Books like Manhattan Beach
12 books with a reading profile close to Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. Balanced in tone; a moderate read.
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1
Noticia de un secuestro
history, narrative
Gabriel García Márquez reconstructs the 1990 abductions of ten prominent Colombian citizens by the Extraditables, a group led by Pablo Escobar to pressure the government into banning extradition to the United States.
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2
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
history, narrative
In 1799, Jacob de Zoet, a young Dutch clerk, arrives at Dejima, the artificial island in Nagasaki harbor that is Japan's only trading link with the West.
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3
The Glass Palace
by Amitav Ghosh
history, narrative
Amitav Ghosh's novel starts with the British conquest of Mandalay in 1885, when the royal family of Burma is exiled to India.
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4
The Weight of Ink
history, narrative
In 2000s London, historian Helen Watt, who is ill and near retirement, is called to an old house where workers have found a hidden cache of seventeenth-century Jewish papers.
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5
The Covenant of Water
history, narrative
Spanning seven decades in Kerala, South India, the narrative follows three generations of a family afflicted by a peculiar medical condition known as the Condition.
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6
All the Light We Cannot See
history, narrative
Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind girl living in Paris, flees to Saint-Malo with her father to escape the Nazi occupation, carrying a precious and potentially cursed diamond from the Museum of Natural History.
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7
The Book of Negroes
history, narrative
Aminata Diallo is eleven when slavers seize her from her village in West Africa and force her across the Atlantic.
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8
The Lacuna
history, narrative
The novel follows the life of Harrison Shepherd, a man navigating the political upheaval of mid-twentieth-century Mexico and the United States.
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9
Horse
history, narrative
Geraldine Brooks tracks the history of Lexington, a record-breaking 19th-century Thoroughbred, across three distinct timelines.
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10
Island Beneath the Sea
history, narrative
Zarité, a young girl sold into slavery in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, navigates the brutal sugar plantations owned by Toulouse Valmorain.
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11
Hiroshima
by John Hersey
history, narrative
John Hersey details the immediate and long-term consequences of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima through the experiences of six survivors: a clerk, two doctors, a tailor’s widow, a German priest, and a Methodist pastor.
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12
Betty
history, narrative
Set in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains during the mid-twentieth century, the narrative follows Betty Carpenter, one of eight siblings born to a white mother and a Cherokee father.
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