The New Year

by Steven Gdula

Like Buck, Grissom explores what happens when someone from outside a family structure enters and disrupts the carefully maintained order—here, an indentured servant girl becomes the emotional center of a plantation household. Both novels examine how love and obligation can coexist uncomfortably, and how families are built through circumstance rather than blood alone.

by Gallix/François

Ishiguro does what Buck does so well—he lets you gradually understand what his protagonist has sacrificed and denied himself, revealing the emotional cost of duty and propriety through careful restraint. Both novels hinge on a central act of acceptance that changes everything, told by narrators who struggle to articulate what they actually feel.

by Michael D. Burke

This is your surprise pick—it's a gothic horror novel, but what makes it work is its emotional core about a mother protecting her child and the secrets families keep across generations. Davidson writes with the same attention to the interior lives of women that Buck does, but sets it in a world of Southern Gothic atmosphere and genuine strangeness.

by Min Jin Lee

Lee traces four generations of a Korean family across decades and continents, capturing the exact tension Buck explores—how people navigate between cultures, how shame and survival shape choices, and how love persists despite impossible circumstances. The scope is larger, but the intimate emotional truth is the same.

by Diane Setterfield

Setterfield constructs a mystery about what a mother owes her children and what children owe their mothers, unraveling it through nested stories the way Buck peels back layers of obligation and love. Both authors understand that family bonds are often forged through deception and acceptance rather than honesty, and both write with genuine tenderness about that paradox.