Themes
Books About Obsession
Characters consumed by an idea, a person or a purpose — to the exclusion of everything else.
20 books · ranked
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1
Rebecca
A new bride is haunted by her husband's glamorous dead wife in a brooding country house; gothic suspense at its finest.
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2
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
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3
Wuthering Heights
A storm of obsession and revenge on the Yorkshire moors; for readers who want their love stories dark and uncompromising.
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4
The Silent Patient
Alicia Berenson, a famous painter, shoots her husband five times and never speaks another word. Theo Faber, a psychotherapist, becomes obsessed with treating her and uncovering why. Michaelides's debut psychological thriller — with one of the most discussed twists in recent crime fiction — became one of the bestselling thrillers of its decade.
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5
Network Effect
Murderbot — the anxious, TV-obsessed security AI who would rather be left alone — returns in the first full-length Murderbot novel, drawn into a crisis involving a kidnapped friend, a hijacked ship and a conspiracy that forces Murderbot to confront its feelings about the humans it protects. Wells's Hugo and Nebula-winning novel combines thriller pacing with one of science fiction's most beloved unconventional narrators.
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6
Romeo and Juliet
Two young people from feuding families fall instantly in love and secretly marry, only to be destroyed by the conflict they cannot escape. Shakespeare's tragedy of speed and fate asks what separates love from obsession and whether the world ever had room for what Romeo and Juliet were.
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7
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans survives as a prisoner of war building the Burma Death Railway, haunted by a love affair that began just before his capture. Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel is a meditation on love, memory, survival and the particular moral difficulty of having lived through something that others did not.
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8
Bleak House
The case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce — a Chancery lawsuit that has consumed generations and may never be resolved — provides the frame for one of Dickens's richest novels, weaving together characters from every level of Victorian society. Bleak House uses a double narrative (third person and first person by the heroine Esther Summerson) and the mystery of Esther's parentage to create the closest thing to the great Victorian novel.
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9
Chess Story
On a transatlantic liner, a mysterious passenger defeats the world chess champion by playing himself in his head — the result of months of solitary confinement by the Gestapo, during which a single book of chess games became his entire mental world. Zweig's final novella, completed days before his death, is about genius, obsession and the particular tortures of the mind turned against itself.
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10
Wise Blood
Hazel Motes returns from the war to Tennessee determined to found the Church Without Christ — a religion without need of redemption. O'Connor's first novel is grotesque, violent and relentlessly theological: a black comedy about someone who resists grace so hard that grace comes for him in the most brutal possible way.
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11
Enduring Love
Joe Rose and his partner Clarissa are enjoying a picnic when they witness a hot air balloon accident. In the aftermath, Joe is targeted by another witness — Jed Parry — who becomes obsessively convinced they share a bond. McEwan's novel pits scientific rationalism against faith, reason against obsession, and asks what happens when no one believes you about a real threat.
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12
The End of the Affair
Maurice Bendrix, a novelist, has an intense affair with the wife of a civil servant that ends mysteriously — without explanation — in wartime London. Years later, obsession and jealousy drive him to discover why. Greene's most personal novel is about love, hate and the possibility of religious faith arriving through the most unexpected door.
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13
The Sea the Sea
Charles Arrowby, a famous theatre director, retires to a remote cottage by the sea to write his memoirs — and encounters his first love, whom he still believes is imprisoned by a bad marriage. Murdoch's Booker Prize-winning novel is about obsession, self-deception and the stories we tell about our own past.
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14
Perfume
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in 18th-century Paris without a body odour of his own, has the most extraordinary sense of smell in history. He devotes his life to creating the perfect perfume — through increasingly monstrous means. Süskind's philosophical thriller is a satire of genius, obsession and the aestheticisation of violence, set in a meticulously researched pre-revolutionary France.
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15
The Poisonwood Bible
Nathan Price, a Baptist minister consumed by guilt and religious fervour, moves his wife and four daughters from Georgia to the Belgian Congo in 1959 — and brings his certainties into a world that will destroy them. Told through the voices of the four daughters and their mother, Kingsolver's novel is about colonialism, religion and what it costs those who are forced to follow someone else's mission.
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16
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Francie Nolan grows up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 20th century — in a family defined by a charming, alcoholic father and a relentlessly practical mother, by poverty and by an extraordinary hunger for books and beauty. Smith's novel is one of the great American coming-of-age stories and a portrait of immigrant aspiration that never sentimentalises the struggle.
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17
The Rabbit Hutch
In a crumbling apartment complex in a Rust Belt city, a group of residents — including eighteen-year-old Blandine, fresh out of the foster care system and obsessed with medieval mystics — converge toward a single shocking night. Gunty's National Book Award-winning debut is a portrait of American decline rendered with formal inventiveness and unexpected tenderness.
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18
The Long Take
Walker, a D-Day veteran from Nova Scotia, drifts through Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York in the years after the Second World War, unable to return home, haunted by what he saw and did in Normandy. Robertson's Walter Scott Prize-winning work — part novel, part book-length poem — captures postwar American cities being demolished for freeways while a generation of traumatised veterans disappear into them.
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19
The First State of Being
In the summer of 1999, twelve-year-old Michael, anxious about Y2K and obsessed with survival preparation, encounters a boy who has time-travelled from the future — and the encounter changes how Michael understands time, fear and what actually matters. Kelly's Newbery Medal-winning novel is about anxiety, friendship and the strange comfort of knowing the future doesn't end the way you fear.
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20
The Reformatory
In 1950s Florida, twelve-year-old Robert is sent to a brutal reform school for boys after a single act of defiance — and discovers the school is haunted by the ghosts of boys who died there, killed by the staff and buried in unmarked graves. Due's Bram Stoker Award-winning novel is based on the real history of the Dozier School for Boys, using horror to confront a genuinely buried atrocity in American history.