Caroline's Daughters

by Anne Tyler

Tyler shares Adams's gift for capturing the peculiar distance between parents and adult children—here, an aging mother reflects on three grown children who've scattered into lives she doesn't quite recognize. Like Caroline's Daughters, the novel moves between perspectives to show how the same family can be experienced as completely different worlds depending on who's remembering it.

by Gallix/François

A departure from Adams's contemporary setting, but Ishiguro does something similar with the unreliable narrator who's spent decades maintaining a careful distance from her own life. The way Stevens gradually reveals what he's actually lost mirrors how Adams's characters discover the gaps between who they thought they'd become and who they actually are.

by Jennifer J. Baker

This is a contemporary take on the fragmented family portrait—told in crystalline fragments rather than traditional chapters, it captures the disorientation of motherhood and marriage with the same wry, unsentimental eye Adams brings to Caroline's experience. Offill's narrator is simultaneously hyperaware and strangely absent from her own life, much like Caroline watching her daughters live.

by Yonatan Netanyahu

A surprise recommendation, but Cohen's novel shares Adams's interest in how families become strangers to each other—here, a Jewish family's arrival at a Midwestern college in the 1950s creates a comedy of misunderstanding and cultural displacement. It has Adams's observational humor about the gap between how people see themselves and how others perceive them, but filtered through a more experimental, playful narrative voice.

by Tove Jansson

Published in 1972, this offers a different era's perspective on female relationships across generations—a grandmother and granddaughter on a Finnish island, each living according to completely different values. Janson captures the same quiet acceptance Adams does: that the people we love most may never truly understand us, and that's not necessarily a tragedy.