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

Gifted

Nikita Lalwani · 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
❤️

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

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionBildungsromanImmigration
❤️

Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow

Faiza Guene · 179 pages

Struggling with an overworked mother, an absent father, and the challenges of life within the infamous Paradise projects of suburban Paris, fifteen-year-old French Muslim Doria endures a parade of social workers, experiences a first kiss, and assumes a philosophical outlook regarding her circumstances.

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionIdentity FormationImmigration
❤️

The Hundred-Foot Journey

Richard C. Morais

Cultural IdentityBildungsromanImmigrationLiterary Fiction
❤️

Bee Season

Myla Goldberg · 288 pages

"Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionBildungsromanToxic Family Dynamics
❤️

Anita and Me

Meera Syal · 336 pages

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionBildungsromanImmigrant Protagonist
❤️

Kay's Lucky Coin Variety

Ann Y.K. Choi · 288 pages

Mary, a Korean girl growing up with her brother above her parents' convenience store in 1980s Toronto, is caught between the traditional culture of her parents and her desire to be a Canadian.

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionImmigrationIdentity Formation
❤️

Girl in Translation

Jean Kwok · 293 pages

Cultural IdentityBildungsromanLiterary FictionImmigration
❤️

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

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionBildungsromanImmigrant Protagonist
❤️

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath · 258 pages

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior

Self-HarmLiterary FictionSelf-Harm ContentBildungsroman
❤️

The Lacuna

Barbara Kingsolver · 528 pages

In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico-from a coastal

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionBildungsromanIdentity Formation
❤️

Wait for Me

An Na · 169 pages

As her senior year in high school approaches, Mina yearns to find her own path in life but working at the family business, taking care of her little sister, and dealing with her mother's impossible expectations are as stifling as the southern California heat, until she falls in love with a man who offers a way out.

Cultural IdentityToxic Family DynamicsImmigrationIdentity Formation
❤️

Sour Heart

Jenny Zhang · 310 pages

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionComing of AgeImmigration
❤️

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionBildungsromanImmigrant Protagonist
❤️

Brick Lane

Monica Ali · 422 pages

Monica Ali's debut novel, Brick Lane, was published in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name. Carrying into her adult years a sense of fatalism instilled during her hardscrabble birth, Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she begins to wonder if she has a say in her own destiny.

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionToxic Family DynamicsImmigration
❤️

The Kitchen God's Wife

Amy Tan · 532 pages

Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past--including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s,

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionToxic Family DynamicsImmigration
❤️

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

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionToxic Family DynamicsImmigrant Protagonist
❤️

A Good Country

Laleh Khadivi · 256 pages

"Laguna Beach, California, 2009. Alireza Courdee, a fourteen-year-old straight-A student and chemistry whiz, takes his first hit of pot. In as long as it takes to inhale and exhale, he is transformed from the high-achieving son of Iranian immigrants into a happy-go-lucky stoner. He loses his virginity, takes up surfing, and sneaks away to all-night raves. For the first time, Reza--now Rez--feels l

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionImmigrationIdentity Formation
❤️

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.

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionIdentity FormationBildungsroman
❤️

The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Mohja Kahf · 448 pages

Syrian immigrant Khadra Shamy is growing up in a devout, tightly knit Muslim family in 1970s Indiana, at the crossroads of bad polyester and Islamic dress codes. Along with her brother Eyad and her African-American friends, Hakim and Hanifa, she bikes the Indianapolis streets exploring the fault-lines between "Muslim" and "American." When her picture-perfect marriage goes sour, Khadra flees to Syr

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionImmigrationComing of Age
❤️

A Map of Home

Randa Jarrar · 292 pages

Nidali, the rebellious daughter of an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, narrates her story from her childhood in Kuwait, her early teenage years in Egypt (to where she and her family fled the 1990 Iraqi invasion), to her family's last flight to Texas.

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionBildungsromanToxic Family Dynamics
❤️

Black Cake

Charmaine Wilkerson · 385 pages

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionImmigrationImmigrant Protagonist
❤️

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

Danielle Evans · 240 pages

Fearless, funny, and ultimately tender, Evans's stories offer a bold new perspective on the experience of being young and African-American or mixed-race in modern-day America.

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionIdentity FormationComing of Age
❤️

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 IdentityLiterary FictionBildungsromanImmigration
❤️

The Lullaby of Polish Girls

Dagmara Dominczyk · 237 pages

Anna lives in Brooklyn. But she didn't always. She grew up in Kielce, Poland, where the summers were long and the politics communist. When her parents were indicted for their alliance with anti-government forces, Anna had to flee her homeland, leaving her closest friends behind. Now an adult, she lives in the US and has lost touch with the girls she once knew, the ones she missed so much as a teen

Cultural IdentityLiterary FictionImmigrationComing of Age
📖 New 2026 Kindles just released. See them on Amazon ↗