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 authorThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon · 639 pages
The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Heidi W. Durrow · 264 pages
After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.
Chulito
Charles Rice-Gonzalez · 317 pages
Set against a vibrant South Bronx neighborhood and the queer youth culture of Manhattan's piers, Chulito is a coming-of-age, coming out love story of a sexy, tough, hip hop-loving, young Latino man and the colorful characters who populate his block. Chulito, which means "cutie," is one of the boys, and everyone in his neighborhood has seen him grow up--the owner of the local bodega, the Lees from
Eating Chinese Food Naked
Mei Ng · 252 pages
A Chinese-American girl's return home from university. As she takes up residence at the back of the family laundry in New York, Ruby Lee realizes her college education has changed her perception. Some things which she disliked, she now likes, and vice versa.
Marjorie Morningstar
Herman Wouk, Gabra Zackman · 573 pages
The Mare
Mary Gaitskill · 441 pages
The story of a Dominican girl, the Anglo woman who introduces her to riding, and the horse who changes everything for her. Velveteen Vargas is eleven years old, a Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York--Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic, and her academic husband, Paul--who wonder what it will mean to "make a difference" in such a con
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
Maps
Nuruddin Farah · 259 pages
"In this novel, Farah tells the story of the orphan Askar. Before he is born, Askar has lost his father to the bloody war dividing Somalia and Ethiopia, and his mother dies giving birth to him. It is only thanks to Misra, a kindhearted woman who discovers him next to his mother's corpse and takes him into her home, that he survives. But Askar is a true child of his times, and as he matures he begi
Inside, Outside
Herman Wouk · 644 pages
**Herman Wouk's classic novel moves on from the grand themes which have won him international acclaim - war, the fate of nations, and the indomitable spirit of man - to the quest for identity, in the clash between the Inside of faith and family and the Outside of the glittery American dream.** Inside, Outside sweeps through ***more than sixty years, from the pre-war, pre-atomic innocence of the
Oleander Girl
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni · 289 pages
Enjoying a sheltered childhood with adoring grandparents but troubled by the silence surrounding her parents' deaths, 17-year-old Korobi is prompted by a love note among her mother's possessions and a fiance's shattering revelation to travel from India to post-September 11 America in search of her true identity.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz · 352 pages
Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us
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
Girl in Translation
Jean Kwok · 293 pages
A Place at the Table
Susan Rebecca White · 314 pages
The lives of an ostracized gay Southern boy, a wealthy Connecticut woman, and an African-American chef converge in a chic Manhattan cafe, in a tale ranging from 1920s North Carolina to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and the present day.
A Feather on the Breath of God
Sigrid Nunez · 192 pages
In this profoundly moving novel, a young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother who meet in post-war Germany and settle in New York. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, the narrator escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of balle
Franny and Zooey
J.D. Salinger · 202 pages
Franny came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed in 1957 by Zooey. Both stories are early entries in a narrative series about the Glasses, a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York. In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her boyfriend for a football weekend, where they go to a café. The story is essentially an account of
To the Moon and Back
Eliana Ramage · 448 pages
Brown Girl, Brownstones
Paule Marshall · 310 pages
"Set in Brooklyn during the Depression and World War II, this is the story of a Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants. She is caught between the struggles of her hard-working, ambitious mother, who wnats to "buy house" and educate her daughters, and her father, who longs to return to the land in Barbados. Selina seeks to define her own identity and values as she struggles to surmount
Rolling the R's
R. Zamora Linmark · 149 pages
Thirty-seven stories and poems on Hawaii's Kalihi Valley. The subjects range from the clash of cultures between whites and natives, to the plight of a 10-year-old girl who becomes pregnant.
Kim
Rudyard Kipling · 345 pages
Kim is Rudyard Kipling's story of an orphan born in colonial India and torn between love for his native India and the demands of Imperial loyalty to his Irish-English heritage and to the British Secret Service. Long recognized as Kipling's finest work, Kim was a key factor in his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
Love and Other Consolation Prizes
Jamie Ford · 336 pages
A half-Chinese orphan whose mother sacrificed everything to give him a better chance is raffled off as a prize at Seattle's 1909 World's Fair, only to land in the ownership of the madam of a notorious brothel where he finds friendship and opportunities, in a story based on true events.
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt · 817 pages
"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra