Themes
Books About Identity
Novels that ask who we are — and who we are allowed to be.
20 books · ranked
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1
Good Girl, Bad Girl
Forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven is asked to assess Evie Cormac, a teenage girl found hiding in a house with a murdered man years earlier, whose true identity has never been established — while investigating the murder of a teenage figure skater. Robotham's CWA Gold Dagger-winning novel launched a series built around Cyrus and Evie's relationship and the mystery of who Evie really is.
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2
The Last Cuentista
Petra Peña, one of the children chosen to journey to a new world after Earth's destruction, wakes from cryosleep to find her memories have been erased by the ship's new ruling order — except for the stories her grandmother told her, which become the only thing she has left of where she came from. Higuera's Newbery Medal-winning novel uses science fiction to explore cultural erasure, memory and the power of storytelling to preserve identity.
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3
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
The respectable Dr Henry Jekyll creates a potion that releases his darker nature as the violent Mr Hyde — smaller, freed from conscience, and capable of acts Jekyll himself cannot commit. As Hyde's crimes grow worse, Jekyll loses control of the transformation. Stevenson's Gothic novella is a founding text of the double-identity story and a study of Victorian repression and the darkness it conceals beneath respectability.
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4
Women in Love
Two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, form intense relationships with Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich respectively in a Midlands mining community. Lawrence's most ambitious and controversial novel probes the nature of love, power and modern alienation — and asks whether genuine human connection is possible in an industrialised, dying world.
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5
The English Patient
In a ruined Italian villa at the end of the Second World War, a Canadian nurse tends to a severely burned man — the English patient — whose identity remains mysterious. Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel interweaves four characters' stories and histories in a meditation on memory, identity, love and the violence of nations.
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6
A Doll's House
Nora Helmer has secretly borrowed money to save her husband's life and has been repaying it for years without his knowledge. When the truth threatens to emerge, the marriage — and Nora's entire constructed identity — begins to crack. Ibsen's play is one of the founding texts of modern drama and a landmark of feminist literature.
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7
Passing
Two light-skinned Black women meet by chance in Chicago in the 1920s: Irene is secure in her Black identity, while Clare is 'passing' as white in a marriage to a man who doesn't know. Larsen's compressed, devastating novella explores race, class, desire and the specific psychological violence of a world that forces people to choose.
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8
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Two minor characters from Hamlet — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — find themselves caught in events they don't understand and cannot control, waiting for the summons that will seal their fate. Stoppard's play is both a comic meditation on identity and free will and a theatrical examination of what it means to be a supporting character in someone else's drama.
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9
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
In 1972, workers digging a water main in Pottstown, Pennsylvania uncover a skeleton that unravels the hidden history of a neighbourhood shared by Black and Jewish communities in the 1930s. McBride's warm, morally complex novel is about the unlikely alliances between the marginalised and what a community of outcasts can offer each other.
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10
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Ageing Hollywood legend Evelyn Hugo grants her only interview to an unknown journalist — and spends it telling the real story of her life, her seven marriages and the love she kept hidden for fifty years. Reid's novel is about celebrity, the performance of identity, female friendship, bisexuality and the price of keeping secrets in a world that would have destroyed you for the truth.
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11
Exit West
Saeed and Nadia fall in love in an unnamed city under threat of civil war. They escape through magical doors that appear across the world, leading to refugee camps in Greece, a mansion in London, a hillside in California. Hamid's formally elegant novel abstracts the refugee crisis to its essential emotional reality — what migration does to love, identity and where you call home.
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12
The Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. His family's response — practical, embarrassed, increasingly resentful — is the subject of Kafka's most celebrated novella, a parable of alienation, family obligation and the irreversibility of certain transformations.
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13
Transit
The second Outline novel follows the narrator Faye through a home renovation, a literary festival and a series of conversations that continue to define her through absence. More overtly connected to a recognisable London life than Outline, Transit extends the trilogy's investigation of identity, change and the stories other people tell us about ourselves.
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14
In the Distance
A young Swedish boy travels from his homeland to the American West but ends up in California instead of New York, and spends decades moving east through the frontier, searching for his brother. Diaz's debut is a spare, elegant deconstruction of the Western, told by a giant of a man who is always the outsider everywhere he goes.
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15
My Name Is Red
In 16th-century Istanbul, an illustrator is murdered — and the miniaturists in the Sultan's atelier must discover which of their number committed the crime while navigating the debate between Eastern and Western styles of representation. Pamuk's Booker International-shortlisted novel is both a detective story and a meditation on artistic identity, tradition and the politics of seeing. He won the Nobel Prize in 2006.
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16
The Vanishing Half
Twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes run away from their small Southern Black community at sixteen — and their lives split: one returns home with her dark-skinned daughter, the other passes as white in a life her family knows nothing about. Bennett's novel spans generations to ask what race is, what it costs to perform an identity, and what is owed to the people you leave behind.
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17
The House on Mango Street
Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana girl, narrates her life in a Chicago barrio through a series of vignettes — lyrical, spare and exact — about her neighbourhood, her family and her growing awareness of what she will need to do to escape while also honouring where she came from. One of the most widely assigned texts in American schools for its exploration of identity, belonging and aspiration.
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18
Austerlitz
Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, begins to recover the buried memory of his own identity — he was brought to England as a child on the Kindertransport and never knew his origins. Sebald's narrator encounters him across forty years of chance meetings. The novel weaves together architecture, memory and the slow emergence of a traumatic history in prose saturated with photographs.
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19
The Human Stain
Coleman Silk, a classics professor, is forced to resign after a remark interpreted as racist — a remark that conceals a secret about his own identity he has kept for fifty years. The third of Roth's American Trilogy, it is set in the summer of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and asks what America does with its private truths.
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20
Portnoy's Complaint
Alexander Portnoy delivers a monologue to his psychoanalyst about his Jewish Newark childhood, his overbearing mother, his obsessive sexuality and his inability to reconcile his desires with his identity. Roth's breakthrough novel is both a comedy of Jewish American identity and one of the most formally uninhibited novels ever published — and one of the most controversial on its appearance.