10 books for fans of Alias Grace
- 1
The Things We Cannot Say
by Kelly Rimmer
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Rimmer weaves together a Polish woman's wartime survival story with her granddaughter's modern family struggles, including caring for an autistic child. The parallel narratives explore how family secrets across generations can both wound and ultimately heal.
★ 4.54 Goodreads (284.0K ratings) - 2
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
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Two family branches—one sold into slavery, one complicit in selling—unfold across three centuries from 18th-century Ghana to contemporary America.
★ 4.47 Goodreads (410.6K ratings) - 3
Beneath a Scarlet Sky
by Mark T. Sullivan
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Teenager Pino Lella guides Jews over the Alps then becomes a Nazi general's driver, spying for the Italian resistance. Based on true events, this forgotten hero's story reveals the extraordinary courage of ordinary people.
★ 4.43 Goodreads (396.0K ratings) - 4
Gates of Fire
by Steven Pressfield
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George Guidall's epic narration matches Pressfield's visceral recreation of ancient warfare and the warrior culture that made such sacrifice possible.
★ 4.40 Goodreads (44.4K ratings) - 5
Genghis: Birth of an Empire
Conqueror • Book 1
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Abandoned as a child after his father's murder, Temujin endures steppe brutality to become Genghis Khan. Iggulden focuses on the personal betrayals and survival instincts that shaped history's greatest conqueror.
★ 4.39 Goodreads (38.2K ratings) - 6
The Frozen River
by Ariel Lawhon
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A midwife in 1789 Maine becomes a detective when a man's body is found frozen in the river, drawing on her intimate knowledge of every family secret in town. Lawhon turns colonial America into a forensic thriller.
★ 4.38 Goodreads (594.0K ratings) - 7
Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)
by Min Jin Lee
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Lee follows four generations of Korean immigrants in Japan, starting with Sunja's desperate marriage to escape shame and continuing through decades of discrimination and survival.
★ 4.34 Goodreads (641.5K ratings) - 8
The Lies They Told
by Ellen Marie Wiseman
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A young immigrant mother in 1930s rural Virginia faces America's rising eugenics movement, where class and origin determine who deserves forced sterilization. Wiseman illuminates this horrific period when pseudoscience justified systematic oppression.
★ 4.34 Goodreads (21.4K ratings) - 9
- 10
The Alice Network
by Kate Quinn
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Quinn links two women across wars—Eve, a WWI spy in the real Alice Network, and Charlie, an American searching 1947 Europe for family lost in WWII's chaos.
★ 4.32 Goodreads (642.8K ratings)