Fans pick 100 books like Seeking Fortune Elsewhere

This book inspired by true stories of children misplaced and stolen during World War II.

This is a deeply affecting and powerful novel on the intertwined stories of four displaced children after the war ended, who have to question their true identities.

There is great tenderness in the writing of Jennifer Rosner, where a child wonders if bats have upside-down dreams and a young woman discovers the emotional depth of photography.

"There is a moment, liquid time, just before photograph's image appears on the developing paper, when Ana conjures the faces of her parents. Their actual features have blurred in her memory but she fills in with her imagination."

Questioning memory and the present is powerful to me and others who left home.

In Find A Place For Me, Deirdre Fagan describes with an attentive eye the delicate emotional negotiations between a couple when the husband is diagnosed with ALS.

Life will never be the same and the sense of dislocation is profound. I am deeply affected by this traumatic and irreversible change.

The heartbreak goes from noticing the snacks carefully packed for a trip the family would not be able to take any longer to staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, ‘—as if I were watching someone else’s life in a movie. I wasn’t in my own body.’

But she deals with the challenges with such courage, honesty, and an open heart that in the end, this novel gave me great hope in the human spirit.

I'm loving this novel by Liam Callanan.

It poses questions I feel close to and presents turns of life I have been surprised by myself, if in a different way. The writing is richly textured and so very delicate.

"...She'd known quiet, of course... But not silence, not like this. This silence had texture and shape; it felt attached to each molecule of air. Everything inside her was falling silent, too."

Claire, 52 and a real estate broker, deeply desires a fresh start. She receives a call from a convent in Rome that is facing its end. When she arrives she meets a colorful, fierce group of nuns living in a crumbling villa and starts wondering if she should stay forever.

I’m deeply affected by the poetic, haunted quest of a Korean adoptee who seeks his place in the world, shifting back and forth in time— Tee’s present in a Massachusetts rehab facility with his time in Prague. 

I respond to how present the awareness of being other is, while I can occasionally pretend to forget mine. I share the question about the past.

Tormented about being an adoptee, Tee left his family behind after facing the tragedy of an uncle’s suicide and a disturbing revelation from his father. In Prague, he has newfound happiness interrupted by a forced evacuation because of an epic flood that comes every 100 years.

Tee decides to remain with his lover: “If the water did rise and cut them off from the rest of Prague, they would be unreachable,” Tee thinks, “even from his pasts.”

This is one of the most innovative and intriguing memoirs I have read. Its structure is inspired by the visual image of the line that runs through the Punjab region, partitioning Pakistan from India. The book is separated into halves: one half relates the stories of the author’s parents, who were born on opposite sides of the line, and the other presents the author’s own experiences and observations as a second-generation immigrant. Nothing about the design of the book indicates which half should be read first—a hint that the reader will be invited to consider the resonances running in both directions across the generations.

The theme of fragmentation and division is, paradoxically, the glue that binds the various elements of the book together. The author explores the arbitrary lines, imposed by historical and cultural forces, that divide people from each other and that split their selves into parts. The portrait… show more.

This book calls itself a novel, but it is deeply intertwined with the author’s own life and experiences as a second-generation immigrant from Pakistan. The chapters often read more like incisive personal essays than segments advancing the plot of a conventional novel, as the author grapples with the economic obsessions and spiritual poverty of contemporary American culture, the experience of everyday racism and the rage it provokes, and the feelings of alienation that many immigrants feel from both their country of origin and their adopted home. 

The central preoccupation of the book is the difficulty of living as a complete, nuanced, self-contradictory individual in a world that forces you to choose—between cultures in conflict with each other, between absolutist world views that permit no ambivalence, between economic success and authenticity. It is a tension that may be especially pronounced in an immigrant’s life, but one that entraps everyone and results… show more.

A twenty year old American woman goes to Paris to paint, meets a French artist, marries, has a child, and together buy a farmhouse and make a summer home and art studios in rural Brittany: that story. A memoir. 

The book was published in 2008, but the story takes place in the early 1960s when rural Brittany was closer to the 19th century than the 21st. I was in Paris in 1967, and it was still possible to rent a hotel room for under five dollars a night, to travel in Europe for ten dollars a day. In 1967, you could not safely drink the water in France, including in Paris, and you had to have proof of a typhus vaccine to return to the U.S. It was still more Henry Miller’s Paris than Macron’s.

This was the time of the last of every day berets, blue… show more.

Ruth Behar writes for both adults and children and is a multi-award-winning writer and a Cuban-American Anthropologist. She’s also Jewish with Ashkenazi and Sephardic roots. Based on the author’s real experiences, we follow ten-year-old Ruthie and her family who are recent Jewish-Cuban immigrants trying to make a new home in 1960s Queens, NY after Castro comes to power. Just as Ruthie is adjusting to school and making new friends, a devastating car accident puts her in a body cast for a year. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking, and inspiring story. I particularly loved her friendship with recent Indian immigrant, Ramu, who has to endure a terrible family tragedy as well. There are some heavy themes here, but Ruthie’s innocent, bright, and brave voice brings the reader along in a hopeful way. There’s some great food (like guava pastries, flan, and samosas) mentioned here, too. 

Thanhha Lai's semi-autobiographical novel in verse form tells the story of a young girl's journey from war-torn Vietnam to the United States.

I was deeply touched by the poetic narrative and the vivid depiction of the refugee experience. The book beautifully captures the challenges of adapting to a new life while carrying the weight of past trauma, making it a compelling read for all ages.

This isn’t a book about food. Instead, it’s about middle grader Yumi Chung, who, in a case of mistaken identity, stumbles upon the opportunity to join a comedy camp taught by her favorite YouTuber.

Even so, I included it on this list because not only does Yumi’s family own a Korean barbeque restaurant, but the other kids at school even call her “Yu-MEAT” because of it. Comedy plus cooking? No wonder I had to include this gem!