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 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
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.
Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English
Natasha Solomons · 368 pages
After escaping Germany during WWII, Jack and Sadie Rosenblum, together with their baby daughter, settle into a life of acting "English." In post-war England, however, no golf club will admit a Rosenblum. So Jack hatches a wild idea: he'll build his own. It's an obsession Sadie does not share, particularly when Jack relocates them to a thatched roof cottage in Dorset to embark on his project.
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
The Story Hour
Thrity Umrigar · 317 pages
An experienced psychologist, Maggie carefully maintains emotional distance from her patients. But when she meets a young Indian woman who tried to kill herself, her professional detachment disintegrates. Cut off from her family in India, Lakshmi is desperately lonely and trapped in a loveless marriage to a domineering man who limits her world to their small restaurant and grocery store. Determined
Digging to America
Anne Tyler · 304 pages
Two families awaiting the arrival of their adopted infant daughters from Korea meet at the airport. The families lives become interwined after the Donaldsons, a young American couple invite the Yazdan's, Maryam, her son and his Iranian American wife to an arrival party, which becomes an annual event. Maryam, who came to this country thirty-five years earlier, feels her values threatened when she i
We Never Asked for Wings
Vanessa Diffenbaugh · 400 pages
For fourteen years, Letty Espinosa has worked three jobs around San Francisco to make ends meet while her mother raised her children -- Alex, now fifteen, and Luna, six -- in their tiny apartment on a forgotten spit of wetlands near the bay. But now Letty's parents are returning to Mexico, and Letty must step up and become a mother for the first time in her life. Navigating this new terrain is cha
The Hindi-Bindi Club
Monica Pradhan · 448 pages
For decades they have remained close, sharing treasured recipes, honored customs, and the challenges of women shaped by ancient ways yet living modern lives. They are the Hindi-Bindi Club, a nickname given by their American daughters to the mothers who left India to start anew -- daughters now grown and facing struggles of their own. For Kiran, Preity, and Rani, adulthood bears the indelible stamp
The Newlyweds
Nell Freudenberger · 352 pages
From Nell Freudenberger, one of America's most dazzling talents, comes "The Newlyweds", an utterly captivating cross-continental love story Amina Mazid is twenty-four when she leaves Bangladesh for Rochester, New York, and for George Stillman, the husband who met and wooed her online. It's a twenty-first-century romance that echoes ancient traditions - the arranged marriages of her home country. A
The Illegal Gardener
Sara Alexi · 288 pages
Together Tea
Marjan Kamali · 328 pages
"Darya has discovered the perfect gift for her daughter's twenty-fifth birthday: an ideal husband. Mina, however, is fed up with her mother's years of endless matchmaking and the spreadsheets grading available Iranian-American bachelors. Having spent her childhood in Tehran and the rest of her life in New York City, Mina has experienced cultural clashes firsthand, but she's learning that the great
Daughter of Fortune
Isabel Allende · 416 pages
"Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaiso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquin Andiera, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen pre
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
Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America
Firoozeh Dumas · 205 pages
In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father's glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas's wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a
The Boston Girl
Anita Diamant · 322 pages
A story "about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century. Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's in
Something in Between
Melissa de la Cruz · 432 pages
Jasmine de los Santos has always done what's expected of her. Pretty and popular, she's studied hard, made her Filipino immigrant parents proud and is ready to reap the rewards in the form of a full college scholarship.
House of Sand and Fog
Andre Dubus III · 365 pages
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.
Arranged Marriage: Stories
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni · 320 pages
In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson
Bette Bao Lord · 169 pages
In 1947, a Chinese child comes to Brooklyn where she becomes Americanized at school, in her apartment building, and by her love for baseball.
The Secret Side of Empty
Maria E. Andreu · 336 pages
M.T. is a high-achieving high school student, who hiding the fact that she's an undocumented immigrant in the United States
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
The Mango Bride
Marivi Soliven Blanco
The Silence of Trees
Valya Dudycz Lupescu · 302 pages