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Books About Mothers and Daughters: Novels About the Bond That Shapes Us
Few relationships are as close, or as complicated, as the one between a mother and a daughter. It can be the safest place in the world. It can also be where the deepest hurts live. Most of us know both sides.
Book Two · The Train Between Worlds
The Memory Fare
A novel of a mother, a missing daughter, and the train that charges in memories.
This site publishes a mother-daughter novel told from the mother’s side. Six years after her daughter June vanished at seventeen, Cora Marsh is still signing the visitor book at a railway lost property office every morning and searching the unclaimed bags for something of June’s. Then she finds a grey holdall with a tag in June’s handwriting, logged off a service that has never existed, and she boards that train on purpose. Every door aboard costs her one true memory of her daughter, and she never learns which one she paid.
Like The Lost Daughter and Tom Lake, it is about a mother as a person, and about how far a parent will go and what love can survive. Unlike them it is speculative, not realist: a train that is on no timetable and a fare paid in memory. It is Book Two of The Train Between Worlds and a standalone novel; you do not need Book One.
A standalone novel — no need to have read Book One
Short answer
The best-loved books about mothers and daughters start with The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan’s sixteen linked stories of four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American daughters. For something short and newer, My Name Is Lucy Barton; for comfort, Tom Lake; for a difficult mother you will not forget, White Oleander; for the mother’s own side, told without flattery, The Lost Daughter. Amy and Isabelle is the realist one, Little Women the classic, and Crying in H Mart the one true story. No spoilers.
What to expect from The Memory Fare
Where it lines up with the books above, and where it does not:
- Same as the books above
- A mother and a grown daughter, years of things unsaid, and love that is real rather than perfect.
- Different
- Speculative. The cost of the search is memory itself; the daughter is alive, and nobody dies.
- Point of view
- Cora Marsh, close third person, over a single journey.
- Tone
- Quiet and devastating rather than harrowing. No on-page violence.
- Content notes
- A missing child, parental grief and guilt, prolonged searching.
- Formats
- Kindle and paperback. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited.
What makes a great mother-daughter novel?
“Books about mothers and daughters” is one of the most common requests on book forums. On Reddit, readers ask for these novels for all kinds of reasons: they are about to become mothers themselves, they have lost their mother, or they want to understand their own family a little better. This list covers warm stories and difficult ones. Seven are novels and one is a memoir, and it is labelled. The best of them share a few things:
- Two points of view. We see the mother as a person, not just as “Mum”.
- Things left unsaid. Silence and secrets often matter as much as words.
- Time. Many of these books move across years, because this relationship changes as both people grow.
- Love that is real, not perfect.
Each pick below says what it is like to read, who it is for, what it contains, and when to skip it. Three of them include sexual abuse or the abuse of a teenager, which most lists do not mention; the “Contains” line says which.
7 novels and a memoir about mothers and daughters
In the order we would hand them to you.
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The Joy Luck Club
Closest match The classicIn 1949 four Chinese immigrant women in San Francisco start a mahjong club. Decades later, one of them, Suyuan Woo, has died, and her daughter June takes her seat at the table. The other three “aunties” have a request for her that will take her to China. Around that frame, the book moves between the mothers’ lives in wartime China and their daughters’ lives in America: sixteen linked stories in four parts, each told by a mother or a daughter in turn.
What makes it the book people return to is that the mothers get to speak. You hear the daughter’s exasperation and then, a chapter later, the mother’s reason, and the two rarely meet in the middle. It is about love getting lost between two languages and two generations, and it is funnier than its reputation. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Wayne Wang filmed it in 1993 from a screenplay Tan co-wrote.
- How it ends
- It ends in China, at the meeting the whole book has been travelling toward.
- Contains
- A suicide, an abortion and a stillbirth, all in the mothers’ pasts; Babies abandoned in wartime
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want one continuous story; the structure is a ring of linked tales, and you have to keep track of eight women.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, structure, awards, film
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My Name Is Lucy Barton
Closest match Short, and about an adult daughterLucy Barton, a young writer in New York, spends nine weeks in hospital after an infection that follows an operation. One day her mother, whom she has not seen in years, is sitting at the foot of the bed. She stays five days and nights, and she does not sleep. They talk about small things, gossip and the people from Lucy’s childhood town of Amgash, Illinois, and the big things, a childhood of poverty and a frightening father, stay just under the surface of every sentence.
It is short and tender, written in brief sections with a great deal of white space around them, and it is for anyone with a mother she loves and does not fully understand, who cannot say the thing you need her to say. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and Laura Linney played Lucy in Rona Munro’s one-woman stage version in London and on Broadway. Strout carries Amgash on in Anything Is Possible.
- How it ends
- It ends years later, with Lucy looking back at what her mother could and could not say.
- Contains
- Childhood poverty and an abusive father, remembered
- Skip if
- Skip it if you need things said out loud; the whole book is built on what the two women avoid.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, Booker longlist, stage version, BookBrowse: summary and reviews
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Amy and Isabelle
Strong match The realist oneStrout’s first novel. Isabelle is a single mother in Shirley Falls, a mill town, and her sixteen-year-old daughter Amy works beside her in the mill office over one long, hot summer, barely speaking to her. The reason is something that happened in the spring, which the book circles back to: Amy’s relationship with a much older maths teacher, and the day her mother found out. As the summer goes on, Isabelle’s own past, which she has kept from everyone, comes up to meet it.
It is slow-burning, close and honest about how hard it is to raise a daughter and to be one, and about the particular silence of two people sharing a small house while furious with each other. Readers of Lucy Barton will recognise the eye for small towns and small humiliations. It won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction. Know before you start that the teacher’s abuse of Amy is the event the book turns on.
- How it ends
- It ends with the summer over and the two women still in the same house, changed.
- Contains
- A teacher’s sexual relationship with a sixteen-year-old pupil; Grooming, in the mother’s past; A missing girl in the town
- Skip if
- Skip it if a teacher’s abuse of a teenager is not something you can read right now; it is central, not background.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, award, TV film
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White Oleander
Strong match The difficult motherAstrid Magnussen is twelve and lives in Los Angeles with her mother Ingrid, a beautiful, brilliant and dangerous poet. When a lover leaves Ingrid, she poisons him with oleander and is sent to prison for life for his murder. Astrid goes into the foster system, and the novel follows her through one home after another, each with a different idea of what a mother is, while Ingrid writes to her from prison and keeps her under her spell.
It is intense and beautifully written, and Ingrid is a mother who is impossible to forget: magnetic, cruel, and certain that her daughter belongs to her. The book is really about the daughter’s long effort to work out which of her mother’s lessons to keep. It was an Oprah’s Book Club pick in 1999 and was filmed in 2002 with Michelle Pfeiffer as Ingrid. It is also the darkest book on this page, and the foster homes are where the darkness is.
- How it ends
- It ends with Astrid grown, far from Los Angeles, deciding how close to stand to her mother.
- Contains
- A murder by poisoning; Sexual abuse of a teenager in foster care; A shooting; A suicide; Neglect, hunger and drug dependence
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want a mother-daughter book that heals anything; this one is about surviving a mother.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, Oprah pick, film
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The Lost Daughter
Strong match The mother’s sideLeda is forty-eight, divorced, a professor of English literature, and on holiday alone on the Ionian coast while her two grown daughters are with their father in Canada. On the beach she becomes fixated on a young Neapolitan mother, Nina, and her little girl, Elena. Then she does something small and inexplicable, and watching the family stirs up her memories of being a young mother herself, including the years she left her own daughters.
It is short, uncomfortable and very honest about the parts of motherhood people do not talk about: boredom, resentment, the wish to be a person again. Ferrante gives you no comfortable place to stand, and Leda never explains herself in a way that would let you off. Maggie Gyllenhaal adapted it as her first film in 2021, with Olivia Colman, and it earned three Oscar nominations. It is the best book here for a reader who is a mother and has felt something she has never said aloud.
- How it ends
- It ends with a phone call from her daughters and a last line readers still argue over.
- Contains
- A mother leaving her young children; A sudden act of violence near the end
- Skip if
- Skip it if you need to like the narrator; many readers do not, and the book does not ask you to.
Checked against: Wikipedia: Italian edition, translation, plot, film
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Tom Lake
Strong match The comfort readSpring 2020. The Nelsons’ three grown daughters, Emily, Maisie and Nell, have come home to the family cherry orchard in northern Michigan, and while they pick fruit they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, the famous actor she dated one summer long ago. So Lara tells it: a production of Our Town, a summer-stock theatre at Tom Lake, a young woman who might have been a star. The book moves between the orchard and that summer.
It is warm and gentle, and its subject is how much we never knew about our parents, and how carefully a mother edits the story of her own youth for her children. Kirkus gave it a starred review and it was a Reese’s Book Club pick; Meryl Streep reads the audiobook. If you want a book about mothers and adult daughters that is full of feeling and leaves you happier, this is the one. Its sadness is real but kept at the edges.
- How it ends
- It ends at the orchard, gently; nothing in it will wreck you.
- Contains
- A death, outside the main story; The pandemic as background
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want conflict; the daughters adore their mother, and the drama is all in the past.
Checked against: Kirkus Reviews (starred), NPR: Patchett on the novel
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Little Women
Looser match The kind classicMeg, Jo, Beth and Amy March grow up in genteel poverty in a New England town modelled on Concord, Massachusetts, while their father serves as a chaplain in the Union Army. Their mother, Marmee, keeps the household going. It was published in two volumes, in 1868 and 1869, and the second follows the sisters into adulthood, marriage and loss.
It is as much about sisters as about mothers, which is why it sits lower on this list, but Marmee’s quiet strength is at its heart. The scene readers remember is the one where Jo, ashamed of her temper, learns that her calm mother has the same temper and has only learned not to show it: “I am angry nearly every day of my life.” That is the book in miniature: a mother who is a person, not a saint. It is kind and timeless, with a strong moral streak.
- How it ends
- It ends with the family gathered, older and fewer, and still a family.
- Contains
- The death of a sister from illness
- Skip if
- Skip it if moral lessons put you off; the first volume has one in nearly every chapter.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, setting, plot
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Crying in H Mart
Looser match Non-fiction The true storyNot a novel: a memoir, included because it comes up in nearly every thread on this subject. Michelle Zauner, who records as Japanese Breakfast, is the daughter of a Korean mother and an American father. In the summer of 2014 her mother, Chongmi, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; she died that October. The book, which grew out of a 2018 New Yorker essay of the same name, is about that year, and about the Korean food that was the language the two of them shared.
It is the one book here for a reader who is grieving her own mother and wants something true rather than imagined. It is funny about a hard, demanding mother and very exact about illness and caregiving, and the cooking is how Zauner finds her way back. It spent more than a year on the New York Times nonfiction list. If you want more for grief, our list of fiction books about grief goes further.
- How it ends
- A memoir of a mother’s death; the grief is the whole story, and the food is how it ends.
- Contains
- Terminal cancer and chemotherapy described in detail; A mother’s death
- Skip if
- Skip it if your loss is very recent and you are not ready for a day-by-day account of a mother’s final illness.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, origin, bestseller run
Quick guide: which one first?
| If you want… | Start with |
|---|---|
| A classic | The Joy Luck Club or Little Women |
| A mother’s point of view | The Lost Daughter, or Tom Lake for a gentler one |
| Something short | My Name Is Lucy Barton |
| A difficult mother | White Oleander |
| A teenage daughter | Amy and Isabelle |
| Comfort | Tom Lake |
| A true story, and grief | Crying in H Mart (memoir) |
Shortest: My Name Is Lucy Barton (208 pp). Longest: White Oleander (446 pp).
Why we keep reading about mothers and daughters
A mother is often the first person who tells us who we are. These books help us see that story from the outside. Many readers say they finally understood their own mother, or forgave her, after reading a novel like these, and the reason is usually the thing the best of them share: at some point the mother gets to speak, and she turns out to have been a person the whole time, with a past her daughter never asked about. Tom Lake is built entirely on that discovery; The Joy Luck Club makes it sixteen times.
The question underneath all of them is what you would give up for the person you love most, and what you would give up to get away from her. If the side of that question that interests you is a parent searching for a child, our page of books about losing a child has the missing-child novels, with their limits stated. If it is the larger questions of a life and what it meant, try books like The Five People You Meet in Heaven.
Where this page’s facts come from
- Wikipedia: The Joy Luck Club (novel) — Structure, narrators, awards.
- Kirkus Reviews: Tom Lake — The daughters, the orchard, the summer at Tom Lake.
- Wikipedia: Crying in H Mart — Publication, the New Yorker essay, the illness timeline.
FAQ
What is the best novel about mothers and daughters?
Are there books about mothers and adult daughters?
Yes. Tom Lake (three grown daughters home on the family orchard), My Name Is Lucy Barton (a grown daughter in hospital and the mother she has not seen in years) and The Joy Luck Club (mothers and their grown, American-raised daughters) all focus on mothers and grown-up daughters. The Lost Daughter is about a mother whose daughters have grown up and left.
What is a good book about a mother searching for her daughter?
In The Joy Luck Club, Suyuan Woo spends the rest of her life trying to find the twin daughters she was forced to leave behind in wartime China, and the book’s frame is her American daughter finishing that search. For novels about a parent searching for a missing child, see our page of books about losing a child.
Are there books about difficult mother-daughter relationships?
Is Crying in H Mart a novel?
No. It is a memoir by Michelle Zauner about her Korean mother’s illness and death in 2014, and about food. It is on this list because readers ask for it alongside the novels.