Historical Fiction

East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck's ambitious generational saga follows two families in California's Salinas Valley, reimagining the biblical story of Cain and Abel across decades of American history. Part autobiography and part moral allegory, it wrestles with inherited sin, the burden of choice, and what it means to forge identity against the weight of the past. A sprawling meditation on good, evil, and the possibility of redemption.

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