The Best Books About Brothers
Fourteen books about brothers, from 1880 to 2015, novels and memoirs both. What they share is not family — brothers are a tighter bond than that, and a great deal more volatile. What they disagree about is what you owe him. Which one answers that best for you is below.
You cannot just lump brothers into the general category of family. The bond is tighter than that, and a hell of a lot more volatile. It is a competitive, quiet kind of love where loyalty and rivalry are completely tangled up. The books about brothers and brotherhood that stay with me are the ones that do not try to neatly name what happens between two boys sharing a roof. They look right at the raw part — the fact that we are profoundly shaped by a person who feels like our own parallel reflection.
Tell Me Who I Am
Alex Lewis, Marcus Lewis & Joanna Hodgkin · 2013A memoir by identical twin brothers about memory loss, devotion, and a truth withheld for more than twenty years.
At eighteen, Alex Lewis wakes from a coma after a motorcycle accident with no memory of his life. The one person he recognises is his twin brother Marcus, who sets about rebuilding a past for him — carefully, selectively, and with omissions that take more than twenty years to surface. Written with Joanna Hodgkin and adapted by Ed Perkins into a Netflix documentary in 2019.
What stays with me is what Marcus did and why. He built his brother a liveable past instead of a true one, which is an act of extraordinary love and an act of control at the same time, and the book refuses to choose between those readings. The documentary shows you their faces; the book gives you what each of them was thinking.
Which one to gift: The strongest pick if your brother rarely reads memoir — the pacing of a thriller, and all of it true.
Read my full reviewEast of Eden
John Steinbeck · 1952Two generations of Trask brothers, one favoured and one not, in Steinbeck's Cain-and-Abel novel.
Steinbeck follows two families across generations, but the same pattern keeps recurring: two brothers, one loved more, and the corrosion that produces. Charles and Adam Trask in the first half, Cal and Aron in the second. Steinbeck called it the book he had been practising for, and the Hebrew word timshel — “thou mayest” — is the argument the whole novel is built to make.
This is the one if you want the full weight of what brothers can do to each other. It accumulates slowly over hundreds of pages, and by the time the last confrontation arrives you have lived with these families long enough that it lands like something personal.
Which one to gift: Right for a brother who wants a serious classic he can sit with for weeks rather than finish in a weekend.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880Four brothers, a murdered father, and the question of who is actually responsible.
Dmitri the sensualist, Ivan the intellectual, Alyosha the believer — and Smerdyakov, the illegitimate half-brother raised in the house as a servant, who is the one that commits the murder. That fourth brother is the point. Dostoevsky uses the family to ask every question that mattered to him: about God, guilt, free will, and what we owe each other.
Most lists say three brothers. There are four, and the difference is the whole novel. Smerdyakov does what Ivan only argues for, which is Dostoevsky's real claim: an idea does not stay an idea when there is a brother in the house willing to carry it out.
Which one to gift: For the brother who already calls himself a serious reader — the one that earns real bragging rights once finished.
A River Runs Through It
Norman Maclean · 1976A novella about two Montana brothers, fly fishing, and a love that cannot save anybody.
Norman and Paul Maclean fish the Big Blackfoot River while the younger of them drinks and gambles his way toward an end the family can see coming and cannot stop. Maclean wrote it at seventy-three and it was the first work of fiction the University of Chicago Press ever published. The 1977 Pulitzer fiction jury recommended it; the board declined to award a fiction prize that year.
The most precise book here about the specific helplessness of loving a brother. Maclean never claims to have understood Paul, and that refusal is what makes it honest rather than sentimental. It is also under a hundred pages, which makes it the easiest way onto this list.
Which one to gift: The best short one. Give it to a brother who says he does not have time to read.
The Sisters Brothers
Patrick deWitt · 2011Two hired killers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, ride toward the California goldfields in 1851.
Eli and Charlie Sisters are brothers and contract killers, sent from Oregon City to find a man in California. Charlie is the one who likes the work; Eli, who narrates, is beginning to wonder what he is for. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2011 and won Canada's Governor General's Award, and it is much funnier than that pedigree suggests.
The comic register is doing serious work. Eli's voice — decent, literal-minded, permanently one step behind his brother — is the most exact portrait here of being the sibling who did not choose the family trade and cannot leave it either.
Which one to gift: The most enjoyable book on this list. A safe choice for a brother who is suspicious of literary fiction.
Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese · 2009Twin brothers born conjoined in Addis Ababa, separated at birth and divided again for life.
Marion and Shiva Stone are born to an Indian nun and a British surgeon in a mission hospital in Addis Ababa, joined at the head and separated at birth. They grow up inside medicine, and eventually inside a betrayal that splits them a second time. Verghese is a physician, and the book's authority about bodies is the reason its ending carries.
The most literal version of the idea running under this entire list: that a brother is a parallel version of you who took different decisions. Marion and Shiva begin as one body. Everything after that is an argument about how much of the other one you get to keep.
Which one to gift: For a brother who wants a long, absorbing novel with somewhere to go — the kind you finish on holiday.
The Lowland
Jhumpa Lahiri · 2013Two Calcutta brothers, fifteen months apart, divided first by politics and then by death.
Subhash and Udayan Mitra grow up inseparable in Calcutta. Udayan joins the Naxalite movement and is shot by police in the lowland behind their house; Subhash, by then in Rhode Island, comes home and marries his brother's pregnant widow. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and a National Book Award finalist in 2013.
Lahiri is writing about the brother who stays and the brother who leaves, and what the one who leaves owes afterwards. The book keeps refusing the consolation you expect it to offer. It is the quietest thing on this list and one of the hardest.
Which one to gift: Good for a brother who reads slowly and carefully, or who liked Interpreter of Maladies.
Lahiri on my short story listThe Fishermen
Chigozie Obioma · 2015Four Nigerian brothers, a madman's prophecy, and the speed at which a family comes apart.
In Akure, Nigeria, four brothers skip school to fish in a forbidden river. A local madman tells the eldest that he will be killed by one of his own brothers, and the prophecy does the rest. Obioma's debut was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015 and is narrated by the youngest of the four, looking back.
The best book here on how brothers police each other. The prophecy only works because the boys already believe in the hierarchy between them, and the novel is merciless about how fast love converts into suspicion once someone says the possibility out loud.
Which one to gift: For a brother who wants something contemporary, fast, and genuinely unlike anything he has read.
We the Animals
Justin Torres · 2011Three brothers in upstate New York, written in a first-person plural that eventually breaks.
Three brothers — Manny, Joel, and the unnamed youngest — grow up poor in upstate New York with a Puerto Rican father and a white mother. Torres writes most of the book as “we”, a single animal made of three boys, until the youngest starts becoming someone the other two cannot follow. Under 150 pages.
The formal choice is the whole book. That “we” is what brotherhood feels like from inside, and the moment it fractures into “I” is the most exact thing I have read about growing away from your own siblings.
Which one to gift: For a brother who reads poetry, or who claims he has no attention span for novels.
The Outsiders
S.E. Hinton · 1967Three orphaned brothers holding a household together, written by an author who was still a teenager.
Darry, Sodapop and Ponyboy Curtis have lost their parents and are keeping the family out of the care system by force of will, with Darry at twenty acting as a father to a brother he barely gets to be a brother to. Hinton began writing it at fifteen and it was published when she was eighteen. It is still one of the most widely read novels in American schools.
The gang gets the attention, but the real subject is the eldest brother who had to stop being a boy so the youngest could keep being one. Read as an adult it is a book about class and unpaid labour, not about greasers.
Which one to gift: The one to give a younger brother — and the one to reread if you are the eldest.
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner · 1929Three Compson brothers narrate the loss of the same sister, each in a different broken register.
Benjy, Quentin and Jason Compson each take a section of Faulkner's novel, and each tells a version of the family's decline organised around their sister Caddy. Benjy has no sense of time, Quentin is coming apart, Jason is pure grievance. The fourth section drops the brothers entirely and lets you see what actually happened.
The most demanding book on this list and the one that pays back most. Three brothers, one event, three incompatible accounts — Faulkner built the form so that you have to assemble the truth yourself, which is exactly what siblings do at every funeral.
Which one to gift: Only for a brother who wants a real challenge and will not hold it against you.
I Know This Much Is True
Wally Lamb · 1998One twin has paranoid schizophrenia; the other has spent forty years being his keeper.
Dominick Birdsey's identical twin Thomas cuts off his own hand in a public library, and Dominick is left to fight a state hospital system, his family history, and his own resentment. It runs to nine hundred pages, it was an Oprah's Book Club pick, and it is far more disciplined than either of those facts suggests.
The best book here on the exhaustion of being the well sibling. Lamb refuses to make Dominick admirable — his love and his rage are the same feeling — and that honesty is rare in fiction about mental illness.
Which one to gift: For a brother with a long flight or a long winter ahead of him.
Brothers and Keepers
John Edgar Wideman · 1984A novelist writes about the brother serving a life sentence, and about the distance between them.
John Edgar Wideman was a Rhodes Scholar and a professor; his younger brother Robby was convicted of felony murder and sentenced to life. The memoir is Wideman trying to write his brother's life without taking it over, and interrogating his own escape from Homewood in the same breath. The title comes straight out of Genesis.
The most self-implicating book on this list. Wideman keeps catching himself turning Robby into material, and he leaves the catching in. If you read one brother memoir that is not Tell Me Who I Am, make it this one.
Which one to gift: For a brother who reads non-fiction and does not want to be flattered.
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara · 2015Four friends in New York build a chosen brotherhood around one man's damage.
Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude meet at college and build their lives around each other over decades. There are no biological brothers in it. It is on this list because it is the most complete portrait in recent fiction of chosen brotherhood — of loving someone whose damage is larger than your love for him — and because that is what a lot of men have instead of siblings.
Willem staying with Jude is the clearest account I know of what it costs to be the one who does not leave. It is long, it is punishing, and it earns it. Read it if you can bear it.
Which one to gift: For a brother who has read every “best books” list and wants something that will genuinely wreck him.
Which book to give your brother
The mistake with a book as a gift is buying the one you loved rather than the one he will finish. Find him in the left column.
| If your brother… | Give him |
|---|---|
| He barely reads at all | Tell Me Who I Am |
| He says he has no time | A River Runs Through It |
| He is suspicious of literary fiction | The Sisters Brothers |
| He wants a proper classic | East of Eden |
| He already calls himself a serious reader | The Brothers Karamazov |
| He only reads non-fiction | Brothers and Keepers |
| He has a long flight ahead of him | I Know This Much Is True |
| He is your younger brother | The Outsiders |
| He wants to be genuinely wrecked | A Little Life |
Famous brothers in literature
The pairs and trios that everything else on this list is answering, in rough chronological order.
- Cain and Abel — Genesis 4, Hebrew Bible
- Jacob and Esau — Genesis 25–33, Hebrew Bible
- Claudius and King Hamlet — Hamlet, William Shakespeare, c. 1600
- Edmund and Edgar (half-brothers) — King Lear, William Shakespeare, c. 1605
- Dmitri, Ivan, Alyosha and Smerdyakov — The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880
- Quentin, Jason and Benjy Compson — The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner, 1929
- Biff and Happy Loman — Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller, 1949
- Charles and Adam Trask, then Cal and Aron — East of Eden, John Steinbeck, 1952
- Darry, Sodapop and Ponyboy Curtis — The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton, 1967
- Sonny, Fredo and Michael Corleone — The Godfather, Mario Puzo, 1969
- Karl and Jonatan Lionheart — The Brothers Lionheart, Astrid Lindgren, 1973
- Norman and Paul Maclean — A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean, 1976
- Eli and Charlie Sisters — The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt, 2011
Not brothers, but close
Two books about mixed sibling pairs. They are not brother books, and I have kept them out of the numbered list for that reason — but if the sibling structure is what interests you, they belong on your shelf.
The Liars' Club
Mary Karr · 1995A memoir of a chaotic Texas childhood, anchored by the imbalance between two sisters: the older one who knows more, the younger one who is protected from knowing. Karr writes about family without sentimentality and without cruelty, which is the hardest thing to do. Not a brothers book, but the best book here on carrying knowledge for a sibling.
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lionel Shriver · 2003Eva writes letters to her husband in the aftermath of a school shooting carried out by their son. Quietly, it is also about Kevin's younger sister Celia and what it means to grow up beside someone who is catastrophically different from you. The dark end of the sibling spectrum, where the bond is not protection but threat.
Frequently asked questions about books about brothers
What are the best books about brothers?
The books most consistently recommended about brothers are Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers and Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone. For non-fiction, the two standards are John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers and Tell Me Who I Am by the twin brothers Alex and Marcus Lewis.
What is the best book about brotherhood?
East of Eden makes the longest and most complete argument about what brothers cost each other, and it is the book most often named when people mean brotherhood rather than simply a story with brothers in it. If you want brotherhood without blood relatives, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life is the fullest portrait of chosen brotherhood in recent fiction.
What are the best novels about brothers, rather than memoirs?
East of Eden, The Brothers Karamazov, The Sound and the Fury, The Lowland, The Fishermen, The Sisters Brothers, Cutting for Stone and We the Animals are all novels built around brothers. Fiction can move inside more than one brother's mind at once, which is why so many of these books give each brother his own section or narrator.
What are the best memoirs about brothers?
Brothers and Keepers by John Edgar Wideman, about the brother he grew up with who received a life sentence, and Tell Me Who I Am by Alex and Marcus Lewis with Joanna Hodgkin, about identical twins and a withheld truth, are the two brother memoirs worth starting with. Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It is autobiographical fiction and sits between the two categories.
What book should I give my brother?
It depends on how he reads. For a brother who barely reads, Tell Me Who I Am has the pacing of a thriller and is true. For one who says he has no time, A River Runs Through It is under a hundred pages. For a brother who already reads seriously, The Brothers Karamazov earns real bragging rights, and A Little Life is the one that will genuinely wreck him.
Who are the most famous brothers in literature?
Cain and Abel in Genesis are the original pair and the template for most of what followed. The other names that recur are the Karamazov brothers in Dostoevsky, the Compson brothers in Faulkner, Cal and Aron Trask in Steinbeck, Biff and Happy Loman in Arthur Miller, the Curtis brothers in S.E. Hinton, and the Corleone brothers in Mario Puzo.
How many brothers are there in The Brothers Karamazov?
There are four. Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha are the legitimate sons of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, and Smerdyakov is his illegitimate son, raised in the household as a servant. Most summaries mention only three, which matters, because Smerdyakov is the brother who actually commits the murder the novel is built around.
Are there good books about twin brothers?
Yes. Tell Me Who I Am is a memoir by identical twins in which one loses his memory and the other decides what to tell him. Cutting for Stone follows twins born conjoined and separated at birth, and I Know This Much Is True is about an identical twin who becomes his schizophrenic brother's keeper. All three turn on the same question of how separate twins ever really become.
Are there books about two brothers specifically, rather than three or four?
A River Runs Through It, The Sisters Brothers, The Lowland and Brothers and Keepers are all built on a single pair. Two brothers give a book a cleaner shape: one who stays and one who goes, or one who is saved and one who is not, without a third sibling to absorb the pressure between them.
What is Tell Me Who I Am about?
Tell Me Who I Am is a memoir by twin brothers Alex and Marcus Lewis, written with Joanna Hodgkin and first published in 2013. At eighteen, Alex woke from a coma after a motorcycle accident with no memory of his past and recognised only his twin. Marcus spent years reconstructing Alex's life for him while deliberately omitting the truth about childhood abuse the brothers had survived, and the full truth surfaced more than twenty years later. It was adapted into a Netflix documentary in 2019, directed by Ed Perkins.
Is the Tell Me Who I Am book or the Netflix documentary better?
Start with the book. The 2019 documentary uses the visual presence of Alex and Marcus as they speak, which carries its own weight, but the 2013 book gives far more of what each brother was thinking rather than only what he says on camera. If the book moves you, the documentary adds texture rather than repeating it.
What should I read after Tell Me Who I Am?
Read Brothers and Keepers if you want to stay in non-fiction and in the same question of what one brother owes another. Read East of Eden if you want the fictional version of that moral problem at full scale, and I Know This Much Is True if the twin relationship is what held you.
Are there books about brothers and sisters rather than brothers?
Mary Karr's The Liars' Club and Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin are both about mixed sibling pairs and both appear further down this page. If the sibling structure matters more to you than which siblings they are, those two are the place to start.
“Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Genesis 4:9 — the question every book on this list is still trying to answer. If these interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author pages, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
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