If you liked
Books like Solito
by Javier Zamora
Solito is Javier Zamora reconstructing his 1999 unaccompanied migration from El Salvador to the United States at age nine, in present-tense first-person prose written from inside the nine-year-old's perspective. The Sonoran Desert chapters are some of the strongest contemporary American memoir prose. If you finished it and needed another book that respected what migration actually does to children, these are our picks.
The shortlist
What to read next
Crying in H Martby Michelle Zauner
“Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner 2021 review. Michelle Zauner's memoir about her Korean mother's death from pancreatic cancer and the Korean food that connected them. The breakout literary commercial memoir of 2021.”
Pachinkoby Min Jin Lee
“Pachinko by Min Jin Lee 2017 review. Four generations of a Korean family in twentieth-century Japan, beginning with Sunja's pregnancy by a married Korean gangster in 1933 Busan. The Apple TV+ adaptation source and one of the canonical contemporary Korean-American literary novels.”
Educatedby Tara Westover
“Educated by Tara Westover 2018 review. The memoir of growing up in a survivalist Idaho family that kept her out of school until age seventeen, and her subsequent education through Brigham Young University and Cambridge. The PEN/Bingham winner and one of the canonical contemporary memoirs.”
Demon Copperheadby Barbara Kingsolver
“Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 2022 review. A Dickensian retelling of David Copperfield in the opioid-crisis Appalachia of the 1990s and 2000s. Pulitzer Prize and Women's Prize 2023 and Kingsolver's defining late-career novel.”
The Vanishing Halfby Brit Bennett
“The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett 2020 review. Identical twin sisters from a small light-skinned Black Louisiana town diverge in the 1960s: one returns with her daughter, the other passes for white in California. Bennett's second novel and one of the canonical 2020s American literary novels.”
The Underground Railroadby Colson Whitehead
“The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 2016 review. Cora, a slave on a Georgia plantation, escapes north via an actual underground railroad, a literalized version of the metaphor. Pulitzer Prize 2017 and the National Book Award winner that defined the contemporary Black literary moment.”
FAQ
Common questions about Solito read-alikes
- What is the closest match for Solito?
- Crying in H Mart. Both contemporary American memoirs by writers of color writing about the family and the cultural inheritance that the migration generations had to carry. Different specific subjects but the same patient memoir-of-loss register.
- I want more about contemporary migration specifically.
- The catalog is light on this subgenre. Reyna Grande's The Distance Between Us and Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends are the canonical adjacent picks. Neither is reviewed here yet but both are easy library finds.
- I want a fictional novel that does adjacent work.
- Pachinko handles the multi-generational diaspora question. Demon Copperhead handles childhood-poverty interiority from inside the child's point of view. The Underground Railroad uses a fantastical structural device to do migration-and-violence work.
- I want a memoir that does not pretend the wound healed cleanly.
- Educated (Tara Westover, family-of-origin trauma) and Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner, grief and Korean-American identity) are the closest matches. Both refuse the redemptive memoir arc.
The original