Here are 100 books that The Mother fans have personally recommended if you like
The Mother.
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As a female grown up in a working-class neighborhood in East Naples (Italy), and as an academic researching political ecologies in Italy, Brazil, and the USA, I am especially interested in how sex/gender, class/work, and race/coloniality are intersected in people’s lives, and especially in how this shapes their perceptions and experiences of environmental problems. This approach has led me to look for the connections between labor and the environment both within and beyond waged/industrial work and formal trade unions, including the unpaid housework and subsistence production done in working-class, peasant, Black, and Indigenous communities and the social movements that represent them.
This is a novel that I have read again over the years, gifted to my loved ones, and recommended to my friends. Set in Kerala (India) between the early 1960s and early 1990s, the book tells the story of the ill-fated love between an upper caste woman and a lower caste man, set against the grain of parallel stories and events involving other members of the two characters' families and village.
What struck me was the profound humanity with which the motivations and worldviews of all characters are depicted and the author's ability to illustrate the chain of suffering that connects them as related to larger social schemes–such as post-colonial relations between the British and the Indian branch of the family.
'They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.'
This is the story of Rahel and Estha, twins growing up among the banana vats and peppercorns of their blind grandmother's factory, and amid scenes of political turbulence in Kerala. Armed only with the innocence of youth, they fashion a childhood in the shade of the wreck that is their family: their lonely, lovely mother, their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher) and their sworn enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun,…
I grew up in a small village in India. The nearest library was in the next town, two bus rides and a long walk away and comprised of one bookshelf, half full, the books with several pages missing. I read and reread those books, making up my own narratives for the missing pages. I suppose this was the crucial first step in my journey to author. I write stories featuring diverse protagonists. In my books, I explore themes of displacement and belonging, how people brought up in different cultures and during different times respond to challenges, how their interactions and reactions are informed by their different upbringings and values.
I loved this masterfully written short story anthology. This book was published in 2009 and I read it soon after but I still remember the stories – they are haunting and thought-provoking. I think this was the first book I read which really brought home to me the challenges faced by the people of Zimbabwe in a changing and uncertain political climate, living their day-to-day lives in a country on the verge of collapse.
A woman in a township in Zimbabwe is surrounded by throngs of dusty children but longs for a baby of her own; an old man finds that his new job making coffins at No Matter Funeral Parlor brings unexpected riches; a politician's widow stands quietly by at her husband's funeral, watching his colleagues bury an empty casket. Petina Gappah's characters may have ordinary hopes and dreams, but they are living in a world where a loaf of bread costs half a million dollars, where wives can't trust even their husbands for fear of AIDS, and where people know exactly what…
I grew up in a small village in India. The nearest library was in the next town, two bus rides and a long walk away and comprised of one bookshelf, half full, the books with several pages missing. I read and reread those books, making up my own narratives for the missing pages. I suppose this was the crucial first step in my journey to author. I write stories featuring diverse protagonists. In my books, I explore themes of displacement and belonging, how people brought up in different cultures and during different times respond to challenges, how their interactions and reactions are informed by their different upbringings and values.
I read this sublime short story collection just after I moved to England from India. Saying that these stories of displacement, yearning, loss, love spoke to me is an understatement. I was new to England, missing India which I still thought of as home and while some of the stories brought India back vividly to me, others I could absolutely identify with as they detailed the immigrant experience so beautifully. A book that will always be very close to my heart as I read it and laughed and cried and yearned alongside the characters.
'One of the finest short story writers I've ever read' Amy Tan
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD
WINNER OF THE NEW YORKER PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK
Jhumpa Lahiri's prize-winning debut collection explores the lives of Indians in exile - of people navigating between the strict traditions they've inherited and the baffling New World they must encounter every day.
Whether set in Boston or Bengal, these sublimely understated stories, imbued with umour and subtle detail, speak with eloquence to anyone who has ever felt the yearnings of exile or the emotional confusion of an outsider.…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I grew up in a small village in India. The nearest library was in the next town, two bus rides and a long walk away and comprised of one bookshelf, half full, the books with several pages missing. I read and reread those books, making up my own narratives for the missing pages. I suppose this was the crucial first step in my journey to author. I write stories featuring diverse protagonists. In my books, I explore themes of displacement and belonging, how people brought up in different cultures and during different times respond to challenges, how their interactions and reactions are informed by their different upbringings and values.
Oh, this book was just magical. And the ending – wow! Everything comes together and how. The writing is just beautiful and the story is enchanting. This book transported me and wowed me - truly I wasn’t expecting to love it as much as I did. I cried so much while reading this book – the language is so poetic and lyrical. It is a story about stories and it is a masterpiece in my opinion.
"This is magical, lyrical, spellbinding writing." Granta
Adamine Bustamante is born in one of Jamaica's last leper colonies. When Adamine grows up, she discovers she has the gift of "warning": the power to protect, inspire, and terrify. But when she is sent to live in England, her prophecies of impending disaster are met with a different kind of fear people think she is insane and lock her away in a mental hospital.
Now an older woman, the spirited Adamine wants to tell her story. But she must wrestle for the truth with…
I’m an Australian writer with a passion for literary fiction, especially novels centered on complex and multi-layered power dynamics. To me, relationships between women are particularly ripe for this kind of exploration – my own friendships with other women have been influential and formative, but not always easy! My interest in these darker and more complex dynamics of close friendship eventually led me to write my own novel on the topic. I’ve also published a range of essays, reviews, criticism, and creative nonfiction.
While many novels about female friendship focus on young women, The Weekend follows three women in their seventies, whose decades-long friendship has sustained them through illness, infidelity, divorce – and recently the death of their fourth close friend, Sylvie.
Drawn together over a weekend to clear out Sylvie’s house, the remaining women must grapple with their shared past and uncertain future. I loved this glimpse into the lives of older women – a reality not often portrayed in fiction – and admired Wood’s ability to make each of her three narrators flawed, relatable, and human.
If you like immersive character-driven novels, this book won’t disappoint.
People went on about death bringing friends together, but it wasn't true. The graveyard, the stony dirt - that's what it was like now . . . Despite the three women knowing each other better than their own siblings, Sylvie's death had opened up strange caverns of distance between them.
Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. Can they survive together without her?
They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur, Wendy, an acclaimed public…
I was born and raised in Texas, and I’ve lived here most of my life. For good or for ill, Texas looms large in the American consciousness and, since everything is bigger in Texas, so are the stereotypes. While you can definitely still find cattle ranches and oil wells in our state, modern Texas is much more complex and diverse than many people might think. While I love books that show those traditional elements of Texas (looking at you, Lonesome Dove!), I have always delighted in finding books that give me a new lens on what it means to be a Texan. I hope you’re delighted by these too.
There’s a special pleasure in reading novels set in the place you’ve long lived, and there’s also a special pleasure—at least for me!—in diving into subcultures with strong and strange beliefs. Owen Egerton delivers on both in Hollow. Set in the Austin far removed from tech money and hip new restaurants, Hollowfollows Oliver Bonds, a former religious studies professor whose life unraveled after the death of his young son. Oliver finds distraction in Hollow Earth theory and the idea a whole different world lies inside the one we currently occupy. Hollowbroke my heart in the best sort of way with its exploration of grief, regret, and the lengths we go to in order to survive being human.
An NPR Best Book of the Year, Hollow is the story of a professor whose life is unended after an unspeakable tragedy.
When Oliver Bonds, a revered religious studies professor at the University of Texas, loses his toddler son and undergoes intense legal scrutiny over his involvement, grief engulfs him completely. His life as he knows it is over; Oliver loses his wife, home, and faith. Three years after his son's death, Oliver lives in a shack without electricity and frequents the soup kitchen where he used to volunteer.
It's only when befriended by Lyle, a con artist with a…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
I want to make the world a better place. After many failed attempts to achieve this goal, I realized that I didn’t understand the world well enough to make a positive impact. Serendipitously, I started working with Farnam Street, a company that is dedicated to mastering the best of what other people have figured out. One of our most significant projects is The Great Mental Models book series, which consists of four volumes of fundamentals about the world. Learning and using the models to co-write this book series is how I found all the books on this list. I plan to give a set to each of my children to give them a jump start on living effectively.
We are all going to lose someone we love. We are all going to go through the pain of people we care about dying. We are all going to contemplate our mortality at some point and wonder if what we’re doing has much of a point, if we could do better, and if we could make life a little less painful somehow.
Keisha Blair lost her husband when they were both in their thirties, when their son was 8 weeks old. She shares what she learned about building from that wreckage in Holistic Wealth. The book puts the pain of loss front and center, and then offers insights from stories and interviews on how to take care of our money, our relationships, and our spirituality, and thus ourselves.
Build a better, richer life by following thirty-two lessons that lead to happiness. Imagine a life where you are financially savvy and independent, living with purpose and generosity while inspiring others. Holistic Wealth will teach you to master these tenets of a happy and joyful life, giving you a greater sense of wholeness and resilience in times of difficulty. By expanding on the teachings shared in her viral article "My Husband Died at 34; Here Are 40 Life Lessons I Learned From It" author Keisha Blair presents revolutionary strategies that will help you find balance and success. By following actionable,…
I'm very interested in neuroscience, and it turns out that when you are in a state of wonder, you activate parts of the brain that correlate with creativity, gratitude, hope, and connection with oneself and others. In a way, wonder is an antidote to the doom-and-gloom ideologies that surround us. I'm very drawn to art and ideas that help me connect with my sense of wonder and remind me that I'm connected with a vast and mysterious universe!
I love the dreamy art and timeless wisdom in this unique book. It reminds me that I'm in an eternal state of oneness with the universe right here and right now. This book is soothing and beautiful and speaks to the deepest longings of the soul!
Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe will set you free on a visual journey of self-discovery. Set against a surreal backdrop of intricate ink illustrations, you will find nine metaphysical lessons with dreamlike instructions that require you to open your heart to unexplored inner landscapes. From setting fire to your anxieties to sharing a cup of tea with your inner demons, you will learn how to let go and truly connect with the world around…
I am the author of Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside and a former artist-in-residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. After graduating from college, I took a “good” job but soon came to realize it wasn't for me. I quit after less than a week and ended up moving to China, where I spent four years teaching English, working for a consumer electronics company, and writing fiction. I currently teach at a school in Oakland, California.
There’s being lost in life, then there’s drunkenly lying about your mother’s death in order to elicit sympathy from a potential love interest. Having bluffed his way into a fellowship in Spain, Adam Gordon, the highly privileged, highly incompetent narrator of this book, spends most of his days getting high and wrestling with the connection between experience and art, questioning his own legitimacy at every turn. Not a lot happens, but that’s kind of the point: the absence of adversity in Gordon’s life is what makes him so insecure and is perhaps saying something on the topic of American decline.
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are?…
On the run from her abusive husband, Kyra Smith hits the road. Destination unknown. With a dog she rescued in tow, she lands in the peaceful California mountain town of Gold Creek and is immediately befriended by an openhearted group of women who call themselves the Tattooed Ladies. They’re there…
I am a childhood abuse survivor, author, and therapist, and I am always looking for books to help me better understand the crazy healing process. I have done over two decades of therapy and have been working with clients for over twenty-eight years. In addition, I serve as an expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs who have experienced different types of trauma. Educating myself and getting the perspective from other clinicians and experts has helped me be a better therapist and expedited my therapy process!
This book, by Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry (Bluebird, April 22, 2022) is still a number one best-seller on Amazon. People who experience childhood abuse are at higher risk for physical and mental health disorders in adulthood. Dr. Perry shares scientific insights into the patterns of behavior in adulthood that so many struggle to understand.
Dr. Perry and Ms. Winfrey share numerous examples of how the lingering shame from the past keeps them stuck in their lives as adults. The part I loved the most in this book was how Ms. Winfrey offered how shame debilitates us and holds us back from living full lives in adulthood.
Our earliest experiences shape our lives far down the road, and What Happened to You? provides powerful scientific and emotional insights into the behavioral patterns so many of us struggle to understand.
“Through this lens we can build a renewed sense of personal self-worth and ultimately recalibrate our responses to circumstances, situations, and relationships. It is, in other words, the key to reshaping our very lives.”―Oprah Winfrey
This book is going to change the way you see your life.
Have you ever wondered "Why did I do that?" or "Why can't I just control my…
