Recommendations
Books Like The Joy Luck Club
What to read after The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club interweaves eight voices — four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters — to explore the gap between generations, languages, and memories of China. If you loved the structure, the mother-daughter dynamics, and the movement between pre-revolutionary China and contemporary America, these eight books will satisfy the same appetite.
- 1Buy
Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee
A Korean family across four generations — same scope, same interest in what immigration and discrimination do to families, same attention to the women whose sacrifices make the next generation possible
- 2Buy
The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
A Bengali family in Boston across two generations — Lahiri is the closest American analog to Tan in her ability to render the specific texture of the gap between immigrant parents and their American children
- 3Buy
Everything I Never Told You
by Celeste Ng
A Chinese-American family in 1970s Ohio after their middle daughter is found dead in a lake — same examination of what families hide from each other and the specific weight of mixed-race, immigrant family identity in America
- 4Buy
The Woman Warrior
by Maxine Hong Kingston
Part memoir, part mythology, part family history — Kingston's foundational exploration of what it means to be Chinese-American and female, the direct predecessor of Tan's work and still the most formally inventive text in the genre
- 5Buy
Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
A custody battle in Shaker Heights that becomes an examination of race, privilege, and what mothers do for their children — same interest in what women sacrifice and what families can and cannot give each other
- 6Buy
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana whose story spans eight generations — same multi-generational scope and the same attention to how history shapes the specific choices available to people in each generation
- 7Buy
The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
Three generations of a family in an unnamed South American country — same multi-generational scope, same magical realist texture, same interest in what women carry across time while the men around them make the political decisions
- 8Buy
Inheritance
by Dani Shapiro
A memoir about discovering through a DNA test that the man who raised the author was not her biological father — about identity, family secrets, and the gap between what parents tell children and what they hide; nonfiction companion to Joy Luck Club's themes
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