9 Luscious Literary Books Like Transcendent Kingdom

Real Life matches Transcendent Kingdom for its depth, its protagonist in academia, its exploration of science, and its stunning, difficult portrayal of grief. Wallace is a Black PhD scholar at a small Midwestern college. Over the course of a summer season weekend, and after just lately studying of his father’s demise, he will get into quite a lot of romantic and non-romantic entanglements that change his outlook on life, academia, and himself. Taylor’s prose is completely beautiful.

Okay, I’ll admit it: there’s not one theme, precisely, that ties this ebook to Transcendent Kingdom, although they each grapple with ambition, race, being Black in America, and immigration. But they’re undoubtedly emotionally and intellectually comparable. They’re each about protagonists who need one thing very badly (within the case of Greenland‘s protagonist, Kip, it’s to publish a novel). They each really feel they’ve one thing to show. And they each work by lots of trauma whereas pursuing their respective goals.

Gifty struggles with questions of religion in Transcendent Kingdom, and so do the characters on this novel. Will has left his evangelical Christian religion behind, having simply transferred from a spiritual school to a liberal arts college. He quickly falls in love with the charismatic Phoebe, however turns into an increasing number of involved as she slowly will get entangled with a fundamentalist cult. Through Will and Phoebe, Kwon explores the truths that form our lives, and the catastrophic penalties of holding too tightly to what we expect we all know.

On the floor this novel doesn’t have a lot in frequent with Transcendent Kingdom — it’s a coming-of-age novel a few fats Black woman in Eighties and Nineties Harlem. But in the event you’re hankering for one more ebook that immerses you deeply in a single POV, that is your ebook. Malaya’s voice is singular, and Sullivan by no means strays from her inner (and exterior) struggles. It makes for an intense, nearly breathless learn that, whereas heartbreaking at instances, is in the end stuffed with pleasure.

If you’re in search of extra books that heart fraught mother-child relationships, in addition to books that discover first and second era immigration experiences, could I like to recommend this excellent novel? Akash is a homosexual Indian American man whose life will not be going the best way he desires it to. When he returns to his childhood dwelling, a yr after his dad’s demise, to assist his mother pack up the home, they’re each compelled to confront the messes, heartbreaks, and truths of their previous for the primary time in a very long time.

Check this out in the event you’re in search of extra books about ladies in science, and particularly extraordinarily sensible, pushed, and competent ladies decided to show themselves in fields riddled with sexism, racism, and homophobia. This historic novel is loosely primarily based on the lifetime of Nobel prize-winning scientist Barbara McClintock. Kate Croft arrives at Cornell in 1920 able to dive right into a scientific profession, however she’s thwarted at each flip by males who’re intimidated by how a lot smarter she is than them. It’s infuriating — which makes it very exhausting to cease studying!

I don’t know why there aren’t extra books about work. So many people spend a lot of our lives working, and but it’s uncommon to search out fiction that actually will get into the emotional realties of it. Transcendent Kingdom does, and so does this breathtaking novel about Sneha, a queer Indian American lady struggling to stay, love, generate income, and make that means in the course of a recession. It’s sharp and bighearted, humorous and scathing, heartbreaking and true. I’ve by no means learn a ebook that so fantastically and actually captures what it feels wish to stay on this planet, within the U.S., in capitalism, proper now.

This is one other unbelievable novel about ladies in science. The narrator is a Chinese American lady getting her PhD in chemistry. Her boyfriend has simply proposed, and her dad and mom are thrilled that she’s about to graduate. Her life, from the surface, seems picture-perfect. But she’s probably not certain what she desires, and having to reply her boyfriend’s proposal is the final straw. On the floor, it’s quirky and even humorous at instances, however beneath, this can be a novel with tooth.

One of the central themes in Transcendent Kingdom is Gifty’s religion and the way the lack of religion impacts her life. This ebook is all about what occurs when the world you thought you belonged to, the world you believed in, collapses earlier than your eyes, and the way exhausting it’s to construct a brand new world from the rubble. Kalki grows up on an ashram in rural India, believed by his dad and mom and neighborhood to be an incarnation of Vishnu. As he will get older, he slowly begins to see himself in another way, and the implications of that shift change his life endlessly.