Books like

Books like Echo

12 books with a reading profile close to Echo by Pam Muñoz Ryan. Balanced in tone; an easy read.

  1. 1 Cane River

    Cane River

    by Lalita Tademy

    history, narrative

    Lalita Tademy traced her own family history to write this novel, which follows four generations of women of colour in Louisiana's Cane River region, from slavery through Reconstruction.

  2. 2 The Wind Knows My Name

    The Wind Knows My Name

    by Isabel Allende

    history, narrative

    In 1938 Vienna, Samuel Adler is a five-year-old Jewish boy whose father disappears on Kristallnacht, and who is sent to England on the Kindertransport.

  3. 3 The Chaperone

    The Chaperone

    by Laura Moriarty

    history, narrative

    In 1922, Cora Carlisle, a conventional Kansas housewife, agrees to chaperone fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks on a summer trip to New York City.

  4. 4 Girl in Hyacinth Blue

    Girl in Hyacinth Blue

    by Susan Vreeland

    history, narrative

    The narrative follows a single, fictional Vermeer painting backwards through time, beginning with its mid-century concealment by a man whose father looted it from a Jewish family during the Holocaust.

  5. 5 Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

    Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

    by Dai Sijie

    history, narrative

    Set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the narrative follows two city-bred teenagers, Luo and the unnamed narrator, who are sent to a remote mountain village for forced Maoist re-education.

  6. 6 Skeletons at the Feast

    Skeletons at the Feast

    by Chris Bohjalian

    history, narrative

    In January 1945, as the Red Army advances toward East Prussia, the Emmerich family, who run an estate, decide to flee west.

  7. 7 Longbourn

    Longbourn

    by Jo Baker

    history, narrative

    Jo Baker re-imagines Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the domestic staff working below stairs at the Bennett estate.

  8. 8 The Marriage of Opposites

    The Marriage of Opposites

    by Alice Hoffman

    history, narrative

    Set on the island of Saint Thomas in the early nineteenth century, this novel follows Rachel Pomie, a woman born into a strict Sephardic Jewish community.

  9. 9 The Architect's Apprentice

    The Architect's Apprentice

    by Elif Shafak

    history, narrative

    Jahan arrives in sixteenth-century Constantinople as a boy from India, bringing a white elephant named Chota as a gift for Sultan Suleiman.

  10. 10 The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

    The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

    by Lisa See

    history, narrative

    Li-yan belongs to the Akha people, an ethnic minority living in a remote mountain village in Yunnan, China, where life centers on harvesting puer tea.

  11. 11 The Birth House

    The Birth House

    by Ami McKay

    history, narrative

    Dora Rare is a young woman growing up in a small Nova Scotia village around the First World War.

  12. 12 A Piece of the World

    A Piece of the World

    by Christina Baker Kline

    history, narrative

    Set in the coastal town of Cushing, Maine, this novel imagines the life of Christina Olson, the subject of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World.

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