents are arrested and imprisoned for robbing a bank, fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is taken in by Arthur Remlinger who, unbeknownst to Dell, is hiding a dark and violent nature that interferes with Dell's quest to find grace and peace on the prairie of Saskatchewan.

Immigrant ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenAtmosphericSparse Prose
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Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk · 208 pages

A man who struggles with insomnia meets a colorful extremist, and they create a secret organization together. Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the base

Identity FormationSparse ProseFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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Identity FormationSparse ProseAtmosphericFirst Person Narrator
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Interior Chinatown

Charles Yu · 288 pages

Identity FormationCultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

Cultural IdentityIdentity FormationCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Benjamin Alire Saenz · 368 pages

Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.

Identity FormationCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenImmigrant Protagonist
❤️

The Reader

Bernhard Schlink · 224 pages

Sparse ProseCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz · 240 pages

This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

Cultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Forty Rooms

Olga Grushin · 342 pages

Follows the life of a woman born in Moscow who leaves for the United States, where she finds happiness and love but must also deal with the ghosts of her youth.

Identity FormationImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
❤️

The Book of Salt

Monique Truong · 272 pages

In deciding if he should accompany his employers to America, stay in France, or go back to his native Vietnam, Binh recalls his life in Vietnam, the jobs he's held since leaving there, and the people it has helped him meet.

Cultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Villette

Charlotte Bronte

Immigrant ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenAtmosphericCultural Identity
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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Sparse ProseCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Julia Alvarez · 304 pages

It\'s a long way from Santo Domingo to the Bronx, but if anyone can go the distance, it\'s the Garcia girls. Four lively latinas plunged from a pampered life of privilege on an island compound into the big-city chaos of New York, they rebel against Mami and Papi\'s old-world discipline and embrace all that America has to offer.

Cultural IdentityIdentity FormationImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Child of All Nations

Pramoedya Ananta Toer · 318 pages

"Coming to grips with the oppression and injustice of the European regime in his country, Minke, [the Dutch-educated javaese writer] struggles to assert his voice and the voices of his people - but he is met at every turn by the corruption of those he trusted and by the tragedies that befall those he loves most."--Back cover.

Cultural IdentityAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Netherland

Joseph O'Neill · 256 pages

In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans--a banker originally from the Netherlands--finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his l

Cultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Brooklyn

Colm Toibin · 262 pages

In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one of many who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving behind her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, t

Sparse ProseCultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Lucy

Jamaica Kincaid · 163 pages

Sparse ProseCultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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The Idiot

Elif Batuman · 427 pages

Embarking on her freshman year at Harvard in the early tech days of the 1990s, a young artist and daughter of Turkish immigrants begins a correspondence with an older mathematics student from Hungary while struggling with her changing sense of self, first love and a daunting career prospect.

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Harvard Square

Andre Aciman · 292 pages

An Egyptian-Jewish Harvard graduate student trying to assimilate into American culture in 1977 befriends an impetuous, loud Arab cab driver and must choose between his dream or his friend. This is a tale of the wages of assimilation, a moving story of an immigrant's remembered youth and the nearly forgotten costs and sacrifices of becoming an American. It is the fall of 1977, and amid the lovely

Cultural IdentityImmigrant ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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