Books Like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Louisa May Alcott

Like Francie, Jo March is a bookish girl with writing dreams growing up in a family short on money but rich in love. It shares the same warm, episodic portrait of family life.

L. M. Montgomery

An imaginative, word-loving girl finds her place in the world through stubborn hope. Fans of Francie's inner life and love of learning will recognise a kindred spirit in Anne.

Harper Lee

Told through a sharp young girl's eyes, it blends childhood wonder with hard truths about the adult world, much as Smith's novel does with poverty and prejudice.

Colm Tóibín

A quiet, observant young woman builds a new life in mid-century Brooklyn. Readers who loved Smith's attention to neighbourhood detail and modest ambitions will find the same gentle precision here.

Henry Roth

A child's view of immigrant life on New York's Lower East Side in the early 1900s, capturing the same era, streets and family tensions that shape Francie's Brooklyn.

Frank McCourt

This memoir of an Irish Catholic childhood marked by poverty and a charming, drinking father echoes Johnny Nolan's story, told with similar humour and resilience.

Maud Hart Lovelace, Lois Lenski

A gentle turn-of-the-century childhood with a budding writer at its heart; it captures the small daily pleasures and friendships that make Smith's novel so cosy to revisit.

Tara Westover

A true story of a girl who claws her way to education against her family's circumstances, echoing Francie's fierce determination to keep learning whatever the cost.

Jeannette Walls

A memoir of a childhood in poverty with a magnetic, unreliable father, written without self-pity. Readers moved by the Nolans' love and struggles will find it hard to put down.

Ann Patchett

A sibling story spanning decades, about family, loss and the houses that shape us. Like Smith, Patchett finds deep feeling in ordinary domestic scenes.

Min Jin Lee

A sweeping saga of a poor Korean family across four generations, built on the same themes of endurance, sacrifice and mothers working to give their children more.

Ann Patchett

Following two families over fifty years, it offers the same patient, episodic look at how childhood experiences ripple through adult lives that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn does.