Books like The Complete Maus
12 books with a reading profile close to The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman. Deep and inward-looking; a moderate read.
-
1
The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
Also deep and inward-looking · history, memoir
Tim O’Brien’s narrative follows the Alpha Company during the Vietnam War, beginning with a literal inventory of the equipment and personal mementos soldiers lug through the jungle.
-
2
Survival in Auschwitz
by Primo Levi
Also deep and inward-looking · history, memoir
Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist, details his eleven months of imprisonment in the Monowitz-Buna concentration camp.
-
3
The Best We Could Do
by Thi Bui
Also inward-looking · history, memoir
Thi Bui narrates her family’s history through a graphic memoir format, beginning with the birth of her own child in the present day.
-
4
Night
by Elie Wiesel
Also deep and inward-looking · history, memoir
In this memoir, Eliezer, a Jewish teenager from Sighet, Transylvania, is deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the final years of World War II.
-
5
War's Unwomanly Face
Also deep and inward-looking · history, memoir
Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of Soviet women who served in the Red Army during World War II as snipers, tank drivers, pilots, and field surgeons.
-
6
The Known World
Also deep and inward-looking · history, narrative
Set in antebellum Virginia, the narrative centers on Henry Townsend, a black man who, having purchased his own freedom, becomes a master himself and owns thirty-three slaves.
-
7
The Vaster Wilds
by Lauren Groff
Also deep · history, narrative
In the early seventeenth century, a young servant girl escapes a starving, disease-ridden colonial settlement in North America, fleeing alone into the winter wilderness.
-
8
Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, Purple Hibiscus
Also deep and inward-looking · history, narrative
This three-volume collection tracks the socio-political evolution of Nigeria through specific family lineages and individual migrations.
-
9
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Also deep and inward-looking · history, narrative
The story centers on Dorrigo Evans, an Australian surgeon and officer held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during the construction of the Burma Death Railway in 1943.
-
10
Human Acts
by Han Kang
Also deep and inward-looking · history, narrative
Han Kang’s novel reconstructs the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and its aftermath through seven interconnected perspectives.
-
11
The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
history, memoir
Edmund de Waal traces a collection of 264 netsuke—tiny Japanese ivory and wood carvings—to reconstruct his ancestors’ history.
-
12
How Much of These Hills Is Gold
by C Pam Zhang
Also deep · history, narrative
Set against the declining years of the American Gold Rush, the novel follows Lucy and Sam, two orphaned siblings of Chinese descent, as they carry their father’s decomposing body across a harsh western landscape.
Get picks matched to your own reading on papr.
Get papr
