Here are 100 books that The Widow's Children fans have personally recommended if you like
The Widow's Children.
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My mother, father, and I were each born in different countries, and into different languages. In my childhood, we were a hybridized wonder—one part jetsam, one part flotsam—and a country unto ourselves. Our house was filled with all kinds of books, our dinnertimes with lively conversation (and occasional shouting), our plates with food cooked according to the recipes of family ghosts. I can honestly say that no other family was like ours, especially not in the American suburbs of the 1980s. As a writer, I have always been fascinated by the tug-and-pull of intergenerational trauma, and by the dislocation of immigration and exile.
When August’s grandfather—the bedrock of a multi-generational Wiradjuri family—dies, she must return to Australia, and to the town of Prosperous. There, she comes face-to-face with the things that have driven her out, a process that began long before her birth. The book’s three narrators chart the casualties of colonialism: the loss of indigenous culture, the stamping out of language, the land that is taken and forever altered. But the book is so much more than a catalogue of losses, and Winch’s song is ultimately one of identity—and history—reclaimed.
"A beautifully written novel that puts language at the heart of remembering the past and understanding the present."-Kate Morton
"A groundbreaking novel for black and white Australia."-Richard Flanagan, Man Booker Prize winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North
A young Australian woman searches for her grandfather's dictionary, the key to halting a mining company from destroying her family's home and ancestral land in this exquisitely written, heartbreaking, yet hopeful novel of culture, language, tradition, suffering, and empowerment in the tradition of Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Amy Harmon.
Knowing that he will soon die, Albert "Poppy" Gondiwindi…
Alice Wilson wants children; her husband, Dan, doesn’t. So Alice "accidentally" gets pregnant, trusting that Dan will eventually go along—and he seems to, at first. But as their marriage falls apart, Alice realizes that, even from the beginning, Dan has cruelly used small criticisms and belittling comments to undermine her…
If I were a supermarket pie, my label would say, ‘Made in the UK with Chinese ingredients.’ Born in Wales to parents from Guangzhou and Hong Kong, my Cantonese is appalling, I’m bad at maths, and I can barely ride a bike without falling off. In short, I am an example of a real-life person and not a cliché or stereotype from the sorts of books we used to have to read if we wanted to see diverse characters. It’s about time the stories we read and the shows we watch become so effortlessly diverse that we don’t even notice. I hope my novels are playing a part in making that commonplace.
This is another book I read that made me think that the story of immigration into a provincial, rather than big city, setting was something people would read. It also made me think, that all parents, immigrants or not, have a massive calling to be deeply embarrassing.
Marina’s story to publication is an inspiring one, too. She was fifty-eight when this, her debut novel, was published.
Concealed inside this comic tale of an octogenarian newly widowed father, finding romance with a much younger Ukrainian barmaid is a lesson that all immigrants must one day learn. Just because someone else is from the old country too, it does not necessarily mean they have your best interests at heart.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainianis bestselling author Marina Lewycka's hilarious and award winning debut novel.
'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.'
Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must aside a lifetime of feuding to save their emigre engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin…
My mother, father, and I were each born in different countries, and into different languages. In my childhood, we were a hybridized wonder—one part jetsam, one part flotsam—and a country unto ourselves. Our house was filled with all kinds of books, our dinnertimes with lively conversation (and occasional shouting), our plates with food cooked according to the recipes of family ghosts. I can honestly say that no other family was like ours, especially not in the American suburbs of the 1980s. As a writer, I have always been fascinated by the tug-and-pull of intergenerational trauma, and by the dislocation of immigration and exile.
Pramesh, a hostel manager, lives a quiet life with his wife and daughter. His job is to help guests who have traveled to the city of Banares in the hope of good deaths. But when a body is pulled from the Ganges, a complicated family history surfaces alongside it, one that threatens the joyful stability of the present. Champaneri’s prose is stunning. Reviewers have aptly called the book “transcendent”, and I found myself entirely transported by this meditation of life, death, and things past.
Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Priyanka Champaneri’s transcendent debut novel brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go.
Banaras, Varanasi, Kashi: India’s holy city on the banks of the Ganges has many names but holds one ultimate promise for Hindus. It is the place where pilgrims come for a good death, to be released from the cycle of reincarnation by purifying fire. As the dutiful manager of a…
Alice Wilson wants children; her husband, Dan, doesn’t. So Alice "accidentally" gets pregnant, trusting that Dan will eventually go along—and he seems to, at first. But as their marriage falls apart, Alice realizes that, even from the beginning, Dan has cruelly used small criticisms and belittling comments to undermine her…
I was born in Odessa, USSR, a Southern Ukrainian city that many more people know now than when my family and I immigrated in 1977. Growing up in the US, everything I read about Soviet immigrants was either cliched, stereotyped, or plain wrong. A 1985 short film, Molly’s Pilgrim, about a (presumably Jewish) Soviet immigrant girl showed her wearing a native peasant costume and a scarf on her head which, for some reason, Americans insisted on calling a “babushka.” “Babushka” means “grandmother” in Russian. Why would you wear one of those on your head? I was desperate for more realistic portrayals. So I wrote my own. And the five books I picked definitely offer them.
Math reigned supreme in the USSR. I was never particularly good at it. I had to immigrate to the United States to marry an American nuclear engineer turned math and physics teacher. In Divide Me By Zero the heroine’s widowed mother describes love in mathematical terms. The passage reminded me of my husband. I forced him to listen to me read it out loud to him. “Wow,” he said. "That’s hot." Read this book for the heart-wrenching story—and the hot math.
As a young girl, Katya Geller learned from her mother that math was the answer to everything. Now, approaching forty, she finds this wisdom tested: she has lost the love of her life, she is in the middle of a divorce, and has just found out that her mother is dying. Nothing is adding up.
With humor, intelligence, and unfailing honesty, Katya traces back her life’s journey: her childhood in Soviet Russia, her parents’ great love, the death of her father, her mother’s career as a renowned mathematician, and their immigration to the United…
My novel choices were part of the Afterschool Literacy & Building Modules for an organization called LitShop. It encourages growth in literacy, making, building, and leadership in girls ages 10-15 in St. Louis, Missouri. I’m honored to lead the writing classes. All of the LitShop books feature strong girls who believe they can make and build their way to a better world, and I aim to include similar characters in my stories. Stories can provide us with motivation, inspiration, and companionship, and all of these books have done just that… for the girls of LitShop as well as myself.
Before reading this book, I had no idea city-based fantasy novels could draw me in as powerfully as stories with more “traditional” fantasy settings. But Mr. Older’s depiction of Brooklyn as a living, breathing landscape made me a new believer in urban magic. And the main character Sierra’s shadowshaping feels like its own form of beautiful, youthful rebellion. Art can save us, if only we breathe our power into it. I stop and stare at most graffiti murals now, waiting for them to move a little.
Sierra Santiago planned an easy summer of making art and hanging with her friends. But then a corpse crashes the first party of the season. Her stroke-ridden grandfather starts apologizing over and over. And when the murals in her neighborhood begin to weep real tears . . . Well, something more sinister than the usual Brooklyn ruckus is going on.
Where the powers converge and become one
With the help of a fellow artist named Robbie, Sierra discovers shadowshaping, a thrilling magic that infuses ancestral spirits into paintings, music, and stories. But…
I’ve always been a big fan of sci-fi and fantasy, especially anything involving superheroes or D&D-style adventure. For the longest time, I had to find queer representation through subtle glances and creative readings of characters. I loved these stories for the sci-fi and fantasy elements, but it was frustrating that every love story that came up was straight. It didn’t feel possible for queer love to be a part of a plot, and even when there was a queer character it had a “very special episode” vibe to it. Finally, queer characters are becoming part of the story, and it doesn’t have to be a “big deal.”
I love a soft sci-fi and Adam Silvera knows how to deliver.
What makes his world different from ours is a technology that can let people know the day they are going to die, on that day, so they have a chance to say goodbye. It provides such potential for deep introspection (for his readers as much as his characters) and heartbreak.
From the author of the INTERNATIONAL NO. 1 BESTSELLER THEY BOTH DIE AT THE END comes an explosive examination of grief, mental illness, and the devastating consequences of refusing to let go of the past.
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You're still alive in alternate universes, Theo, but I live in the real world where this morning you're having an open casket funeral. I know you're out there, listening. And you should know I'm really pissed because you swore you would never die and yet here we are. It hurts even more because this isn't the first promise you've…
I’m a queer, nonbinary, Muslim, immigrant writer who has been reading their whole life and writing for part of it. I learned to write by reading–by devouring all kinds of books across different genres and paying attention to how words create feelings, worlds, and chronologies. I also learned to live by reading–I didn’t grow up with models of how to live a life that was true to my identities and so I read everything I could find about experiences that were adjacent to my own. The emergence of queer Muslim literature has been exciting to follow, and I try to read everything in the field.
I love the way Bushra Rehman writes about immigrant New York in the 80s – in vignettes that thread together to convey a sense of time, place, and geography.
All her characters are portrayed sensitively and complexly: from the main protagonist Razia coming into her queerness, to Pakistani aunties with their own histories and trauma, to friends who grow further apart.
I love how much this story is about women as the cornerstones of community.
Razia Mirza grows up amid the wild grape vines and backyard sunflowers of Corona, Queens, with her best friend, Saima, by her side. When a family rift drives the girls apart, Razia's heart is broken. She finds solace in Taslima, a new girl in her close knit Pakistani-American community. They embark on a series of small rebellions: listening to scandalous music, wearing mini skirts, and cutting school to explore the city.
When Razia is accepted to Stuyvesant, a prestigious high school in Manhattan, the gulf between the person she is and the daughter her parents want her to be, widens.…
I’m Professor of History at Colorado State University Pueblo and have published eight books, mostly about the history of food. After encountering Up in the Old Hotel for the first time during the early 1990s, I started reading New York City history in my spare time.The Fulton Fish Market: A History is my way to blend my expertise with my hobby. Each of these books are beautifully written, informative, and fun. If you’re interested in the history of New York City and you’re looking for something else to read, I hope you’ll find my book to be the same.
Joseph Mitchell was the city reporter for the New Yorker for about half a century. This is a collection of his magazine stories. Many of them involve the old Fulton Fish Market, but he also wrote about weird things like dime museums, gypsies, and stag banquets.
To me, every story in this collection is like a time capsule. This is the book that made me want to write about New York City because it suggests there is a history on every block there worth recording. If you don’t like a chapter or two, then skip to the next one, but I’ll vouch for 80% of this book being the best non-fiction writing that I have ever read (and I practically read for a living).
Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style.
These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of…
Growing up in Brooklyn I heard stories about local mafia figures. Now, as the author of several books that deal with crime, I am passionate about good storytelling. I believe that a novel delving into the world of crime and criminals should be fast-paced and believable. Readers have told me that they give up on a book because, in their words: 1. “It isn’t believable” and 2. “It didn’t draw me in.” God forbid that any of the books I’ve written should fall into either of those categories! The books that I recommend are tops in the genre of The Best Mob Books That Tell It Like It Is.
This is a novel about Italian immigrants struggling to survive in New York City’s Little Italy during the early years of the twentieth century amid the growth of the Black Hand, the precursor to the American mafia. The book is unique in that most of the characters are the author’s actual ancestors and people with whom they had come into contact during that era. Similarly, the grisly central events described in the story all occurred.
It is beautifully written and filled with fascinating historical details. The characters and the descriptions of places and events come alive on the page. Fabiano includes an extensive Glossary of Italian Terms used in the book, as well as a multi-generational family tree. Elizabeth Street makes for very good reading!
Based on true events, Elizabeth Street is a multigenerational saga that opens in an Italian village in the 1900's, and crosses the ocean to New York's Lower East Side. At the heart of the novel is Giovanna, whose family is targeted by the notorious Black Hand-the precursor to the Mafia. Elizabeth Street brings to light a period in history when Italian immigrant neighborhoods lived in fear of Black Hand extortion and violence-a reality that defies the romanticized depiction of the Mafia. Here, the author reveals the merciless terror of the Black Hand-and the impact their crimes had on her family.…
I am the oldest of four children and was always close to my mom. She was a trailblazer, earning her doctorate in educational psychology in 1963 and teaching at the college level. In her early 70’s her memory started to falter, and she lived with dementia for 10 years before she died. I was a reporter at The New York Times and had published three books by that point. My fourth became All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother’s Dementia. With Refreshments. I spent years in doctors’ and hospital’s waiting rooms and these are some of the books that helped make that time not only tolerable but sometimes, even joyful.
“I saw a little boy on the street today, and he cried so eloquently that I will never forget him.” Maeve Brennan wrote for the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section as ‘The Long-Winded Lady’ from 1954 to 1968. She roamed the city’s streets, bars, and restaurants, eyes wide open, weaving stories of vivid emotional detail from the most seemingly mundane moments. None of these are too long – in the waiting room concentration can be fleeting – but each sketch engages. Her story of the crying boy ends this way: “He might have been the last bird in the world, except that if he had been the last bird there would have been no one to hear him.”
“Of all the incomparable stable of journalists who wrote for The New Yorker during its glory days in the Fifties and Sixties,” writes The Independent, “the most distinctive was Irish-born Maeve Brennan.” From 1954 to 1981, Maeve Brennan wrote for The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column under the pen name “The Long-Winded Lady.” Her unforgettable sketches—prose snapshots of life in small restaurants, cheap hotels, and crowded streets of Times Square and the Village—together form a timeless, bittersweet tribute to what she called the “most reckless, most ambitious, most confused, most comical, the saddest and coldest and most human…
