Recommendations
Books Like A Long Petal of the Sea
What to read after A Long Petal of the Sea
Isabel Allende's A Long Petal of the Sea follows Spanish Civil War refugees from Europe to Chile across decades of history and exile. If you loved the historical sweep, the sense of people building lives in exile, and the double displacement of surviving both the Spanish Civil War and the Pinochet coup, these eight books will resonate.
- 1Buy
The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
Allende's most famous novel — three generations of the Trueba family in an unnamed South American country through political upheaval; same historical scope and the same Allende voice, with more magical realism
- 2Buy
All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
Two children in WWII Europe whose lives will eventually intersect — the same lyrical prose, the same sense of historical forces crashing through individual lives, the same quality of love and loss in wartime
- 3Buy
The Nightingale
by Kristin Hannah
Two sisters in Nazi-occupied France — the same examination of what people do to survive occupation and what they do for each other, the same emotional scale and the same devastating wartime ending
- 4Buy
The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A boy in post-Civil War Barcelona hunting a forgotten author — the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath as backdrop, the same sense of a literary Spain haunted by recent political violence
- 5Buy
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
An Kabul boy carrying his country with him into American exile — same examination of what displacement does to people who love a country that has become dangerous and what exile does to the relationships left behind
- 6Buy
Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee
A Korean family across four generations navigating discrimination and displacement in Japan — same sense of people building lives in a country that didn't choose them, the same emotional scope
- 7Buy
Suite Française
by Irène Némirovsky
Two novellas written during the Nazi occupation and abandoned when Némirovsky was deported and murdered — the most direct imaginable connection between European displacement and literature; devastating nonfiction companion to A Long Petal of the Sea's themes
- 8Buy
A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
A man who cannot leave a hotel for thirty years — same patience, same sense of someone building a complete life within the constraints that history has imposed, same warm elegance of prose
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