Historical Fiction
The Lion Women of Tehran
Two girls from very different families become inseparable friends in Tehran, until a betrayal and the turmoil of a changing Iran pull them apart for decades.
Curated list · 8 books
Read the World
Eight books that carry you into other homes, histories and ways of belonging, from Tehran to Kerala to Brooklyn.
Reading across cultures is the gentlest kind of travel. Take these slowly, and let each one change what you notice about your own world.
Memoir
Crying in H Mart
A musician and writer reconnects with her Korean heritage through food in the wake of her mother's illness and death.
Literary Fiction
The Braid
Three women in India, Sicily and Canada, each at a breaking point in her own life, are linked in ways they cannot see by something as small as a braid of hair.
Literary Fiction
A Woman Is No Man
Across three generations of Palestinian-American women in Brooklyn, each searches for a voice of her own within the strict expectations of family and community.
Historical Fiction
The Covenant of Water
Across three generations in Kerala, a family shadowed by a mysterious tendency to drown finds its way toward healing through medicine, faith and love.
Historical Fiction
Pachinko
Four generations of a Korean family make their lives in Japan across the twentieth century, held together by stubborn love and quiet endurance.
Literary Fiction
Americanah
A young Nigerian woman builds a life in America while her first love stays behind, and years later their paths cross again in Lagos, each changed by what it costs to belong somewhere.
Memoir
Born a Crime
A comedian recalls growing up in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa as the son of a Black mother and a white father, at a time when their relationship was against the law.