Books like Joseph and His Brothers
Mann's retelling of Genesis across four novels: Jacob's favourite son, Joseph, is sold into Egypt by his brothers and rises in Pharaoh's land.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Joseph and His Brothers
Buddenbrooks
Four generations of a Lübeck merchant family from their commercial height through their slow bourgeois rot, in the novel that made the 25-year-old Mann.
The Holy Sinner
Mann's comic retelling of the medieval legend of Gregorius, a child born of noble twins and set adrift at sea, who grows up to become a knight and, in time, pope.
Children of the Alley
The history of a Cairo alley told as allegory: Gabalawi, its founder, shut away in his great house, while his descendants fight over his estate generation after generation.
Return to Ithaca
Odysseus, worn out by twenty years of war and wandering, washes up among the Phaeacians and makes his way home to Ithaca, where suitors are eating through his house.
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Jesus of Nazareth reimagined as a fully human man, doubting, loving and in open dispute with God, in Saramago's provocative retelling of the Gospels.
Thaïs
Paphnuce, a desert monk in fourth-century Egypt, resolves to save the soul of Thaïs, the celebrated courtesan of Alexandria he once desired.
Barabbas
Barabbas, the thief freed in place of Jesus, watches the crucifixion from a distance and can't stop thinking about the man who died in his place, or about the people who believe in him.
East of Eden
Two brothers in California's Salinas Valley reenact the story of Cain and Abel across two generations, fighting over land, love, and their father's approval.
A Thousand Ships
The Trojan War told by its women, from the Trojan queens waiting on the shore to be taken as slaves to Penelope writing increasingly sharp letters to her absent husband.
Cain
After killing his brother Abel, Cain is condemned to wander and slips through time into the Old Testament's great episodes, from the sacrifice of Isaac to the Tower of Babel and Noah's ark, questioning every act of divine cruelty he sees.
Only Yesterday
Isaac Kumer, a young idealist from Galicia, arrives in Ottoman Palestine in the early 1900s to work the land and ends up a house painter caught between secular Jaffa and religious Jerusalem.
Dream of the Red Chamber
Jia Baoyu, the sensitive heir of a great aristocratic family in eighteenth-century China, grows up among his cousins in a vast garden, as love, ambition and debt bring the household down.