Books Like The Bonesetter's Daughter

Amy Tan

Tan's first novel braids the stories of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American daughters, with the same misunderstandings, buried histories and slow reconciliations that make The Bonesetter's Daughter so moving.

Michelle Zauner

A memoir of a Korean American daughter and her formidable mother, told through food, illness and grief. It shares the novel's mix of friction, love and cultural inheritance.

Lisa See

Two girls in nineteenth-century rural China share secrets in a hidden women's script, echoing the novel's theme of written words carrying what cannot be spoken aloud.

Jung Chang

Three generations of Chinese women across the twentieth century. If LuLing's chapters gripped you, this true family history offers the same sweep of tradition, upheaval and survival.

Pearl S. Buck

A classic of peasant life in pre-revolutionary China, with the land, family duty and harsh fortune that shape the mountain-village world LuLing grows up in.

Min Jin Lee

A Korean family's saga spanning decades and an immigrant move to Japan, with the same sense of how one generation's hardships quietly shape the next.

Celeste Ng

A Chinese American family in 1970s Ohio is undone by unspoken expectations, much like the silences between Ruth and LuLing that only truth can begin to heal.

Maxine Hong Kingston

A landmark memoir mixing a mother's ghost stories and Chinese legends with growing up in California, close in spirit to Tan's interplay of myth and family truth.

Amy Tan

Wait, same author limit reached; instead consider Tan's peers.

Emma Healey

Told by a woman with dementia chasing an old mystery, it explores memory slipping away while the past grows vivid, much like LuLing's fading present and sharp history.