If you liked
Books like Less
Loved Less by Andrew Sean Greer? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from literary fiction, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
Pachinko
Beginning in early 20th-century Korea, Pachinko follows four generations of a Korean family through their migration to Japan and the systematic discrimination they face as zainichi Koreans — banned from most professions, denied citizenship in the only country their children have ever known. Lee's saga of survival, sacrifice and the pachinko parlours that became one of the few open routes to prosperity was a National Book Award finalist.
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2
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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3
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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4
Her Body and Other Parties
Eight stories at the intersection of horror, fantasy and the everyday lives of women — including an extended riff on Law & Order: SVU and a novella about a green ribbon. Machado's debut collection is formally inventive and politically sharp, using genre conventions to illuminate what the female body endures and what it desires.
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5
Sing Unburied Sing
Thirteen-year-old Jojo, his toddler sister and their mother Leonie make a journey across Mississippi to collect Leonie's partner from prison, accompanied by the ghost of a boy who died in Parchman Farm decades earlier. Ward's National Book Award-winning novel weaves together the living and the dead in a meditation on race, grief and the specific inheritance of the American South.
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6
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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7
Lincoln in the Bardo
Abraham Lincoln visits the Washington cemetery where his son Willie has just been buried, and the novel unfolds through the voices of the ghosts inhabiting the bardo — the intermediate state between death and whatever comes next — as they witness Lincoln's grief and try to help Willie move on. Saunders's Man Booker-winning debut novel is formally unlike anything else.
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8
Home Fire
Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz Pasha are the British children of a jihadist father; when Parvaiz is recruited to ISIS, his sister Aneeka's relationship with the son of the Home Secretary becomes a test of loyalty, love and the limits of the state. Shamsie's Women's Prize-winning novel is a contemporary retelling of Sophocles' Antigone, asking what a sister owes a brother the state has declared an enemy.
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9
The Underground Railroad
A reimagining of the escape from slavery as a literal railway; inventive, brutal and morally clear.
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10
The Overstory
Nine Americans whose lives are changed by trees — a chestnut tree photographed for generations, a couple bonded by a sentinel banyan, a scientist who discovers trees communicate — are drawn together in a defence of old-growth forests. Powers's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel makes trees the protagonist of American history and asks whether human consciousness will arrive before or after the damage is done.