Books like

Books like The Lowland

12 books with a reading profile close to The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. Deep, inward-looking, contemplative and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

1

A Streetcar Named Desire

by Tennessee Williams

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Blanche DuBois, a displaced schoolteacher with a fragile mental state, arrives at the cramped New Orleans apartment of her sister, Stella, and brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.
2

The Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Set in 1941 Lorain, Ohio, the narrative focuses on Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl who internalizes the white standards of beauty dominant in her community.
3

The Inheritance of Loss

by Kiran Desai

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Set in a crumbling house in the Himalayas against the 1980s Gorkhaland insurgency, the narrative follows Biju and Sai.
4

Tokyo Ueno Station

by Yū Miri

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Kazu is a ghost who haunts the grounds of Tokyo’s Ueno Park, mirroring the era he spent living there as a homeless laborer.
5

The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Daisy Goodwill Flett is born in 1905 in a Manitoba limestone quarry town, her mother dying in childbirth without knowing she was pregnant.
6

A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

John Wheelwright narrates the life of his best friend, Owen Meany, a boy with a high-pitched voice who accidentally kills John’s mother with a foul ball during a Little League game in 1953.
7

Martin Eden

by Jack London

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Martin Eden, a coarse and uneducated sailor, decides to overhaul his entire identity after meeting Ruth Morse, a woman from a refined bourgeois family.
8

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

by Thomas Hardy, Margaret R. Higonnet

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Tess Durbeyfield, a young woman living in the rural English countryside, discovers her family descends from the aristocratic d’Urberville line.
9

Cathedral

by Raymond Carver

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Raymond Carver’s collection presents twelve short stories centered on blue-collar domesticity, alcoholism, and isolation in the American Pacific Northwest.
10

Villette, a novel

by Charlotte Brontë

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Lucy Snowe, a young woman without family or financial security, travels to the fictional Belgian city of Villette to become a teacher at a girls’ boarding school.
11

Dear Life

by Alice Munro

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

Dear Life is Alice Munro's last collection, with ten stories of rural and small-town Canada.
12

Stoner

by John Williams

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, classic literature

William Stoner arrives at the University of Missouri in 1910 to study agriculture but shifts his focus to English literature after encountering a Shakespearean sonnet.

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