11 Striking Novels About Identity and Belonging

In Devil Is Fine, John Vercher crafts a moving portrait of grief, fatherhood, and identity in America. The novel centers on a biracial Black man who’s grappling with the unexpected loss of his teenage son when he receives word that he’s inherited a former plantation from the white side of his family. Stunned by the development, the narrator travels to the property with plans to sell it off. Once there, however, he begins to reckon with his history and the depths of his pain, unearthing long-buried truths about his family, his lost son, and who he really is. Deftly blurring the lines between past and present, what’s real and imagined, Devil Is Fine is a marvel.

An array of outlets named Ursula Villarreal-Moura’s Like Happiness one of the most anticipated books of 2024, and for good reason — the novel offers a riveting perspective on gender, queerness, Latinx identity, fame, power, and more. It’s 2015, and Tatum Vega leads a happy life in Chile working at a museum and living with her partner, Vera. But a surprise call from an American reporter upends Vera’s contentment, asking her about the complex relationship she had years ago with the powerful writer M. Dominguez. Dominguez has now been accused of assault, and the reporter wants to hear Tatum’s perspective. In an instant, Tatum is pulled back to the murky decade she spent in New York with Dominguez, grappling with thorny questions about who she was then and who she has become. “Villarreal-Moura writes with stunning emotional clarity about sexual identity, art and marginalization, and the ways control can masquerade as love” (Bustle).

In the bestselling The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett crafts a stunning family saga about the ever-shifting state of identity, exploring the facets we can change — and those we cannot. Desiree and Stella are identical twin sisters growing up in a small Black community in Louisiana. Both sisters leave for New Orleans as teenagers, but their stories diverge from there. Desiree gets married, gives birth to a dark-skinned daughter, and then returns home to raise her family. Her sister Stella, meanwhile, chooses to reinvent herself entirely. She moves to California and builds a new life where she passes for a white woman, not even telling her husband about her true racial identity. The story sees Desiree’s daughter head to California for college, where her storyline collides with her family’s complicated history.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller, Tommy Orange’s There There explores life as a Native American in contemporary America. Set in Oakland, the book follows several characters whose lives intersect at the Big Oakland Powwow — including newly sober Jacquie Red Feather, grieving Dene Oxendene, and Orvil, a teenage boy attending the powwow to perform his first-ever traditional dance routine.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah recently celebrated its 10^th anniversary, so now is the perfect time to check out this gem of a novel. Both poignant and hard-hitting, the bestselling book is a love story about two young Nigerians, Ifemelu and Obinze. They leave their military-ruled country for a life in the West, but things do not go as planned. Ifemelu heads to the United States to study, where she grapples with Black identity in a country where Black people are not always made to feel they belong. Unable to join Ifemelu in America because of post-9/11 immigration restrictions, Obinze sinks into a dangerous life in London, where he lives without documentation. Americanah powerfully explores issues of race, immigration, and the American dream. Yet it’s also suffused with humor — and heart.

Charles Yu’s National Book Award–winner Interior Chinatown is a “shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood” (Vanity Fair). The novel centers on Willis Wu, an actor who can only see himself as a “Generic Asian Man” or a prop in someone else’s story. He dreams of being “Kung Fu Guy” in a show like the procedural Black and White, since this feels like the best role that someone of Asian descent could hope for. Willis’s career — and his internalization of cultural stereotypes — will give you plenty to think about race, assimilation, celebrity, and humanity. It will also make you laugh. If you like sharp and brilliant satirical fare, this book is for you.

Virginia Woolf is a literary icon, and Orlando is a stunning example of the author’s radical talent and vision. The novel begins in Elizabethan England, where a 16-year-old male nobleman named Orlando fills his days with delight and revelry. The book ends three centuries later in 1928, by which point Orlando has transformed into a modern 36-year-old woman who is both a wife and a mother. Orlando is a fictionalized account of Woolf’s friend and lover Vita Sackville-West. Its influence on feminist, transgender, and queer studies cannot be overstated given its 1928 publication date.

Torrey Peters’s bestselling novel centers on three women whose lives intersect because of an unexpected pregnancy. There’s Reese, a New York City–based trans woman with a good job and a desire for a baby. Then there’s her partner, Amy, who has detransitioned and become Ames, complicating the relationship and causing a breakup. Reese is now sleeping with married men to deal with her loneliness, while Ames is pining for Reese. When Ames’s lover Katrina gets pregnant with his baby — and because she is unsure about motherhood — Ames wants to include Reese in forming a new family. Thought-provoking and witty, Detransition, Baby is a brilliant book about identity that’s not to be missed.

Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing won both the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. The New York Times bestseller centers on Effia and Esi, two Ghanaian half sisters in the 18^th century who are thrust into very different lives. Effia is married off to an English slaver and sent to live in a castle on the Gold Coast. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister Esi is also in the castle, imprisoned in its dungeon. Esi is shipped to America, where she’s sold into a brutal life of slavery that will become the only option for her children and grandchildren. The novel traces the sisters’ descendants across 300 years, presenting a wrenching and socially important historical fiction narrative.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a New York Times bestseller. The book is set in India and the United States and captures the universal feeling of being caught between two worlds as you struggle to find your place. It starts with Ashok and Ashima Ganguli, who leave Calcutta for the Boston area so that Ashok can study at MIT. They have their first child in the States, and Ashima struggles with isolation and the forced naming of the child before the family can leave the hospital, which bucks their Bengali tradition. Their son, Gogol, rebels against his parents’ culture and traditions — including changing his name. What follows is a riveting story about ethnicity, assimilation, love, loyalty, and the complexity of intergenerational conflict in immigrant families.

Lisa Ko’s The Leavers — winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction and a National Book Award finalist — caps off our list of engaging and emotional books about identity and belonging. Deming Guo is an 11-year-old boy living in the Bronx with his mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant. One day Polly leaves for work and never comes home. Adrift, Deming is eventually adopted by two white professors. The new family moves to upstate New York, and Deming is renamed Daniel, sparking a search for identity and cultural history. The Leavers is fascinatingly told from both Daniel and Polly’s points of view. Spanning New York to China, the sweeping novel is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.