Books like Real Life
Wallace, a queer Black biochemistry graduate student from Alabama at a mostly white Midwestern university, spends a late-summer weekend in which his friendships, his work and his past are all tested.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Real Life
Filthy Animals
Interconnected stories about young people in the American Midwest grappling with desire, loneliness, and the impossible project of being known by another person.
The Late Americans
Graduate students and gig workers in Iowa City orbit each other through workshops, slaughterhouses, and dating apps, searching for connection in a precarious economy.
Stoner
A Missouri farm boy becomes a literature professor at the University of Missouri and lives a quiet, thwarted life that only gains shape in its retelling.
The Human Stain
A classics professor in late-1990s New England takes a young mistress and watches his carefully constructed life collapse under the weight of a secret he's kept for fifty years.
Another Country
After the suicide of Rufus Scott, a Black jazz drummer, his friends in late-1950s New York, Black and white, gay and straight, try to love one another across every line America draws.
A Thousand Acres
A modern retelling of King Lear set on an Iowa farm, where a father's decision to divide his land among three daughters unleashes buried secrets and destruction.
The Bluest Eye
A young Black girl in 1940s Ohio prays for blue eyes, and her wish exposes the way American beauty standards destroy the people they exclude.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
A man haunted by the unexplained abandonment of four close friends makes a pilgrimage to understand what broke them apart.
Crossroads
In 1971 suburban Chicago, associate pastor Russ Hildebrandt and his family each struggle with faith, desire and a youth group called Crossroads, as their lives pull apart over a single winter.
God Help the Child
A striking dark-skinned Black woman confronts the mother who rejected her as a child and the damage that rejection left behind.
Hangsaman
A troubled young woman leaves home for college and begins to unravel in ways that may or may not be real.
On Beauty
Two academic families, the liberal mixed-race Belseys and the conservative Trinidadian-British Kippses, collide in a New England college town in Zadie Smith's update of Howards End.