Books like A Tale of Love and Darkness
Amos Oz's memoir of growing up in Jerusalem in the 1940s and 50s, the only child of bookish European Jews, and of the loss of his mother when he was twelve.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of A Tale of Love and Darkness
The Tongue Set Free
Canetti remembers his childhood from 1905 to 1921, in a Sephardic Jewish family in Bulgaria, Manchester, Vienna and Zurich, and the mother who taught him German.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi, a literature professor forced out of her university in the Islamic Republic, gathers seven of her best women students at her house every Thursday to read forbidden Western novels.
Boyhood
Coetzee's account, written in the third person, of a boy growing up in Worcester, a provincial town in the Cape, in the late 1940s and early 50s.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Seven weeks after his mother killed herself, Handke wrote this compact account of her life to keep her from vanishing into the ordinary.
Istanbul: Memories and the City
Pamuk's memoir of growing up in Istanbul in the 1950s and 60s, of his family, and of the melancholy of the city, which Turks call hüzün.
The Color of Water
A Black writer tells his own story alongside that of his white Jewish mother, who raised twelve children and refused to discuss her past.
The Return
Hisham Matar goes back to Libya after Qaddafi's fall, more than thirty years after his family left, to find out what happened to his father, a dissident who disappeared into a Tripoli prison.
Speak, Memory
Nabokov remembers his St. Petersburg childhood and émigré youth, from butterfly summers on the family estate to Cambridge and Berlin, in prose built like a chess problem.
Less Than One
Brodsky's essays on growing up in postwar Leningrad, on his parents, and on the poets he loved, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Auden and Cavafy among them.
In Memory of Memory
A Russian poet sifts the boxes of a Jewish great-aunt into a century of letters, photographs, and reflections on what memory keeps and why.
The Liars' Club
Mary Karr's childhood in an East Texas oil town with a storytelling, hard-drinking father and an unstable mother, the memoir that helped start a wave of confessional writing.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson's memoir of being adopted into a Pentecostal household in a Lancashire mill town by a mother who once asked her that question, and of looking for her birth mother decades later.