Books like The Lincoln Highway

William Kent Krueger's novel follows four children who escape a brutal Native American boarding school in Minnesota and travel down the river on a stolen canoe, encountering danger and kindness in equal measure. Like The Lincoln Highway, This Tender Land is set in Depression-era America and uses a physical journey to test its young protagonists against a country that is both beautiful and cruel.

Both novels share a Huckleberry Finn DNA: kids on the move, improvising their way through adult situations, bonding across difference. Krueger writes with a warmth and narrative drive that matches Towles's own generous storytelling style, and both books believe in the fundamental goodness of their young characters even when the world does not cooperate.

The 1930s setting gives This Tender Land a different economic texture than The Lincoln Highway's 1950s, but both novels use their periods to ask the same question: what does America owe its most vulnerable children? This is the closest match in tone and spirit on this list.

Maggie Shipstead's novel alternates between two women: Marian Graves, a fictional aviator in the early twentieth century who attempts to circumnavigate the globe via the poles, and Hadley Baxter, a twenty-first-century actress cast to play Marian in a biopic. Like The Lincoln Highway, Great Circle is a big American novel about the pull of freedom and the cost of ambition, and both books use multiple timelines to build a story that feels larger than any single character.

Shipstead writes with a sweep that matches Towles's, covering decades of American history through specific, vividly rendered lives. Both novels are invested in the mythology of the American adventure, whether that adventure takes place on a highway or in a cockpit.

Great Circle is longer and more structurally complex than The Lincoln Highway, with its dual-timeline architecture requiring more patience from readers. But the payoff is similar: a sense that individual lives can contain the ambitions and contradictions of an entire country.

Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows two young men in wartime New York: Josef Kavalier, a Jewish refugee from Prague, and Sammy Clay, his Brooklyn-born cousin, who together create a hit comic book superhero. Like The Lincoln Highway, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a midcentury American story about young people reinventing themselves through talent, friendship, and sheer nerve.

Both novels are built on the belief that big, plot-driven storytelling can coexist with literary ambition, and both use their period settings not as backdrop but as active participants in the story. Chabon writes about the comic book industry the way Towles writes about cross-country travel: as a vehicle for exploring what America promises and what it actually delivers.

The novel is longer and more densely layered than The Lincoln Highway, with more characters and a wider historical canvas. But readers who love Towles's combination of warmth, wit, and narrative propulsion will find the same qualities amplified here.

Jesmyn Ward's National Book Award-winning novel follows Jojo, a thirteen-year-old Black boy in rural Mississippi, on a car trip with his mother to pick up his white father from prison. The drive becomes a reckoning with family history, racial violence, and ghosts both literal and figurative. Like The Lincoln Highway, Sing, Unburied, Sing uses a physical journey to push its characters through emotional transformations they would not have undergone at home.

Both novels feature multiple narrators whose perspectives complicate and enrich each other. Ward writes in a lush, rhythmic style that contrasts with Towles's more urbane prose, and her Mississippi is a rougher, more dangerous landscape than Towles's heartland. But both authors share a conviction that the American road reveals something about the people who travel it.

This is the pick for readers who want The Lincoln Highway's narrative energy channeled through a darker, more lyrical, and more racially specific American story.

Towles's earlier novel follows Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel in 1922, where he spends the next three decades building a rich life within the confines of a single building. Like The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow is built on the premise that constraints breed invention, and both books feature protagonists who make the best of circumstances they did not choose.

Towles's signature style is fully formed in both novels: literate, warm, digressive in the best sense, and deeply committed to the pleasures of good company and good conversation. Where The Lincoln Highway sends its characters racing across the country, A Gentleman in Moscow keeps its protagonist in one place and lets the world come to him.

That structural inversion makes the two books fascinating companions. Readers who loved The Lincoln Highway and have not yet read Towles's first novel should start here immediately.

Madeline Miller's novel retells the story of Circe, the witch from the Odyssey, giving her a full inner life and a story that spans centuries. Like The Lincoln Highway, Circe is a book that takes enormous pleasure in storytelling itself, building a narrative that moves at its own pace and trusts the reader to follow. Both novels feature protagonists who are underestimated by the people around them and who must learn to assert their own agency through intelligence rather than force.

Miller writes with a classical clarity that matches Towles's own precise, unhurried style. The connection between the two books runs through their shared belief that old stories can feel new when told from the right angle. Circe is not set in America or in the twentieth century, but its narrative temperament is close to Towles's: generous, witty, and committed to the idea that a well-told story is its own justification.

This is the pick for readers who want the same storytelling pleasure in a completely different setting.

Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old boy who survives a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, in the aftermath, steals a small Dutch painting that becomes the anchor of his tumultuous life. Like The Lincoln Highway, The Goldfinch follows a young protagonist across American geography, from New York to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, as he tries to find his footing in a world that keeps shifting beneath him.

Both novels are long, plot-heavy, and unapologetically invested in the power of narrative to carry a reader through hundreds of pages. Tartt writes in a more Dickensian mode than Towles, packing her novel with colorful secondary characters and improbable plot twists that somehow cohere.

The two books share a conviction that fiction can be both literary and entertaining, and both use art and culture as touchstones for their characters' inner lives. This works for readers who want The Lincoln Highway's sweep and forward motion in an even bigger, more densely populated novel.