Recommendations
Books Like Oscar Wao
Best books to read after The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
If The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao moved you — Oscar's impossible quest for love, Yunior's voice mixing Spanglish and footnotes and science fiction references, the fuku pursuing the de León family from the Trujillo era through the New Jersey suburbs — these eight novels share its Caribbean political history, its immigrant family portrait, or its refusal to separate literary fiction from genre joy.
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Drown
by Junot Díaz
Stories about Dominican and Dominican-American boys in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic — Díaz's debut collection is the immediate companion to Oscar Wao: Yunior appears as a younger version of himself, the New Jersey and Dominican Republic settings are the same, and the voice is the same refusal to separate street slang from literary ambition; the obvious next Díaz read for anyone who loved Oscar's world
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In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
The four Mirabal sisters under the Trujillo dictatorship — Alvarez's novel is the closest literary companion to Oscar Wao in its subject: both novels make the Trujillo regime central to a Dominican family's history, both use a woman's or a family's private experience as the lens through which political violence becomes legible, and both insist that the dictatorship's damage extends forward in time into the lives of those who survived it and their descendants
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A Brief History of Seven Killings
by Marlon James
Seventy voices narrating the attempted assassination of Bob Marley and its aftermath in Jamaica and New York — James's Booker Prize winner is the Jamaican counterpart to Oscar Wao's Dominican one: the same Caribbean political violence, the same multiple-voice narrative that refuses a single authoritative perspective, and the same insistence that the diaspora community in New York cannot be understood without understanding the violence that produced it
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How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez
Four Dominican sisters and their family who fled the Trujillo regime for New York — Alvarez's debut novel shares Oscar Wao's portrait of the Dominican diaspora in the United States and its engagement with what it means to carry Dominican identity in an American context; where Díaz's novel follows a boy who cannot fit into either Dominican or American masculinity, Alvarez's novel follows girls who cannot fit into either Dominican or American femininity
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Breath, Eyes, Memory
by Edwidge Danticat
Sophie Caco traveling from Haiti to New York to join her mother and discovering the intergenerational trauma embedded in both their bodies — Danticat's debut is the Haitian companion to Oscar Wao's Dominican one: the same Caribbean immigrant family in New York, the same engagement with what political violence does to families across generations, and the same insistence that the diaspora cannot be understood without understanding the country that produced it
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Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ifemelu leaving Nigeria for Princeton and discovering that she is 'Black' for the first time in America — Adichie's novel shares Oscar Wao's portrait of the immigrant who discovers in the United States that the category of race is applied to them in new ways; where Oscar is Dominican in a world that reads him as Black, Ifemelu is Nigerian in a world that reads her as African American; both novels are about the exhausting labor of navigating an identity assigned by others
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The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Amir and Hassan in 1970s Kabul, and Amir's guilt over an act of cowardice during the Taliban's rise — Hosseini's debut shares Oscar Wao's engagement with how political violence shapes the lives of ordinary families in countries that the American reader may know primarily through headlines; both novels use family and friendship to make legible the history of countries that are otherwise abstract to American readers, and both are organized around a guilt that cannot be expiated through distance
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Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
Abraham Lincoln visiting the graveyard where his son Willie is buried, as the dead in the bardo (a Tibetan Buddhist intermediate state) narrate the night — Saunders's Booker Prize winner shares Oscar Wao's formal ambition and its refusal of conventional realist prose: both novels raid other genres (Díaz raids science fiction and footnotes, Saunders raids the ghost story and historical documentary) to say things that straightforward realistic narration cannot say; recommended for readers who loved Oscar Wao's formal playfulness more than its Caribbean subject
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