19 must-read fiction books like How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

Cover of How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

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, …

"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

"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 you liked the fiction plot in How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue , here is a list of 19 books like this:

Cover of Trust by Hernan Diaz

1. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • 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

"Sleeplessness kept claiming her nights, and she used books as shields against the onslaught of her abstract terrors."

-Hernan Diaz, Trust

Cover of The Covenant of Water by Abraham   Verghese

2. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

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

3. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • literary fiction
  • 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

4. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • literary fiction
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • novels
  • audiobook
Cover of North Woods by Daniel       Mason

5. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • literary fiction
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • novels
  • audiobook
Cover of A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

6. A Spell of Good Things

By: Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

3.79

Format: 352 pages, Hardcover

Ayobami Adebayo, the celebrated author of Stay With Me unveils a dazzling story of modern Nigeria a… read more

Similar categories in Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀'s A Spell of Good Things book and Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • literary fiction
  • africa
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"Time was unforgiving, it didn’t stop, not even to give people a chance to scrape themselves off the floor if they’d been shattered."

-Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, A Spell of Good Things

"He stared back at her, unconcerned. She had always marvelled at his calm assurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune for granted. As th…"

-Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, A Spell of Good Things

Cover of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

7. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

By: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

4.52

Format: 816 pages, Hardcover

A magisterial epic—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing;… read more

Similar categories in Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois book and Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • literary fiction
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • novels
  • audiobook
"These are the incongruities of memory. It is hard to hold on to the entirety of something, but pieces may be held up to light."

-Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

Cover of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James   McBride

8. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • literary fiction
  • historical
  • fiction
  • historical fiction
  • audiobook
Cover of This Other Eden by Paul Harding

9. This Other Eden

By: Paul Harding

3.78

Format: 224 pages, Hardcover

Set at the beginning of the twentieth century and inspired by historical events, This Other Eden te… read more

Similar categories in Paul Harding's This Other Eden book and Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

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

10. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • 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

11. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • environment
  • 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

12. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • 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

13. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • 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 The Fraud by Zadie Smith

14. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • 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

15. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • 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 Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott

16. Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

By: Andrea Elliott

4.72

Format: 602 pages, Hardcover

The riveting, unforgettable story of a girl whose indomitable spirit is tested by homelessness, pov… read more

Similar categories in Andrea Elliott's Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City book and Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • audiobook
".. they assume that intelligence is a pre-ordained trait, [...], their perceived destiny, which flows from another belief, that the poor are to blame for their condition. Poverty is the proof of defi…"

-Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

Cover of How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

17. How to Say Babylon

By: Safiya Sinclair

4.47

Format: 352 pages, Hardcover

With echoes of Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s … read more

Similar categories in Safiya Sinclair's How to Say Babylon book and Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • audiobook
"As I grew older, I knew I would never be his perfect Rasta daughter. I was too headstrong, too curious. Too much of myself, and not enough of him."

-Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon

Cover of How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

18. 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 Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • literary fiction
  • africa
  • historical
  • cameroon
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • historical fiction
  • novels
  • environment
  • 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 Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

19. Intimacies

By: Katie Kitamura

3.65

Format: 225 pages, Hardcover

A novel from the author of A Separation, a taut and electrifying story about a woman caught between… read more

Similar categories in Katie Kitamura's Intimacies book and Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"I thought—I want to go home. I want to be in a place that feels like home. Where that was, I did not know."

-Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

"I had lived with my slow-moving grief for so long that I had ceased to notice it, or recognize how it blunted my feeling."

-Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

"This was done for obvious reasons, there were great chasms beneath words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning."

-Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

"I realized, belatedly, that she had likely applied the makeup for Adriaan’s sake; certainly she had not done so for mine. I wondered then what it was like to be a man, so often surrounded by such del…"

-Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

Cover of The Furrows by Namwali Serpell

20. The Furrows

By: Namwali Serpell

3.21

Format: 288 pages, Hardcover

How do you grieve an absence? A brilliantly inventive novel about loss and belonging, from the awar… read more

Similar categories in Namwali Serpell's The Furrows book and Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • literary fiction
  • africa
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
Cover of Our Lady of Mile End by Sarah    Gilbert

21. Our Lady of Mile End

By: Sarah Gilbert

3.73

Format: 208 pages, Paperback

None read more

Similar categories in Sarah Gilbert's Our Lady of Mile End book and Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

  • fiction

8 best-selling contemporary books like How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

Transform Your Habits

A Spell of Good Things

Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

3.79

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

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12 Best fiction books like Our Lady of Mile End by Sarah Gilbert

Transform Your Habits

Lullabies for Little Criminals

Heather O'Neill

4.03

Transform Your Habits

Shut Up You're Pretty

Téa Mutonji

3.57

Transform Your Habits

The Future

Catherine Leroux

3.32

Transform Your Habits

And Then She Fell

Alicia Elliott

3.90

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