If you liked
Books like The Joy Luck Club
Loved The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from literary fiction, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
The Remains of the Day
An English butler looks back on a life of duty and the love he never let himself feel; restrained and quietly shattering.
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2
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Owen Meany, a small boy with an unnaturally high voice who believes he is God's instrument, kills his best friend John's mother with a foul ball — and then reveals he has seen a vision of how and when he will die. Irving's most celebrated novel interweaves the Vietnam era, New Hampshire prep school life and a meditation on faith as something you are forced into, not chosen.
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3
Matilda
Matilda Wormwood is a precocious five-year-old with parents who ignore her brilliance. She teaches herself to read, devours the local library, and eventually discovers she has telekinetic powers — which she uses to bring justice to her terrifying headmistress Miss Trunchbull. Dahl's most beloved novel for children is about the power of intelligence, reading and kindness in a world that prefers children to be seen and not heard.
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4
The Alchemist
An Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago travels from Spain to Egypt following a dream of treasure, guided by the concept of a Personal Legend — the path one is meant to take. Coelho's spiritual parable has sold over 150 million copies and is one of the most-read books in history, presenting a philosophy of destiny, signs and the courage to follow one's heart.
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5
Breathing Lessons
Maggie and Ira Moran drive to a friend's funeral and back across a single day, the journey surfacing forty years of marriage, compromise and what each has given up and kept. Tyler's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on the ordinary marriage as the site of everything — love, resentment, disappointment and the kind of durable intimacy that asks no great questions.
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6
The Satanic Verses
Two Indian actors survive a plane explosion over the English Channel by falling — and land transformed: one into a figure of divine radiance, one into something diabolical. Rushdie's novel is a meditation on identity, migration, good and evil, and the nature of revelation — and it became the most politically explosive novel of the 20th century.
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7
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
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8
The New York Trilogy
Three connected detective novels — City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room — in which the conventions of detective fiction are systematically dismantled: detectives lose their identities, the cases dissolve, the distinctions between investigator and subject collapse. Auster's debut fiction is a postmodern meditation on identity, language and the impossibility of knowing anything with certainty.
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9
White Noise
Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies at a small American college, lives with his family in a consumer-saturated suburban world — until an 'Airborne Toxic Event' forces an evacuation and makes death suddenly tangible. DeLillo's National Book Award-winning novel is one of the central texts of postmodern American fiction, satirising media, consumerism and the American terror of mortality.
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10
Perfume
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in 18th-century Paris without a body odour of his own, has the most extraordinary sense of smell in history. He devotes his life to creating the perfect perfume — through increasingly monstrous means. Süskind's philosophical thriller is a satire of genius, obsession and the aestheticisation of violence, set in a meticulously researched pre-revolutionary France.