If you liked
Books like Commonwealth
Loved Commonwealth by Ann Patchett? 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
The Underground Railroad
A reimagining of the escape from slavery as a literal railway; inventive, brutal and morally clear.
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2
Autumn
Elisabeth Demand visits her elderly friend Daniel Gluck in a care home as he drifts in and out of sleep and consciousness. Interwoven with their relationship across decades is a fragmented portrait of Britain in the weeks after the 2016 Brexit vote. The first of Smith's Seasonal Quartet and one of the first literary novels to respond directly to Brexit.
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3
Swing Time
Two mixed-race girls grow up in north-west London dreaming of dance — one talented, one not. Their friendship is the heart of the novel, which follows them into adulthood, across countries and into very different lives. Smith's fifth novel is her most ambitious structurally, moving through time and place to examine art, ambition, friendship and the ways race and class shape what's available to us.
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4
My Name Is Lucy Barton
Lucy Barton lies in a New York hospital recovering from a procedure that has unexpectedly gone wrong. Her estranged mother comes to sit with her and they talk — about people from home, about almost nothing — for five days. Strout's novel about memory, poverty, shame and the impossibility of escaping where you came from is compressed to something very like perfection.
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5
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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6
Days Without End
Thomas McNulty, an Irish immigrant in 1850s America, enlists with the US Army and serves through the Indian Wars and the Civil War — surviving through his love for his fellow soldier John Cole. Barry's National Book Award winner is a novel of extraordinary beauty about violence, tenderness and the survival of love in inhospitable places.
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7
Homegoing
Beginning in 18th-century Ghana with two half-sisters — one who marries a British coloniser and one who is sold into slavery — the novel follows each family's lineage for seven generations, to the present day. Gyasi's debut traces slavery's long reach across history and two continents in a formally ambitious generational saga.
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8
Convenience Store Woman
Keiko Furukura has worked in the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years — and she is happy, having found in the store's routines and scripts a way of performing humanity that society otherwise denies her. Murata's short novel is a deadpan, unsettling comedy about conformity, the pressure to marry and reproduce, and what counts as a normal life.
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9
Kim Jiyoung Born 1982
Kim Jiyoung is a 33-year-old South Korean woman who has quit her job to raise her daughter. Her psychiatrist's clinical account of her life, told in the third person, is a systemic record of everything Korean society required of a woman from birth — the sexism at school, at work, in marriage, from strangers. Published in Korea in 2016, it became a global feminist phenomenon.
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10
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.