18 books like The Wangs vs The World
Talent
Talent
An English grad student struggling with her dissertation about the intellectual history of inspiration desperately searches for a perfect case study to anchor her thesis, only to find it in the unlikeliest of places.
Shares Humorous, Literary, Coming-of-age, General
Asymmetry
Explores the imbalances that spark and sustain dramatic human relations, tracing the overlapping stories of a young American editor's relationship with a famous older writer, an unexpected New York romance during the early years of the Iraq War and an Iraqi-American man who is detained by immigration officers in Heathrow.
Shares Literary, Family life, Coming-of-age, New York Times reviewed
The Good Luck Of Right Now
When his mother dies, 38-year-old Bartholomew Neil, who doesn't know how to be on his own, discovers a letter in his mother's underwear drawer that causes him to write a series of highly intimate letters to actor Richard Gere, while embarking on a quest to find out where he belongs.
Shares Humorous, Literary, Family life, Coming-of-age
Miracle Creek
"A literary courtroom thriller about a mother accused of murdering her eight-year-old autistic son"--
In rural Virginia, Young and Pak Yoo run an experimental medical treatment device known as the Miracle Submarine-- a pressurized oxygen chamber that patients enter for therapeutic 'dives' with the hopes of curing issues like autism or infertility. When the Miracle Submarine mysteriously…
Shares Immigrants, New York Times reviewed
An Orchestra of Minorities
"A contemporary twist on the Odyssey, An Orchestra of Minorities is narrated by the chi, or spirit of a young poultry farmer named Chinonso. His life is set off course when he sees a woman who is about to jump off a bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, he hurls two of his prized chickens off the bridge. The woman, Ndali, is stopped in her tracks. Chinonso and Ndali fall in love but she is from…
Shares Cultural Heritage, Literary, Coming-of-age, New York Times reviewed
Academy street
"A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer. Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely--a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with. Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess…
Shares Literary, Family life, Coming-of-age, New York Times reviewed
The incendiaries
A young Korean-American woman at an elite American university is drawn into acts of domestic terrorism by a cult tied to North Korea and then disappears, leading a fellow student into an obsessive search for her.
Shares Cultural Heritage, Literary, Coming-of-age, New York Times reviewed
Mona in the Promised Land
Unhappy with her own ethnic group, Mona Chang, a Chinese-American, decides to become a Jew. After all, if one has to live as a minority, choose the best. A witty look at ethnicity, multiculturalism and the melting pot. By the author of Typical American.
Shares Chinese American families, Chinese Americans
Brood
Shares Family life, Coming-of-age, General with this book.
All the ugly and wonderful things
"As the daughter of a drug dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. It's safer to keep her mouth shut and stay out of sight. Struggling to raise her little brother, Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star gazing…
Shares Literary, Family life, Coming-of-age
Our young man
282 pages ; 20 cm
Shares Literary, Coming-of-age, New York Times reviewed
Giants in the Earth
Giants in the Earth
The novel describes struggle of Norwegian settlers in eastern South Dakota, based on the actual lives of the author's parents in law. The settlers make progress, then face further problems, such as grasshoppers eating their wheat. In the end, the protagnist freezes to death in a snow storm and his wife struggles with sanity. It is in the same general area and era as Laura Ingalls Wilder's "By the…
Shares Immigrants
The Billion-Dollar Molecule
The Billion-Dollar Molecule
The Billion-Dollar Molecule raises the curtain on the fascinating and tumultuous drama of a radically new start-up pharmaceutical company. That company, Vertex, is trying to design a lifesaving new drug that - if it works - will prove the potential of a brand-new drug-making technique and also fulfill the vision of Vertex's founder and chairman, Joshua Boger, one of the most promising scientists…
Shares United States
Less
Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.
Shares Humorous, Literary, New York Times reviewed, General
The kinship of secrets
"From the author of The Calligrapher's Daughter comes the riveting story of two sisters, one raised in the United States, the other in South Korea, and the family that bound them together even as the Korean War kept them apart"--
Shares Cultural Heritage, Coming-of-age, United States
The Kitchen God's Wife
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past--including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s,…
Shares Chinese American families, Chinese Americans, United States
Precaution
The entire focus of this novel rests on the determined though sometimes woefully mistaken efforts of three British families--the Moseleys, the Jarvises, and the Chattertons--to arrange suitable marriages for their respective sons and daughters. The bulk of the early-nineteenth-century action is therefore played out through dinners, social calls, visits to summer resorts, and development of…
Shares Family life, United States
The caller
Shares Coming-of-age, New York Times reviewed, General with this book.