Recommendations
Books Like There There
What to read after There There
Tommy Orange's There There is a novel about twelve Native American characters converging on an Oakland powwow, built from a tradition Orange himself defines in the prologue — one of the most unforgettable opening statements in recent American fiction. If you loved the structure of converging voices, the devastating ending, and the examination of what colonialism has done to Native communities, these eight books will resonate.
- 1Buy
Wandering Stars
by Tommy Orange
The direct sequel — follows characters from There There after the powwow; requires having read There There first
- 2Buy
Sing, Unburied, Sing
by Jesmyn Ward
A Black family in rural Mississippi on a road trip through a landscape layered with trauma and ghosts — same examination of what historical violence does to specific communities and families, same lyrical approach to carrying that weight in contemporary lives
- 3Buy
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Eight generations of a Ghanaian family through slavery and its aftermath — same scope and the same interest in how historical violence lives in bodies across generations
- 4Buy
Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee
A Korean family across four generations navigating structural discrimination in Japan — same interest in what it means to survive in a society that has decided your people don't fully belong
- 5Buy
The Round House
by Louise Erdrich
A Native American boy in 1988 North Dakota investigating the assault on his mother — Erdrich is the other major living Native American novelist and has been writing about the same themes as Orange for decades longer; a Pulitzer Prize winner
- 6Buy
Anything by Louise Erdrich
by Louise Erdrich
Erdrich has built a multi-novel saga set on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota — The Plague of Doves, Love Medicine, The Night Watchman (Pulitzer Prize winner 2021) — that together form the deepest body of work in Native American fiction
- 7Buy
An American Marriage
by Tayari Jones
A Black couple in Atlanta destroyed by wrongful conviction — same examination of what the American criminal justice and legal system does to specific communities, same emotional precision about structural injustice in intimate lives
- 8Buy
The Sympathizer
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
A double agent and communist sympathizer narrating his experience of the Vietnam War's end and its aftermath — a Pulitzer Prize winner with the same political seriousness and formal ambition as There There
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