Books like Middlesex
Cal Stephanides, an intersex narrator born in Detroit in 1960, traces the genetic mutation that shaped his life back through three generations of a Greek-American family, from the burning of Smyrna to the Detroit riots.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Middlesex
White Teeth
A Bangladeshi family, a Jamaican family, and a Jewish-Catholic couple collide in North London at the turn of the millennium, and their intersecting lives map multicultural Britain.
Kane and Abel
Born on the same day in 1906, William Kane, heir to a Boston banking fortune, and Abel Rosnovski, a Polish orphan who reaches America with nothing, are set on a collision course.
Pachinko
Four generations of a Korean family build lives in Japan, enduring discrimination and sacrifice, connected by stubbornness and the pachinko parlours that sustain them.
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
Four sisters from a well-off Dominican family, forced to flee to New York in 1960, grow up American, told backwards from adulthood to their island childhood.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar de León, an overweight Dominican-American nerd in New Jersey who dreams of love and of being the next Tolkien, may be suffering under the fukú, a curse that has haunted his family for generations.
This Is How It Always Is
Rosie and Penn have four boisterous sons when their fifth, Claude, starts saying he wants to wear dresses and be a girl when he grows up, and the family moves across the country to give the child a fresh start.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Two Jewish cousins in 1930s Brooklyn create a comic-book superhero, channeling their rage and dreams into the birth of an art form.
Dominicana
In 1965 Ana Canción, fifteen, is married off by her family to Juan Ruiz, a man twice her age, and taken from the Dominican countryside to an apartment in Washington Heights, so that the rest of them can follow.
American Pastoral
A successful Jewish-American glove manufacturer watches his family and his country unravel in the aftermath of the 1960s counterculture.
Love Medicine
The Kashpaws and the Lamartines, two Ojibwe families on a North Dakota reservation, from the 1930s to the 1980s, told in many voices.
Raised from the Ground
The peasants of a Portuguese estate endure a century of feudal oppression, and Saramago gives voice to the people history usually ignores.
Black Cake
Byron and Benny Bennett, estranged siblings, come home to California after their mother's death to find she has left them a long voice recording, the story of her life in the Caribbean, and a black cake in the freezer.