Identity & Belonging

Explorations of self, belonging, and what it means to find your place.

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Natural Beauty

Ling Ling Huang

Natural Beauty follows a talented young pianist whose promising musical career is interrupted when an accident leaves her Chinese immigrant parents unable to care for themselves. Forced to abandon her ambitions, she takes a job at Holistik, an exclusive beauty and wellness store in New York City that caters to wealthy customers seeking increasingly extreme forms of physical perfection. As she becomes immersed in this glamorous world, she discovers an industry where experimental treatments promise to reshape bodies, erase imperfections, and transform people’s appearances. Her growing fascination with Helen, the niece of the store’s charismatic owner, further draws her into a world of privilege, desire, and manipulation. Yet beneath the seductive promises of self-improvement lies something deeply disturbing.

United States 2024

Daughter of Fire

Daughter of Fire

Set in Guatemala in 1551, Daughter of Fire follows Catalina Cerrato, the daughter of a powerful Spanish landowner and a Maya noblewoman. Growing up between two cultures in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest, Catalina struggles to reconcile her father’s expectations with her mother’s legacy. Before her death, her mother entrusted her with preserving the sacred history of the K’iche’ people, recorded in the Popol Vuh. Determined to protect this endangered heritage, Catalina embarks on a dangerous journey to recover and preserve its stories. Along the way, she encounters Juan de Rojas, a Maya nobleman whose life has also been transformed by the conquest. Blending historical fiction, romance, and Maya mythology, the novel explores cultural identity, colonial oppression, love, and the struggle to preserve Indigenous traditions in the face of erasure.

The Original

A painting is burned to ashes. Years later, it mysteriously returns. And in a crumbling English country house, nothing—and no one—is quite what they seem. Oxfordshire, 1899. Grace Inderwick has spent most of her life as an unwanted guest in her wealthy uncle’s household. An outsider with a talent for copying paintings, she secretly turns her unusual skill into a way to earn money and imagine a life beyond the estate. But when her cousin Charles, presumed dead after disappearing at sea, suddenly returns, the family is thrown into turmoil. Some believe he is their long-lost relative; others suspect an impostor hoping to claim the family fortune. As Grace becomes entangled in the mystery, her own secrets threaten to surface. In a world where appearances can deceive and even love involves a kind of imitation, she must decide whom to trust—and who she wants to become. Atmospheric, witty, and full of Victorian intrigue, The Original explores the blurred boundaries between authenticity and deception, asking what makes a person truly original.

United Kingdom 2025

Necessary Fiction

Necessary Fiction

Eloghosa Osunde

In Lagos, a vibrant cast of queer Nigerians navigate love, desire, family expectations, and the courage to live on their own terms. From artists and lovers to parents and friends, their lives intertwine as they confront the stories they have constructed to survive in a society that often refuses to accept them as they are. Through intimate relationships, unexpected connections, and moments of radical self-discovery, Eloghosa Osunde explores what it means to create a family beyond blood ties and to claim the freedom to define oneself. Tender, defiant, and deeply human, Necessary Fiction is a celebration of chosen family, queer identity, and the complicated fictions we sometimes need to survive.

Helen of Nowhere

Helen of Nowhere

Makenna Goodman

A disgraced English professor, separated from his wife and forced out of his job, visits an idyllic country house for sale, hoping to begin again. The realtor introduces him to the mysterious Helen, the former owner who built a life close to nature and outside conventional expectations. As the evening unfolds, the viewing becomes a surreal journey through the professor’s resentments, regrets, and carefully constructed sense of self. Philosophical, darkly humorous, and formally inventive, Helen of Nowhere questions the fantasies we build around happiness, freedom, and starting over—and what we must surrender to find a more meaningful life.

United States 2025

Good Girl

In Berlin’s underground techno scene, nineteen-year-old Nila is searching for freedom, belonging, and a voice of her own. Born in Germany to Afghan refugee parents, she moves between her family’s expectations and the city’s intoxicating nightlife, trying to escape the weight of her past and imagine a different future. When she meets Marlowe, an older American writer whose fading literary fame opens the door to a world of artistic possibility, Nila becomes drawn into a relationship that challenges her independence. Meanwhile, beneath Berlin’s cosmopolitan surface, racism and unresolved historical tensions threaten the fragile worlds she inhabits. Sensual, restless, and deeply perceptive, Good Girl explores the contradictions of growing up between cultures—and the messy, liberating struggle to decide who you want to become.

Liquid

A brilliant Iranian-Indian American scholar has a PhD from UCLA, an underwhelming academic career, and a growing fear that she has failed to achieve the comfortable life her immigrant parents worked so hard to build. When her best friend jokingly suggests she marry rich, she takes the idea seriously, embarking on a summer of one hundred dates with wealthy Angelenos. Armed with spreadsheets and intellectual confidence, she approaches romance as another problem to solve. But when a family emergency takes her to Tehran, an unexpected queer attraction challenges her carefully constructed plans and forces her to reconsider what she wants from love, family, and her future. Witty, provocative, and deeply perceptive, Liquid explores the contradictions of ambition, the pressures of cultural expectations, and the search for belonging between different worlds. With sharp humour and emotional honesty, it turns the familiar romantic comedy into a thoughtful examination of identity, desire, and the lives we imagine for ourselves.

United States 2025

Salutation Road

Salutation Road

Twenty-three-year-old Sirad Ali feels trapped between the life she has inherited and the future she dreams of. Living in South London, she struggles to support her mother and younger brother while carrying the wound of her father’s abandonment. But one ordinary morning, her commute takes an extraordinary turn: she finds herself transported to an alternate version of Mogadishu, where her family has lived an entirely different life. There, she encounters Ubah, her double—the woman she might have become had her parents never fled Somalia during the civil war. When Ubah later appears in London, the boundaries between their worlds begin to blur. Blending magical realism with an intimate exploration of migration and family, Salutation Road asks a haunting question: How different would we be if our families had made different choices?

Far Away from Here

Far Away from Here

Five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, three young Black American Muslims find themselves confronting the losses, choices, and secrets that have shaped their lives. Fatima returns to the city she fled after the murder of her fiancé, reluctantly taking on the care of his dying mother. Tahani, a single mother who has struggled to reconcile her independence with her religious upbringing, longs for a life that leaves room for her own ambitions. Meanwhile, Saif must face his troubled past and the role he played in his cousin’s death. As their lives intertwine once more, all three must reckon with grief, faith, and the possibility of a different future. A tender, thought-provoking novel about community, belonging, and the courage to reclaim your own story.

United States 2025

Dust Settles North

Dust Settles North

Deena Elgenaidi

Set in 2012, in the aftermath of Egypt’s revolution, Dust Settles North follows Hannah and Zain, two Egyptian American siblings whose lives are upended by their mother’s sudden death and their father’s devastating betrayal. Travelling from New York to Cairo to bury their mother, they find themselves confronting not only their grief but also the painful secrets that have shaped their family. Hannah abandons her plans to attend Columbia Law School and stays in Egypt, where she navigates unfamiliar surroundings, complicated romantic relationships, and a growing political consciousness. Meanwhile, Zain remains in the United States, where his self-destructive behaviour threatens his relationships and forces him to question whether he is repeating his father’s mistakes. When the siblings reunite in Cairo, Hannah becomes caught up in the atmosphere of political upheaval surrounding the Arab Spring, while both struggle to reconcile their conservative Muslim upbringing with their evolving beliefs and desires. Tender and introspective, the novel explores grief, faith, cultural identity, and the complicated ties between parents and children. Through Hannah and Zain’s journeys, ElGenaidi examines what it means to belong to two cultures while searching for a sense of home—and whether a fractured family can find a way to heal.

The Courtesan, Her Lover, and I

The Courtesan, Her Lover, and I

Tarana Husain Khan

In the historic North Indian town of Rampur, two women separated by more than a century discover an unexpected connection through literature, history, and the struggle to have their voices heard. In the nineteenth century, Munni Bai Hijab, a gifted courtesan and poet, captures the heart of the celebrated Urdu poet Dagh Dehlvi. Yet as her lover immortalises her in his verses, her own literary achievements risk being overshadowed by her role as his muse. In contemporary Rampur, Rukmini, an aspiring writer whose family has returned from Dubai after her husband’s business collapses, rediscovers her long-abandoned ambitions. While researching the town’s past at the Rampur Raza Library, she encounters Dagh’s letters and becomes fascinated by Hijab’s forgotten story. As Rukmini uncovers the poet’s life, she begins to recognise parallels with her own struggles as a wife, mother, and woman seeking creative independence. Blending historical fiction, romance, and cultural history, Tarana Husain Khan’s novel explores women’s literary legacies, the complexities of desire, and the power of reclaiming stories that history has overlooked.

Natalja’s Stories

Natalja’s Stories

Inger Christensen

Spanning generations of women and moving between Denmark and Russia, Natalja’s Stories is an inventive, surrealist exploration of family history, migration, and the elusive nature of identity. The story begins with Marie, a young woman living in Copenhagen who leaves her home with a Russian admirer and travels to St. Petersburg. As political upheaval engulfs Russia following the Revolution, Marie dies, and her daughter, Natalja, undertakes the journey back to Denmark carrying her mother’s ashes. But Natalja’s story refuses to unfold as a conventional tale of exile and loss. Retold through the memories and imaginations of successive generations, it becomes a shifting narrative filled with mysterious encounters, murders, absurd characters, and unexpected connections. A particularly unsettling figure, Viktor Blanke, appears across the lives of three generations of mothers and daughters, blurring the boundaries between past and present, memory and invention. As the stories accumulate, identities overlap and family history becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from fiction. Originally published in Danish in 1988 as Nataljas fortællinger, this playful, formally experimental novella challenges familiar narratives about migration and belonging. Christensen combines dark humour, surrealism, and philosophical reflection to suggest that identity is never fixed: we continually reinvent ourselves through the stories we tell about our lives.

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About this theme

Books: 196
Countries: 72

Countries with this theme

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Congo, Democratic Republic

Dominican Republic

North Macedonia