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Secret Daughter

Shilpi Somaya Gowda · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Pigs in Heaven

Barbara Kingsolver · 363 pages

A phenomenal bestseller and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, Pigs in Heaven continues the story of Taylor and Turtle, first introduced in The Bean Trees.

AdoptionMother and DaughterBelongingCultural Identity
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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

Mother and DaughterCultural IdentityBelongingImmigrant Protagonist
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And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini · 446 pages

Presents a story inspired by human love, how people take care of one another, and how choices resonate through subsequent generations. Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pari, as beaut

AdoptionTearjerkerBelongingImmigration
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Where We Belong

Emily Giffin · 384 pages

Her carefully constructed life thrown into turmoil by the appearance of an eighteen-year-old girl with ties to her past, New York television producer Marian Caldwell is swept up in a maelstrom of personal discovery that changes both of their perceptions about family.

AdoptionBelongingMother and DaughterTearjerker
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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,

IndiaBelongingCultural IdentityImmigrant Protagonist
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Dreams of Joy

Lisa See · 354 pages

A continuation of "Shanghai Girls" finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation's intolerant Communist culture.

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityMother and DaughterBelonging
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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

Mother and DaughterImmigrant ProtagonistBelongingCultural Identity
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The Language of Flowers

Vanessa Diffenbaugh · 322 pages

Victoria Jones spent her childhood moving from foster home to foster home. She believes she is damaged beyond hope and trusts nobody, connecting with the world through message-laden bouquets. Her messages are never understood until one day a man in a flower stall responds in kind.

AdoptionMother and DaughterBelongingFamily Secrets
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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

AdoptionBelongingCultural IdentityImmigrant Protagonist
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Orphan Train

Christina Baker Kline · 400 pages

Close to aging out of the foster care system, Molly Ayer takes a position helping an elderly woman named Vivian and discovers that they are more alike than different as she helps Vivian solve a mystery from her past. When 17-year-old Molly Ayer is sent to perform community service at elderly Vivian Daly's home in order to avoid juvenile hall, she discovers the two are very much alike, despite the

AdoptionBelongingImmigrant ProtagonistTearjerker
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The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards · 408 pages

Kim Edwards's stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives fo

AdoptionMother and DaughterTearjerkerMultigenerational Family
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The Leavers

Lisa Ko · 392 pages

"One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. Set in New York and China, the Leavers is the story of how one boy com

AdoptionBelongingCultural IdentityImmigrant Protagonist
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Black Cake

Charmaine Wilkerson · 385 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityImmigrationFamily Secrets
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Moloka'i

Alan Brennert · 389 pages

Seven-year-old Rachel is forcibly removed from her family's 1890s Honolulu home when she contracts leprosy and is placed in a settlement, where she loses a series of new friends before new medical discoveries enable her to reenter the world.

BelongingTearjerkerImmigrationMultigenerational Family
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Girl in Translation

Jean Kwok · 293 pages

BelongingMother and DaughterCultural IdentityImmigration
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Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 560 pages

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision

BelongingImmigrant ProtagonistCultural IdentityImmigration
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Salt Houses

Hala Alyan · 320 pages

"From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home ... On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they wi

ImmigrationBelongingCultural IdentityMother and Daughter
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AdoptionImmigrant ProtagonistMother and DaughterCultural Identity
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The Center of the World

Jacqueline Sheehan · 321 pages

When her teenage daughter, who believes she was born in Mexico and legally adopted, discovers the truth, Kate accompanies her back to Guatemala, where they both confront the damage done by years of dangerous yet necessary deceptions.

AdoptionMother and DaughterCultural IdentityImmigration
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The Red Tent

Anita Diamant · 321 pages

Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood--the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers--Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--the f

Mother and DaughterTearjerkerMultigenerational FamilyEmotional
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Winter Garden

Kristin Hannah · 448 pages

Can a woman ever really know herself if she doesn’t know her mother? From the author of the smash-hit bestseller Firefly Lane and True Colors comes a powerful, heartbreaking novel that illuminates the intricate mother-daughter bond and explores the enduring links between the present and the past. Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her chil

Mother and DaughterTearjerkerMultigenerational FamilyFamily Secrets
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The Bastard of Istanbul

Elif Shafak · 368 pages

Cultural IdentityImmigrationMother and DaughterBelonging
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The Light Between Oceans

M.L. Stedman · 345 pages

"A novel set on a remote Australian island, where a childless couple live quietly running a lighthouse, until a boat carrying a baby washes ashore"--

InfertilityTearjerkerAdoptionFamily Secrets
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The Bamboo Stalk

Saud Alsanousi, s`wd lsn`wsy · 377 pages

Josephine escapes poverty by coming to Kuwait from the Philippines to work as a maid, where she meets Rashid, an idealistic only son with literary aspirations. Josephine, with all the wide-eyed naivety of youth, believes she has found true love. But when she becomes pregnant, and with the rumble of war growing ever louder, Rashid bows to family and social pressure, and sends her back home with her

BelongingImmigrationImmigrant ProtagonistCultural Identity
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