100 Books Like Lucy

This heartwarming, multigenerational drama about the Korean community in Japan swept me into another time and place. Born and raised in a poor fishing village in Japanese-occupied Korea, Sunja makes an impulsive decision in the pursuit of love that transforms the trajectory of her life.

Thoughtful, resilient, and fiercely independent, Sunja was a relatable character whom I desperately wanted to see thrive. I felt her heartache when she left her beloved Korea and shared her indignation at the discrimination she and her family experienced in Japan. Expertly crafted and keenly observed, Pachinko shows us how history and politics shape the lives of ordinary people, often for generations to come. 

This novel broke my heart so many times. It did so with beautiful and subtle prose, with its astonishing depiction of tragedy and loss, and with its magical insistence that the music we make can outlive us all. But what broke my heart the most in Thien’s novel is the reminder, or perhaps the revelation, of how much art’s existence depends on an unpredictable, ever-shifting, uncaring, brutal world.

It was staggering, watching generations of a family of musicians fight through a century of political turmoil in China and not knowing if they, and the music, would survive. But I loved it. This novel is a marvel.

Lorrie Moore is another one of my favorite writers and someone I’ve been lucky enough to write about on multiple occasions. Her first novel, Anagrams, is smart, fun, and resolutely—even defiantly—weird. Her second novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is all those things and more.

Berie, the narrator, is on a bad vacation in Paris, where her marriage is teetering on the brink of collapse. Instead of dealing with her obnoxious husband, she thinks back to the summer she turned fifteen and the profound friendship she forged with a girl she worked with at a Disney-knockoff theme park in upstate New York.

Like Home Land, this novel has its cultists, and I’m happy to count myself among them. Moore, like Lipsyte, is a stylist as unmistakable as she is unprecedented, someone whose sentences I would recognize anywhere. This slim coming-of-age novel bears all her hallmarks—comic timing, gimlet… show more.

Just to get this out of the way: Adam is one of my closest friends. We both started our second novels New Year’s week of 2014 on a trip we took for the explicit purpose of starting new novels. I spent the next ten years trying to write my book, but Adam finished Sensation Machines in a more reasonable time frame. It was published in the summer of 2020, a basically impossible time to promote a book because we were all in lockdown. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t the worst thing that happened that summer, but still.)

It is a marriage story, a murder mystery, a cultural satire, a tech farce, and a reckoning with all the lessons we failed to learn from the last financial crisis. And it’s a great Brooklyn novel, in the tradition of Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (also a second novel!) and Jonathan Lethem’s The… show more.

I read Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland in 2015—a time when my life wasn't tainted by grief. Even then, I found myself mesmerized by the novel's depiction of the grieving process as a long-lasting curse that spreads its tentacles into all aspects of our lives.

Gauri, the protagonist of Lahiri's novel, loses her Naxalite husband to political violence. Although Gauri gains a second chance at happiness, her pain consumes her, and she constantly reinvents herself to escape its clutches, albeit at her family’s emotional expense.

In retrospect, I was impressed by the author's accurate portrayal of grief as a sort of spiritual and emotional gridlock. In addition, I believe The Lowland provides a moving meditation on the intergenerational effect of unresolved trauma.

Talk about teenage angst. This YA novel is like living inside the mind of an anxiety-driven, introverted teenager who constantly finds herself in precarious positions.

I loved the honesty of this book the most. I got so frustrated with the main character because she kept making decisions that I’ve seen people in real life make. I wanted to scream at her so many times throughout the novel, and several times, I put the book down and shook my head in frustration. That’s when you know the novel is a winner. 

A few years ago, I had the chance to write about Allan Gurganus for Harper’s magazine. That gave me a reason to read his entire oeuvre. There’s a lot of great stuff in there, but Plays Well With Others is my favorite. Published in 1997, it was the eagerly awaited follow-up to Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Gurganus’s smash hit debut, which had come out in 1989. That book sold several million copies and was adapted into a TV miniseries as well as a Broadway show.

Unfortunately, Plays Well could not escape the long shadow cast by Widow. But I am here to tell you that this story of a queer friend-group weathering the worst of the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York City is a sui generis work of genius: a sexually graphic, laugh-out-loud funny, emotionally devastating tour-de-force, as beautiful and bonkers as it is… show more.

Sam Lipsyte’s sentences are demented and perfect. He’s one of the funniest writers I have ever read.

The story behind this book is one of publishing legend. Here's the way I've always heard it told: Lipsyte’s first book, The Subject Steve, was a brutal satire of contemporary American life that had the deep misfortune of being published on September 11, 2001. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t the worst thing that happened on 9/11, but still.)

He followed it with Home Land, a vitriolic, sleazy, hilarious novel in the form of epic pissy dispatches to a high school alumni newsletter. As narrators go, Lewis Miner is as unimprovable as he is unredeemable. This book was passed around to every publishing house in New York City, read and cherished by dozens of editors who were scared to put their colophon where their heart was.

It’s hard to remember now, but… show more.

The utopian dreams of the 60s died hard, and this beautiful novel captures the mood of the decade—and the forces that destroyed it. Set mostly in a back-to-the-land hippie community, the book centers on Bit, the first baby born to the settlers. It follows him through childhood and adolescence, and checks in on him on the cusp of middle age, a single father in New York City. Bit’s a sensitive soul, and I felt for him, especially when the story tracked his relationship with his first lover and later runaway wife, the self-destructive Helle. Groff’s expressive use of language, her feel for the natural world, and her deep sensitivity to the psychology of her characters marks this book as a classic not to be missed. 

It can be difficult for kids to see their parents as real people, and that’s why I love Some Places More Than Others. When Amara finally convinces her parents she should get to go on a trip with her dad to New York City’s Harlem to meet the grandfather she’s only spoken to on the phone, she uncovers the fact that her dad and her grandfather haven’t spoken in twelve years. I love the depiction of Amara’s father as a person in his own right, someone with a history and his own problems and how, as Amara slowly unravels the mysteries of her father’s past, she begins to understand herself better too.