Books Like Homegoing: 7 Reads for Fans of Multigenerational Sagas.

Homegoing works by taking one family's split at a single moment — one sister sold into slavery, one married into the slave trade — and following the ripple effects across three hundred years and two continents. If that structure is what hooked you, here are seven more novels that use the same generational, ripple-effect storytelling to trace how history moves through a single family line.

1. Roots by Alex Haley

The novel that arguably invented the modern multigenerational saga as a mainstream genre, tracing Haley's own family history from Kunta Kinte's capture and enslavement in West Africa through seven generations of his American descendants, up to Haley's own research into his lineage. Its scope and subject matter — tracing an African American family's roots directly back to Africa — make it the closest thematic sibling to Homegoing on this list.

2. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

A Greek-American family saga spanning three generations, from a grandmother and grandfather's scandalous secret in a small Greek village to their intersex grandchild Cal's own coming of age in 1970s Detroit. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it uses the same "one hidden decision echoes for generations" structure as Homegoing, applied to genetics and identity instead of slavery and colonialism.

3. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-raised daughters navigate the gap between them — different countries, languages, and expectations — through interwoven stories that jump between generations and continents. Like Homegoing, it's structured as a series of connected shorter narratives rather than one continuous plot, letting each generation's story stand on its own while building toward a larger family picture.

4. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

A sprawling reimagining of the Cain and Abel story, following two families in California's Salinas Valley across generations, with the same patterns of favoritism, rivalry, and inherited sin repeating from fathers to sons. Steinbeck considered it his masterpiece, and its interest in how the past shapes each new generation, whether they want it to or not, echoes Homegoing's central question of inheritance.

5. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Set in Kerala, India, and moving fluidly between the 1960s and the 1990s, this Booker Prize–winning novel follows twins Estha and Rahel and the family tragedy that shapes both their childhood and the adults they become decades later. Less directly multigenerational than the others on this list, but shares Homegoing's interest in how a single devastating event echoes forward and reshapes everyone who comes after it.

6. The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Spanning nearly a century of Vietnamese history — French colonization, land reform, and decades of war — this novel is told through a grandmother, Trần Diệu Lan, and her granddaughter, Hương, as they piece together the family's fractured history and everything it cost to survive it. Like Homegoing, it uses one family across generations to make an entire national history legible on a human scale, moving between two narrators' timelines rather than jumping between many descendants.

7. Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Quế Mai's follow-up novel interweaves three storylines: a Black American helicopter pilot who fathered a child during the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese bar hostess he left behind, and their now-adult Amerasian son searching for the family history he was never given. A different structure than Homegoing — three converging present-day-adjacent threads rather than a long historical chain — but the same central question of what descendants owe to, and inherit from, choices made generations before they were born.

Where to Find These Books in Kenya

All the titles above are in stock at Readers' Republik, with delivery across Nairobi and the rest of Kenya. Explore more in these collections:

• Historical Fiction
• Contemporary Fiction
• African Literature

Frequently Asked Questions.

Which of these books is most similar to Homegoing in subject matter specifically? Roots by Alex Haley, given its shared focus on tracing an African American family's lineage back to Africa and through the experience of slavery.

Which book has the most similar structure to Homegoing's chapter-by-chapter generational format? The Joy Luck Club and The Mountains Sing are the closest structural matches, both moving between different characters and generations in distinct sections rather than one continuous narrative.

Which of these books is the longest commitment? Roots and East of Eden are both substantial reads, considerably longer than Middlesex or The God of Small Things.

Is The God of Small Things really a multigenerational saga? Not in the strictest sense — it focuses mainly on one generation across two timelines rather than tracing several generations directly. It's included here for how closely it shares Homegoing's interest in how one event's consequences ripple forward through a family.

How are The Mountains Sing and Dust Child different from each other? The Mountains Sing follows one family across nearly a century through a grandmother and granddaughter's alternating perspectives, closest in structure to Homegoing itself. Dust Child is more tightly focused on three converging present-day-adjacent storylines rather than a long generational chain, centered specifically on the legacy of Amerasian children born during the Vietnam War.

Do I need to read these in any particular order? No — each of these is a standalone novel and can be read in any order, with no connection to Homegoing or to each other beyond the shared genre. The Mountains Sing and Dust Child are also unconnected to one another and can be read in either order.