Must-Read
Best Books About Resilience
Resilience is the contemporary book-marketing word for what literature has always been about: people surviving things they should not have had to survive. These eight respect what the actual work of surviving looks like and refuse to sell easy redemption.
8 books on this list.
Educatedby Tara Westover
5.0“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.”
Solitoby Javier Zamora
5.0“Solito by Javier Zamora 2022 review. The 1999 migration of a nine-year-old Salvadoran boy on foot and by sea across two months. The canonical contemporary memoir of unaccompanied minor migration to the United States.”
Demon Copperheadby Barbara Kingsolver
5.0“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.”
A Little Lifeby Hanya Yanagihara
4.0“A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara 2015 review. Four college friends in New York, slowly narrowing onto Jude St. Francis and what childhood trauma does to the rest of an adult life. Man Booker Prize shortlist and the most-discussed contemporary American doorstop.”
Pachinkoby Min Jin Lee
5.0“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.”
The Vanishing Halfby Brit Bennett
5.0“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
5.0“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.”
Belovedby Toni Morrison
5.0“Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.”