30 books like The Good Earth Trilogy

I love this book for its unique perspective. Most war stories feature heroic protagonists—whether fighting on the front lines, operating behind enemy lines, or innocent victims enduring hardship and struggling to survive. However, this book presents a group of characters who ordinarily would be unlikely to cross paths. A Roman Catholic priest and a deacon in an American church during the Japanese occupation of Nanking in China were tasked with protecting 16 schoolgirls. They unexpectedly become entangled with 13 young prostitutes from a famous brothel and three injured Chinese soldiers.

The priest faces an impossible dilemma: allowing the prostitutes to stay means there will be less food and water for everyone, but turning them away could lead to their deaths. The presence of the injured soldiers complicates matters further; if discovered, the church would lose its neutrality and risk a raid by Japanese soldiers, endangering everyone inside.

I won’t reveal… show more.

Like most readers, I love a story with intense conflict, high stakes, dilemmas, and tension. In this book, the clever setup allows the author to weave them seamlessly into the narrative.

The story is set during the late Qing Dynasty in China. The heroine, Sun Meiniang, is compelled to marry the imbecile Zhao Xiaojia due to her large feet. Her father, Sun Bing, remarries, but tragedy strikes when German soldiers kill his new wife and their young children before his eyes. Driven by revenge, Sun Bing leads the townspeople in sabotaging the Germans' railroad and ambushing their soldiers.

Simultaneously, Sun Meiniang falls in love with the county magistrate, a married man, Qian Ding, who is forced to arrest her father. Adding to the conflict, her father-in-law, the notorious executioner Zhao Jia, returns and takes pride in executing Sun Bing using the torturous sandalwood death. This means both her father-in-law and… show more.

I love this book for its epic structure, character development, intricate and complex plotlines, rich imagination, poetic language, and use of magical realism.

The book spans several decades, covering significant events in 20th-century China from the 1920s to the 1990s across four generations. Through this multi-generational lens, Mo Yan explores themes of family, identity, and the impact of historical events on individual lives. Each character is so unique that after reading the book, I wrote a group of poems, two to four lines for each of the fifteen main and supporting characters. For protagonist Jin Tong, I wrote, “You are the hope of the Shangguan family, yet you live so pathetically.”

For his mother, I wrote, “The old cow eats grass, but what it gives is milk; the mother swallows tears, but what flows out is blood.” Mo Yan's sharp insights, profound reflections, and vivid prose reveal the harsh realities… show more.

I love the book because of its spectacular opening, among other merits. As the sequel to Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls, this book focuses on the next generation—Joy. The book opens with a powerful twist: Joy discovers that her mother is actually her aunt, and her aunt is her biological mother. Additionally, her father, unrelated by blood, committed suicide because of her, while her real father is an artist in China. Angry and guilt-ridden, the rebellious and naïve college student from San Francisco's Chinatown runs away to communist China to find her real father and help build the country.

Her adoptive mother, Pearl, follows to rescue her. In China, Joy marries the wrong man, nearly dies of starvation, and learns the harsh realities of the new regime. I also love the book for its character development, conflicts, and complex relationships among the main characters, as well as its historically accurate depiction… show more.

An extraordinary tale of a chokingly claustrophobic household in historical China, in which four women (wives and concubines) jealously vie for attention and privilege. As the stakes grow higher, so do the dangers inherent in their choices. Made into the film Raise the Red Lantern by Zhang Yimou, for me, this is the gold standard on this theme.

While Snow Falling on Cedars also flashes back to Japanese internment camps on the West Coast during WWII, this fictional story centers around a suspicious drowning of a white man in 1954 and the trial of the accused Japanese American. Ishmael Chambers, a one-armed war veteran himself, runs the local newspaper and follows the trial closely as he has a close connection to the players. Ishmael not only grew up with the drowning victim and the accused, but he was also the high school sweetheart of Hatsue, the accused’s wife. A love he never got over. (If you are an Ethan Hawke fan the 1999 movie is also well done, but more of a courtroom thriller than the book.)

True confession time…after reading The Winemaker’s Wife I hightailed it to the library and took out all of Kristin Harmel’s historical fiction titles (Book of Lost Names!!). Yes, they are that good! In The Winemaker’s Wife, Harmel transports her readers to 1940, a time when WWII and the Nazi regime threatened the lives and livelihoods of a particular Champagne House in France. She expertly taps into all of the five senses in her tale of love and betrayal, of the unyielding power of the human spirit in the face of adversity, and of a Resistance movement hidden beneath the casks and caves of the winery. A riveting, read-in-one-sitting book!

Winner of the 2004 Smarties Award for fiction 9 – 11, it is a well-deserved award as it describes a difficult topic at an appropriate level for its readers. 

I read Spilled Water as it has a similar theme to my own book. It gives insight into the unseen ugliness of economic success in China. In addition, this story informs our target audience of the existence of child labour and misogynism in this part of the world, where poverty forces family to treat their daughters like ‘spilled water’ and employers regard them as property.

This book stands out because it delves deeper into popular characters that appear repeatedly in similar books. I have also enjoyed coming across new names and places not previously found. But far from being obscure names, I have encountered these in Chinese fantasy dramas.

Best of all, it includes pictures of relevant artwork and museum artifacts. I get to see these without having to travel to the four corners of the world. Giving us a sense of where we are in place and time, these displays show that throughout the long Chinese history, these legends and myths are integral to the lives of Chinese people.

It’s not often you can pick up a fantasy book and laugh. Not only laugh but travel with a rogue group of people and enjoy every minute of it. The Girl from Everywhere is just plain fun! I loved the characters, so much personality! That it’s a time travel story makes it exciting, and I have a passion for tall ships, so she had me with the sailing adventure. Add to that humor and a feisty dialogue. I can’t say enough about this book.