100 Books Like The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

I love this book for the poetic and multilingual effect in just about every line of writing. Although its explicit descriptions of bodily violence are visceral and challenging, there is something utterly compelling about the impossibility of disentangling literal from metaphorical descriptions.

I love the way the book revisits and also queers some of the themes of Maxine Hong Kingston’s A Woman Warrior (e.g., the story of immigration to the U.S., the woman warrior theme). Linguistically, it is even more complex than A Woman Warrior.

It combines American English and Chinese—sometimes breaking up the Roman letters with Chinese characters—and then subverts both English and Chinese through references to the indigenous Taiwanese language, Atayal.

I love the way this book moves between Scotland and Sudan, as told from the perspective of a devout Muslim woman working as a translator for a Scottish academic at Aberdeen University. The story itself is a work of translation and a highly original rewriting of the encounter between East and West, Islam and Christianity, English and Arabic.

All those binaries break down: the English, for example, is Scottish, and the way to pronounce Arabic turns on a difference between Arab-speaking regions so that in both speech and writing, the reader encounters subtleties of translation usually overlooked in the tiresome cliches about “West” and “East.”

I love teaching it to learn with my students the politics of translation. The book has my favorite rewriting of that famous map-pointing scene at the beginning of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”—Aboulela restores as Arabic names the blank spaces on the map of… show more.

This is a book that keeps on changing my life. I was bowled over the first time I read it because it completely transformed my understanding of global history. The multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-national history I’d been piecing together studying Conrad’s work suddenly all made sense in a different way.

Pramoedya’s novel shows how Conrad’s novels are really all about the anti-colonial revolution. I love the book for the way it introduces all the most important historical, political, social, sexual, and philosophical questions bound up with decolonization.

It's a deceptively simple read, but cocooned within the sentimental coming-of-age story of its first-person narrator, the European-educated Minke, is an increasingly historical account of colonial oppression, anti-colonial resistance, and worldwide revolution that completely overturns European assumptions about what constitutes “this earth of mankind.” 

I love this book for the epic story it tells of two Native American sisters kidnapped from their home and reunited after separate journeys. There’s something extraordinary about Silko's ability to craft a novel about the horrors of violence against Native Americans and make it a book of resilience and affirmation.

It may not have the heft of her other epic novel, Almanac of the Dead (which I also love), but whereas Almanac has no likable characters and many brutal stories, this one manages to have no unlikeable characters despite the underlying brutality of the stories it tells.

It is deceptively childlike in its focus on children and its inclusion of animal characters, although the animal-human relation is far from simplistic, forming part of its deep linguistic, cultural, and ecological world-changing perspective. 

While many novels about female friendship focus on young women, The Weekend follows three women in their seventies, whose decades-long friendship has sustained them through illness, infidelity, divorce – and recently the death of their fourth close friend, Sylvie.

Drawn together over a weekend to clear out Sylvie’s house, the remaining women must grapple with their shared past and uncertain future. I loved this glimpse into the lives of older women – a reality not often portrayed in fiction – and admired Wood’s ability to make each of her three narrators flawed, relatable, and human.

If you like immersive character-driven novels, this book won’t disappoint.

Ukrainian-born, Yelena Moskovich, is one of the most daring and radical stylists working in contemporary literature, and I was “bewitched, bothered and bewildered,” in the best possible ways, by her debut novel, The Natashas. Set in contemporary Paris, it is through the mirrored introversion of two protagonists—Beatrice, a jazz singer, and Cesar, an actor—that the dramatic tensions between self and other, silence and voice, are played out, with “the Natashas,” women resigned to a void, functioning as the novel’s haunted, nesting doll chorus. Moskovich’s book is an experiment that closes in on itself, and with claustrophobic intimacy produces a strange, brooding, and salacious form of music. 

Dr. Ivan Misner is the father of modern networking. It stands to reason he knows a thing or two or three about change. When you are trying to make changes in your life or be successful, it is very important to surround yourself with the right people to foster your growth and success. This book shows you just how to do that. This is one of my favorite books to recommend to people when they feel stuck.

Happiness is a gentle, insightful, poetic depiction of the politics of nature in London, England—specifically, the treatment of urban foxes in the midst of human activity. The layers of life (children, adults, foxes, falcons, street cleaners, psychiatrists, immigrants, landowners) interact here in ways deeply moving and insightful, reminding me of the central question in much of my writing: the boundaries between our private, poetic perceptions and the politics of survival.

Learning to set boundaries – with work and with other people – was essential to helping me to recover from burnout, and this book is a practical how-to guide for how and why to set them.

In my own life, and in my work as a clinical psychologist, I have seen how chronic people-pleasing tendencies, and saying “yes” to everything, can lead to exhaustion and burnout. Having this book as a tool has helped me to be more intentional about saying no, and more assertive about standing up for my own needs.

As the author, Nedra Glover Tawwab, states in the book, “Burnout is overwhelming, and boundaries are the cure.” I couldn’t agree more!

I took a while to warm to Mabel Beaumont. She’s grumpy and wasn’t a loving partner to her late husband, Arthur, a caring attentive man.

When he dies, she’s bereft and feels bound to carry out his last wish, written cryptically in his last list, "Find D." Mabel thinks she knows what it means. She must track down her former best friend Dot, who she hasn’t seen since she suddenly left more than sixty years ago. But how?

Fortunately, savvy helpers turn up, thoughtfully arranged by Arthur before he died, and they all become unlikely friends. Did Arthur know her better than she knew herself? Did he love her more than she loved herself or him? Well-drawn characters make this an intriguing, uplifting story. It’s never too late!