100 books like The Days of Abandonment

This contemporary, quirky tale centers around the life of Keiko, a young woman who has never done anything in a conventional way and has her mother very worried that her daughter will never find a man and settle down into a conventional life. No, Keiko’s ways of thinking are startling and odd in ways that are both amusing and somewhat horrifying, as she really does fall outside the realm of conventional thinking and socially rewarded behavior. The reader comes to love her as she grows into womanhood (and personhood) as a worker in a fast-paced convenience store, where she memorizes hundreds of products and practices behaving more “normally” by mimicking the actions and words of her co-workers. Then a man named Shiraha enters the picture, for a new twist.

This book is part odyssey, part ghost story, and part passion play. Toni Morrison is one of the patron saints of American literature whom I was fortunate to discover at an early age. This is her masterpiece, an example of what is possible when a writer’s heart, mind, and spirit are aligned.

The fact that the unfathomable sacrifice around which Beloved is imagined is based upon an actual event speaks volumes about the innate horrors of slavery. In matters of race, America’s skeletons are buried in shallow graves.

I was moved and delighted by this highly original novel, which blends murder-mystery with heartfelt philosophical explorations into animal rights, mysticism, existential anxiety, and our own humanity.

Narrator-protagonist Janina, a woman who translates Blake, studies horoscopes and feels a deep connection to the animals around her; she tells the story of what happens one winter when a series of men in her Polish village are murdered by a culprit yet to be found.

I adored this book’s intelligence and blending of tragedy and humor. Its narrative combines a compelling plot with a distinctive first-person voice and deeply thoughtful reflections about the beauty, cruelty, and wonder of life.

Many of the characters in this story collection work in unappreciated, underpaid, and unseen labor: as caregivers, nurses, cleaners, switchboard operators, administrators, substitute teachers. The stories are rooted in Berlin’s own experience as a mother, worker, and alcoholic.

A lot of authors are famous for writing “working class” stories — but many of them are men. I love this collection because it centers the story on working-class women, who often happen to be mothers raising their children alone. 

Lucia Berlin didn’t receive much attention as an author in her lifetime, but she writes with a skill, shrewdness, and vulnerability that places her among the very best. While some of the stories in this collection are sorrowful, others are funny, even uplifting. Whether from laughter or sadness, I was frequently moved to tears.

This one I loved for the style as much as the character. I love the use of fragments to weave together a life and it felt true to the life of a mother—that a mother only gets snippets of time to piece together her story and her thoughts. I also loved that Offil was wrestling with such a big issue—how to hold onto oneself while giving so much of your self to a child.    

This mesmerised me and I still think about it often.

A daughter has taken her mother to Spain to see a doctor who they hope will be able to cure her from a mysterious physical paralysis. 

This is a throbbing sun-bleached, Mediterranean world, explorations of troubled familial bonds, of the nature of sexuality, an examination of exile, reminding me at times of Virginia Woolf in its interiority – and the writing is masterly: “My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.”

A constellation of symbols scattered throughout with such a deft touch that it left me in love with Levy and wishing she was my friend in real life not just in the magic world of the written page.

Why Did I Ever falls into my favorite genre of fiction, which I will describe loosely as “narrated by a sardonic, wincingly funny, tragic woman.” (See also: Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Lauren Groff, Mary Gaitskill, among others.)

The narrator, Money, is a self-sabotaging script doctor whose daughter, Mev, is addicted to opioids, and whose son is under police protection following a violent assault. 

As a seemingly directionless woman who spends much of the book driving or sourcing Ritalin, Money counts, in my books, as a “transgressive” mother. She’s also charming and likable. This book is dark and deeply affecting at times. At many other times, it’s hilarious. I recommend it to anyone who loves that hinterland — between the tragic and darkly funny.

Without giving too much away, this book follows a woman who lost a baby. We don’t witness her as a mother, as such. She’s someone whose choices resulted in no child at all. Instead, we witness her in a cavernous, self-destructive funk, in which she leaves her husband and flees to an ambiguous seaside town. 

Here, she drinks too much. She falls asleep in public places. She charms men, just to feel her power over them. And also — she longs for something. Deeply. Like the protagonists in all these stories, she remains somehow absolvable, despite the moments where she does something abhorrent or perplexing. 

If you were to list the protagonist’s transgressions on paper, the character portrait would be unflattering, even loathsome at times. But that’s not how I perceived her. I found myself sympathetic, charmed, and wanting to be her friend.

It’s mid-20th century, Budapest, and the narrator, a Hungarian writer named Magda, interviews Emerence about cleaning her house. I fell in love with this book early on, when Emerence makes it clear that she, not Magda, will decide whether she’ll take the job. To this day, Emerence haunts me. She’s a peasant, illiterate, an anti-intellectual, tall, and powerfully built. And she’s a relentless gift giver, a caretaker of the sick, and a tireless worker, sweeping the snowy or leaf-stricken street for the 11 buildings on the block. The contradictions and inconsistencies pile up, which is why she continues to roam around in my brain. And there’s the lovely mystery, which only reveals itself toward the end, as to why she’s never allowed anyone into her house. 

Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers, not that I write like her, (I wish I had more of her style, for sure) but for her courage and creative will that stretched her work beyond the boundaries of what existed at the time. Along the way, you can pick out the raw material of her life that she transmuted into fiction. What great fortune to hear directly from Virginia about her philosophy of life and her vision of art.