Recommendations
Books Like Middlesex
What to read after Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex is simultaneously a family saga, a coming-of-age story, and a meditation on identity and the body — tracing a recessive gene through three generations of Greek-American immigration while telling Cal's story of self-discovery. These eight books share that same combination of multi-generational scope and intimate, searching character study.
- 1Buy
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Eugenides's debut — five teenage sisters in suburban Michigan in the 1970s, narrated by the neighborhood boys who could never understand them; the same dark suburban lyricism as Middlesex, different in scale and tone
- 2Buy
The Marriage Plot
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Three Brown students in the early 1980s and the romantic triangle that defines their post-college years — more contemporary than Middlesex, equally intelligent, different in form
- 3Buy
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana whose descendants carry the history of slavery across eight generations — same scope and the same structural ambition of tracing consequences across generations
- 4Buy
The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
Four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters — same multi-generational structure and the same interest in what immigrant families carry across generations and what their American-born children inherit
- 5Buy
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
by Michael Chabon
Two Jewish-American cousins who create a superhero comic book during WWII — the same sweep of American Jewish experience, the same formal ambition, the same interest in art as a form of identity and survival
- 6Buy
The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Ganguli family's immigration from Calcutta to Massachusetts — same examination of what immigrant families carry across generations and what their American-born children do with what they inherit, same patient literary intelligence
- 7Buy
Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
An American man in Paris who is in love with a man and tries to escape that love — a quieter examination of the same questions about identity and what happens when who we are doesn't match what the world allows
- 8Buy
The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Three women on a single day connected to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway — same literary ambition, same formal inventiveness, same interest in gender, time, and the specific interior texture of lives lived against social expectation
More Middlesex Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.