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Books like The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

Jamie Ford · 2022 · US · literary fiction · historical fiction
★ 3.86 Goodreads · 28,640 ratings

In 2045 Dorothy Moy, a Seattle poet afraid of passing her depression to her daughter, tries a treatment that lets her relive the memories of her ancestors, back to Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to come to America, in 1834.

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12 books for readers of The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

What's Mine and Yours

Naima Coster · 2021 · US 96% match ★ 3.55 Goodreads · 23,548 ratings
shares: emotional, multi generational, mother daughter, family · earnest, unhurried

When a North Carolina county brings Black and Latino students from the east side into a mostly white high school, two families, Gee's and Noelle's, are bound together for the next twenty years.

The Last Romantics

Tara Conklin · 2019 · US 96% match ★ 3.70 Goodreads · 50,452 ratings
shares: emotional, near future, sprawling, family · earnest, unhurried

In 2079 the celebrated poet Fiona Skinner, now very old, tells an audience the true story behind her most famous poem, which begins with the Pause, the years after her father's death when her mother took to her bed and four children raised themselves.

Cane River

Lalita Tademy · 2001 · US 95% match ★ 4.08 Goodreads · 51,179 ratings
shares: multi generational, mother daughter, family, family saga · earnest, unhurried

Drawn from the author's own family, the lives of four generations of women of colour along the Cane River in Louisiana, from Elisabeth, born into slavery, to her great-granddaughter Emily, across a century.

Of Women and Salt

Gabriela Garcia · 2021 · US 95% match ★ 3.69 Goodreads · 50,956 ratings
shares: multi generational, mother daughter, novel in stories, family · earnest, easy read

In Miami in 2018 Jeanette, newly sober, goes to Cuba to learn about her family from her grandmother, and the story reaches back to her great-great-grandmother in a Camagüey cigar factory in 1866.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers · 2021 · US 95% match ★ 4.50 Goodreads · 44,624 ratings
shares: multi generational, sprawling, family, family saga · earnest, epic

Ailey Pearl Garfield grows up between the city and the Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother's people have lived for generations, and as she grows older she traces her family back through slavery to the land's first people.

Breath, Eyes, Memory

Edwidge Danticat · 1994 · Haiti 94% match ★ 3.90 Goodreads · 31,707 ratings
shares: multi generational, mother daughter, trauma, family · earnest, unhurried

Sophie Caco, raised by her aunt in a Haitian village, is sent at twelve to join the mother she barely knows in New York.

The Last Story of Mina Lee

Nancy Jooyoun Kim · 2020 · US 94% match ★ 3.53 Goodreads · 46,966 ratings
shares: emotional, mother daughter, family · earnest, easy read

When her mother stops answering the phone, Margot Lee, twenty-six, goes home to Koreatown in Los Angeles and finds her dead, and as she tries to find out what happened, the story of Mina's arrival in 1987 is told alongside hers.

Wandering Stars

Tommy Orange · 2024 · US 94% match ★ 3.80 Goodreads · 40,660 ratings
shares: trauma, family, family saga · earnest, unhurried

Tommy Orange widens There There across 150 years, from a survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre through an Indian boarding school to the Oakland family still reeling from the powwow shooting.

Real Americans

Rachel Khong · 2024 · US 94% match ★ 3.94 Goodreads · 101,318 ratings
shares: multi generational, Chinese, family · earnest, easy read

In New York in 1999 Lily Chen, twenty-two and the daughter of Chinese immigrants, is scraping by on an unpaid internship when she falls for Matthew, the son of an enormously rich family. In 2021 their teenage son, Nick, who knows little of where he comes from, goes looking for his father.

Beijing Coma

Ma Jian · 2008 · China 94% match ★ 3.88 Goodreads · 2,014 ratings
shares: Chinese, trauma, memory · unhurried, interior

Dai Wei, a student shot in the head in Tiananmen Square in 1989, lies in a coma for ten years, aware of everything, remembering the protests while China changes around him.

Dream State

Eric Puchner · 2025 · US 94% match ★ 3.56 Goodreads · 31,716 ratings
shares: emotional, multi generational, family · earnest, unhurried

In the summer of 2004 Cece Calhoun arrives at the Margolis family's lake house in Montana to marry Charlie, and finds herself spending her days with Garrett, the best friend Charlie has asked to officiate.

Dream of the Red Chamber

Cao Xueqin · 1791 · China 94% match ★ 3.99 Goodreads · 2,963 ratings
shares: Chinese, sprawling, family, family saga · unhurried, earnest

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.