17 must-read fiction books like Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

Cover of Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

Homeland Elegies

By: Ayad Akhtar

4.14

Format: 368 pages, Hardcover

A deeply personal work about hope and identity in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Eleg…

If you liked the fiction plot in Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar , here is a list of 17 books like this:

Cover of Bezette Stad by Paul van Ostaijen

1. Bezette Stad

By: Paul van Ostaijen

3.91

Format: 69 pages,

In de zomer van 1914 wordt Antwerpen geheel onverwacht gebombardeerd vanuit een zeppelin. Een felle… read more

Similar categories in Paul van Ostaijen's Bezette Stad book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

2. Erasure

By: Percival Everett

3.62

Format: 280 pages, Paperback

"Thelonious (Monk) Ellison has never allowed race to define his identity. But as both a writer and … read more

Similar categories in Percival Everett's Erasure book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

3. Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste

By: Vilém Flusser , None

3.42

Format: 8 pages, Paperback

How far apart are humans from animals--even the "vampire squid from hell"? Playing the scientist/ph… read more

Similar categories in Vilém Flusser's Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

Cover of Trust by Hernan Diaz

4. Trust

By: Hernan Diaz

3.83

Format: 402 pages, Hardcover

10 hours, 21 minutes From an award-winning chronicler of our nation's history and its legends co… read more

Similar categories in Hernan Diaz's Trust book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • novels
  • audiobook
"Where there's a ventriloquist, there's a dummy."

-Hernan Diaz, Trust

"Chaos is a vortex that spins faster with each thing it swallows."

-Hernan Diaz, Trust

"Silence between 2 is always shared. But 1 of the 2 owns it and shares it with the other."

-Hernan Diaz, Trust

"I’ve come to think one is truly married only when one is more committed to one’s vows than the person they refer to."

-Hernan Diaz, Trust

Cover of The Covenant of Water by Abraham   Verghese

5. The Covenant of Water

By: Abraham Verghese

4.45

Format: 724 pages, Hardcover

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial ep… read more

Similar categories in Abraham Verghese's The Covenant of Water book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • novels
  • audiobook
Cover of Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

6. Let Us Descend

By: Jesmyn Ward

3.70

Format: 320 pages, Hardcover

From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congres… read more

Similar categories in Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • race
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • audiobook
"You must leap. You must do as your people did. You must sink in order to rise."

-Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend

Cover of James by Percival Everett

7. James

By: Percival Everett

4.54

Format: 303 pages, Hardcover

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , both harrowing and f… read more

Similar categories in Percival Everett's James book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • race
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • novels
  • audiobook
Cover of The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid

8. The Last White Man

By: Mohsin Hamid

3.44

Format: 192 pages, Hardcover

From the New York Times -bestselling author of Exit West , a story of love, loss, and rediscovery i… read more

Similar categories in Mohsin Hamid's The Last White Man book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • race
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"…the way people act around you, it changes what you are, who you are."

-Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

"If he stayed, it would not be for them--need not be for them--but for himself. And yet each day he did stay. Bored and tense, true, but he stayed. And he discovered thereby how badly he wanted to sta…"

-Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

"Online you could form your own opinion of what was going on and your opinion was, likely as not, different from the next person's, and there was no real way to determine which of you was right, and t…"

-Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

"Anders knew he would soon lose his father, and that impending loss seemed more concrete now, more real, not like air but like a door or a wall, something you could bang against, bang into, and of cou…"

-Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man

Cover of North Woods by Daniel       Mason

9. North Woods

By: Daniel Mason

4.15

Format: 372 pages, Hardcover

A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those … read more

Similar categories in Daniel Mason's North Woods book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • novels
  • audiobook
Cover of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James   McBride

10. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

By: James McBride

4.00

Format: 385 pages, Hardcover

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing de… read more

Similar categories in James McBride's The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • audiobook
Cover of Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

11. Wandering Stars

By: Tommy Orange

3.89

Format: 315 pages, Hardcover

The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize-finalist Tommy Orange’s breakout best seller There … read more

Similar categories in Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • contemporary
  • audiobook
"And in the year 1924 Indian citizenship will have been granted, even though they will mean to dissolve tribes by giving citizenship, dissolve being another word for disappearance, a kind of chemical …"

-Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

Cover of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

12. Birnam Wood

By: Eleanor Catton

3.82

Format: 432 pages, Hardcover

Birnam Wood is on the move . . . Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening gro… read more

Similar categories in Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"...wondering, not for the first time, when exactly she had become so technologically dependent that her first instinct in every unpredicted circumstance was to outsource her imagination to her phone."

-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

"Not at all,’ he said. ‘I was just going to remark that being a cliche can be very useful. You ought to consider it some time.’ ’Oh yeah?’ ’Yeah,’ he said. ‘It means people underestimate you. They thi…"

-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

"As his rhetoric and reading life matured, he grew intensely scornful of what passed at his high school for 'education' - the mania for testing; the intolerance of real dissent; and the conformist cel…"

-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

"... his future, had either been sold or laid to waste by his parents' generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as…"

-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

Cover of Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

13. Chain-Gang All-Stars

By: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

4.14

Format: 367 pages, Hardcover

Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far… read more

Similar categories in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Chain-Gang All-Stars book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • audiobook
"They were all humans, and yet they had completely different ideas about what humanity meant."

-Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

"My brother-in-law is an alien. I have a bunch of alien friends. I can't be racist," Randy Mac continued."

-Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

"An absurd thing for the murderous state to plead for, but, as always, the massive violence of the state was “justice,"

-Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

"...despite how hard it was, she wasn't afraid with love. She knew how to wield it, how to grow it, and how to receive it."

-Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

Cover of The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

14. The Bee Sting

By: Paul Murray

3.96

Format: 656 pages, Hardcover

From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and … read more

Similar categories in Paul Murray's The Bee Sting book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"It is for love. You are doing this for love."

-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

"We all have problems. But often instead of accepting the truth about ourselves, we cover it up. We try to make ourselves the way we think we’re expected to be."

-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

"Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know. When the kids ask, tell them…"

-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

"Maybe that’s how it will go – instead of one definitive cataclysm, a series of ‘anomalies’, each time lasting longer, with the stretches of what you call normal life becoming further and further apar…"

-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

Cover of Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

15. Martyr!

By: Kaveh Akbar

4.24

Format: 352 pages, Hardcover

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves… read more

Similar categories in Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
Cover of The Fraud by Zadie Smith

16. The Fraud

By: Zadie Smith

3.30

Format: 464 pages, Hardcover

The extraordinary first historical novel from bestselling author of White Teeth Zadie Smith It i… read more

Similar categories in Zadie Smith's The Fraud book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • novels
  • audiobook
"Eliza had long understood her cousin to be beyond the reach of editorial intervention."

-Zadie Smith, The Fraud

"What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires …"

-Zadie Smith, The Fraud

"I know this country well. Well enough to understand that justice takes time, and that the freedoms of a minority are rarely self-evident to the majority. What is perfectly selfevident to God is – unf…"

-Zadie Smith, The Fraud

"God preserve me from novel-writing, thought Mrs Touchet. God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness! In a cold dormitory, two hundred miles away, three heartbrok…"

-Zadie Smith, The Fraud

Cover of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

17. Demon Copperhead

By: Barbara Kingsolver

4.50

Format: 560 pages, Hardcover

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." Set in t… read more

Similar categories in Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing."

-Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

"I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together."

-Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

"Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal."

-Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

"life is a wild, impetuous ride. There could be good shit up ahead, don’t rule it out."

-Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

Cover of Stay True by Hua Hsu

18. Stay True

By: Hua Hsu

4.03

Format: 208 pages, Hardcover

From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for se… read more

Similar categories in Hua Hsu's Stay True book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • race
  • audiobook
"My parents are great, I said. Unbelievably non-stereotypical."

-Hua Hsu, Stay True

"The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories."

-Hua Hsu, Stay True

"You were describing people we had not yet met, maybe people we ourselves would become."

-Hua Hsu, Stay True

"It was a sign of personal growth, I thought to myself, that I could be friends with someone who liked Pearl Jam this much."

-Hua Hsu, Stay True

Cover of Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

19. Homeland Elegies

By: Ayad Akhtar

4.14

Format: 368 pages, Hardcover

A deeply personal work about hope and identity in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Eleg… read more

Similar categories in Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • adult fiction
  • literary fiction
  • race
  • historical
  • politics
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • historical fiction
  • novels
  • audiobook
Cover of How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

20. How Beautiful We Were

By: Imbolo Mbue

3.95

Format: 364 pages, Hardcover

From the celebrated author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, comes a sweeping, … read more

Similar categories in Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"But my father used to say we can’t do only what we’re at ease with, we must do what we ought to do."

-Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were

"much of the suffering in the world was because of those who had forgotten that they too were once children."

-Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were

"Only with him did I come to realize how much noise there is in the world, and how marvelous it is not to be a part of it."

-Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were

"... if everyone only did what they ought to do, who would do the things no one thought they had to do? What did enjoyment have to do with duty?"

-Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were

Cover of Deacon King Kong by James   McBride

21. Deacon King Kong

By: James McBride

4.17

Format: 370 pages, Hardcover

The funny, sharp, and surprising story of the shooting of a Brooklyn drug dealer and the people who… read more

Similar categories in James McBride's Deacon King Kong book and Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies

  • literary fiction
  • race
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • audiobook
"Friendship was trouble in business."

-James McBride, Deacon King Kong

"You’ve got to be strong to get old."

-James McBride, Deacon King Kong

"A man ain’t got to stand in church every Sunday to do God’s work."

-James McBride, Deacon King Kong

"Is your cheese this good? This wasn’t plain old housing projects “cheese food"

-James McBride, Deacon King Kong

8 Top contemporary books like Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

Transform Your Habits

The Last White Man

Mohsin Hamid

3.44

Transform Your Habits

Wandering Stars

Tommy Orange

3.89

Transform Your Habits

Birnam Wood

Eleanor Catton

3.82

Transform Your Habits

The Bee Sting

Paul Murray

3.96

View all the books

21 best-selling fiction books like Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

Transform Your Habits

James

Percival Everett

4.54

Transform Your Habits

North Woods

Daniel Mason

4.15

Transform Your Habits

Wandering Stars

Tommy Orange

3.89

Transform Your Habits

Real Americans

Rachel Khong

4.04

View all the books

Never miss a story from us, get weekly updates in your inbox.