Books like The Ancestor Game
Steven Muir, an Australian writer, befriends Lang Tzu, a painter whose family history runs from Shanghai to Melbourne, and sets out to piece it together.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Ancestor Game
Questions of Travel
Laura, an Australian who travels the world, and Ravi, a Sri Lankan who comes to Sydney after his family is killed, both end up working at a travel-guide publisher.
The Vivisector
Hurtle Duffield, sold as a small boy by his poor parents to a rich Sydney family, grows up to become a painter who will use everyone he loves as material.
Benang
Harley, a young Noongar man whose white grandfather set out to breed the Aboriginality out of the family, floats in the air as he tells his family's history in Western Australia.
The Shadow Lines
A boy growing up in Calcutta pieces together the lives of his family across Calcutta, Dhaka and London, and a death in a riot in 1964.
An Artist of the Floating World
In the years after World War II, a once-celebrated Japanese painter tries to arrange his daughter's marriage while slowly facing the propaganda he made for the imperial cause.
East Wind: West Wind
Kwei-lan, raised in the old ways to be a perfect Chinese wife, tells a foreign friend of her marriage to a doctor trained in the West who wants her to unbind her feet.
Cat's Eye
A painter in 1980s Toronto revisits her childhood tormentors and discovers that the cruelties of girlhood shaped everything she became.
To the Lighthouse
A family vacations at a Scottish lighthouse, and the passage of time between two visits reveals everything about love, art, loss, and the impossibility of reaching the things we yearn for.
The Tree of Man
Stan Parker clears a patch of bush outside Sydney around 1900, brings home his young wife Amy, and the two of them make a farm and a life together over fifty years.
The Plains
A young filmmaker travels to the plains of inland Australia, where the landowners keep artists and scholars, and spends years failing to make his film.
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.
How to Be Both
Two linked stories, of a Renaissance painter in Ferrara and of a grieving teenage girl in present-day Cambridge, can be read in either order, and both ask how we see and who we become.