— “The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan
Tan’s first novel, a seminal work of Asian-American literature, jumps back and forth as it follows the lives of four women in pre-1949 China and, a generation later, their four American-born daughters. In the United States, the elder women form the Joy Luck Club and gather regularly to play mah-jongg. When one member dies, her daughter is called to sit in, and she begins to see the older generation and her Chinese heritage, which she had tried to distance herself from, in a different light.
— “Breath, Eyes, Memory” by Edwidge Danticat
In this novel, which follows three generations of Haitian and Haitian American women, Danticat’s “calm clarity of vision takes on the resonance of folk art,” a Times reviewer wrote. Danticat explores many heavy themes in this novel set in New York and Haiti — sexual abuse, political upheaval, migration — a choice that a Times reviewer called both “extraordinarily ambitious” and “extraordinary successful.”
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If you don’t want a cookie-cutter story
— “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
A runaway slave kills her daughter in an attempt to keep her from being taken into captivity, and the devastating action reverberates in her life for decades. This novel “possesses the heightened power and resonance of myth — its characters, like those in opera or Greek drama, seem larger than life and their actions, too, tend to strike us as enactments of ancient rituals and passions,” a Times reviewer wrote.
— “Mothers and Sons” by Colm Tóibín
“You pick up a book called ‘Mothers and Sons’ and expect something reassuring and warm, domestic,” wrote a Times reviewer about this short story collection, “but it is part of Tóibín’s pitiless and often brilliant vision to show that mothers and sons are suspicious even of one another, less pietàs than emblems of missed connections.”
— “Room” by Emma Donoghue
This book is told from the perspective of 5-year-old Jack, who the reader comes to understand was born in captivity, in a room where his mother has been held prisoner for years. “This is a truly memorable novel, one that can be read through myriad lenses — psychological, sociological, political,” a Times reviewer wrote. “It presents an utterly unique way to talk about love, all the while giving us a fresh, expansive eye on the world in which we live.”
— “Stay With Me” by Ayobami Adebayo
Though the central female character in this novel, Yejide, is not a mother, the book is grounded in her struggles with fertility and how these threaten to destroy her marriage. Yejide begins to realize the secrets her husband has been keeping from her. “It’s a realization that forces her to question traditional attitudes toward women in Nigeria — including the primacy of motherhood and deference toward their husbands — and to try to sort out her own expectations from those she’s inherited from her family and society,” a Times reviewer wrote.
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If you’ve lost a mother
— “What We Lose” by Zinzi Clemmons
In searing vignettes, Clemmons describes her protagonist Thandi’s life before and after her mother’s death to cancer. “The book’s distinctive form and voice give it an unusual capacity to show how individuals connect deep feeling to broad political understanding — an experience too rarely rendered in fiction,” a Times reviewer wrote.
— “The Mothers” by Brit Bennett
Bennett’s “ferociously moving debut lives up to its title,” wrote a Times reviewer, “never once allowing readers a simplistic view of the maternal pain at its center.” The novel follows a young woman named Nadia who, while grieving her mother’s suicide when she was a teen, becomes pregnant by the pastor’s son. She gets an abortion, goes away to college and must later reckon with seeing a friend live a version of the life she did not choose. All the while, community elders — “the mothers” — are in the background as moral arbiters.
— “Please Look After Mom” by Kyung-sook Shin
It’s not immediately clear what happened to the mother in this novel, translated from the original Korean, except that she disappeared in a train station in Seoul. The story is told from the perspectives of her children and her husband, who realize in her absence the ways in which they took her for granted. This novel “powerfully conveys grief’s bewildering immediacy,” a Times reviewer wrote.
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If you are a mother
— “Blue Nights” by Joan Didion
This book is “honest, unflinching, necessarily solipsistic and, in the way of these things, self-lacerating,” a Times reviewer wrote. In it, Didion mourns her daughter, Quintana Roo, who died in 2005, only two years after losing her husband. Didion also wrote about that loss, but according to a Times reviewer, this book is “rawer than its predecessor, the ‘impenetrable polish’ of former, better days now chipped and scratched.”
— “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother” by Rachel Cusk
This memoir, which a Times reviewer described as “funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary,” is about the psychological and social changes in Cusk’s life as a “new mother who finds mommy groups unbearable, her child’s neediness frightening and, gasp, breast-feeding despicable,” a Times reviewer wrote.
— “To Siri With Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines” by Judith Newman
In this book, which a Times reviewer called “uncommonly riotous and moving,” Newman chronicles her life with her autistic teenage son, Gus. The reviewer counted this among the best books by parents of autistic children. “That’s not only because she is a top-drawer prose stylist with good comic timing,” he wrote. “As she removes the zone of privacy from herself and her family, she is edging into the world her son occupies.”