If you liked
Books like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Loved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith? 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
-
1
The Stranger
A man feels nothing at his mother's funeral and drifts toward catastrophe; the cornerstone of existential fiction.
-
2
The Power and the Glory
In a Mexican state where Catholicism has been outlawed, a whisky priest — the last in the region — is hunted by a pursuing lieutenant as he moves from village to village. Greene's novel is a profound examination of guilt, faith and human fallibility: the priest knows he is a bad man, but continues to administer the sacraments anyway.
-
3
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
In a small Georgia mill town, a deaf-mute named John Singer becomes the unlikely confessor to a series of lonely people — a teenage girl, a Black doctor, an itinerant communist, a drunken café owner. McCullers's debut, written when she was twenty-two, is a meditation on isolation, the impossibility of communication and the American South on the eve of WWII.
-
4
The Plague
A bubonic plague descends on the Algerian port city of Oran, and the citizens find themselves quarantined in an absurd situation of suffering, solidarity and moral reckoning. Camus's most widely read novel is both a realistic chronicle of epidemic and an allegory of occupied France — and of any human community confronting an indifferent catastrophe that demands a collective response.
-
5
Brighton Rock
Pinkie Brown, a vicious teenage gang leader in Brighton's criminal underworld, murders a rival and then marries a naive girl who witnessed the killing. Greene's novel is both a thriller and a deeply Catholic meditation on sin, damnation and the question of whether grace can reach even the most corrupt soul.
-
6
The End of the Affair
Maurice Bendrix, a novelist, has an intense affair with the wife of a civil servant that ends mysteriously — without explanation — in wartime London. Years later, obsession and jealousy drive him to discover why. Greene's most personal novel is about love, hate and the possibility of religious faith arriving through the most unexpected door.
-
7
Invisible Man
An unnamed Black narrator, living underground in a basement lit by stolen electricity, recounts his journey through Southern education, the Communist Party and the depths of Harlem, always unseen by a society that refuses to acknowledge his full humanity. Ellison's sole novel is one of the great works of American literature.
-
8
Wise Blood
Hazel Motes returns from the war to Tennessee determined to found the Church Without Christ — a religion without need of redemption. O'Connor's first novel is grotesque, violent and relentlessly theological: a black comedy about someone who resists grace so hard that grace comes for him in the most brutal possible way.
-
9
East of Eden
Two families — the Trasks and the Hamiltons — play out variations of the Cain and Abel story across generations in the Salinas Valley of California. Steinbeck's most ambitious novel is his explicit attempt to write the great American novel, weaving biblical myth, family saga and the philosophy of timshel — the Hebrew word that became his central argument about human freedom and choice.
-
10
The Quiet American
Thomas Fowler, a jaded British journalist in 1950s Vietnam, watches as the idealistic young American Alden Pyle intervenes in the conflict with disastrous results. Greene's prescient novel about American intervention in Asia asks what damage is done by those who believe they are helping — and whether Fowler's cynicism is any more moral than Pyle's innocence.