If you liked
Books like Girl, Woman, Other
Loved Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo? 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
-
1
The Nickel Boys
At the Nickel Academy, a Florida reform school in the 1960s, two Black teenagers — the idealistic Elwood and the pragmatic Turner — face systematic abuse and find different ways to survive. Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a devastating account of institutional racism and the long shadow that violence casts over an entire life.
-
2
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
A young Vietnamese-American man writes a letter to his illiterate mother — about the grandfather he never knew, the grandmother who survived the Vietnam War, his own adolescence in Hartford Connecticut, and a first love that ended in opioid overdose. Vuong's debut novel is prose as concentrated as poetry, a meditation on language, inheritance and what immigrants pass down without knowing it.
-
3
Daisy Jones and The Six
Told entirely through oral history — interviews with the band members, roadies and record executives — the story of Daisy Jones and The Six reconstructs the rise and sudden implosion of one of the greatest rock bands of the 1970s. Reid's novel is about creative partnership, addiction, ambition and who gets to own a shared story.
-
4
The Family Upstairs
Libby Jones inherits a London house she's never seen from parents she never knew, and begins to unravel the story of what happened there in 1994. Jewell's psychological thriller alternates between Libby's present-day investigation and a chilling account of a commune that took over the house thirty years earlier. A novel about charismatic control, family damage and the long reach of an enclosed world.
-
5
In the Dream House
Machado recounts her abusive relationship with a girlfriend through a series of fragmented chapters, each named after a different narrative genre — romance, horror, fable. The memoir invents a form for the queer abusive relationship while also asking why such stories have been so hard to tell and so little believed.
-
6
Trust Exercise
Students at a competitive performing arts high school in the 1980s fall in love, betray each other and are shaped by a charismatic drama teacher — and then the novel restarts, reframing everything from a different perspective, and again. Choi's National Book Award-winning novel is a formally audacious examination of memory, narrative authority and who gets to tell the story of what happened.
-
7
New Kid
Jordan Banks, a Black seventh-grader who would rather draw cartoons than attend a prestigious mostly-white private school, navigates the daily friction of being one of the few kids of colour in his class. Craft's graphic novel won the Newbery Medal — the first graphic novel to do so — for its honest, funny depiction of code-switching and microaggressions.
-
8
Look Both Ways
Ten interconnected stories follow different groups of kids walking home from the same middle school on the same afternoon — each story a small world of its own, each connected to the others by the walk itself. Reynolds's Carnegie Medal-winning collection captures the texture of childhood and adolescence with warmth, humour and unexpected depth.
-
9
Lark
Brothers Nicky and Kenny set out for a walk on the moors above their Yorkshire town — Kenny, who has Down syndrome, in his element among the wildlife he loves — when a sudden fog and a dog's escape turn an ordinary afternoon into a fight for survival. McGowan's Carnegie Medal-winning novella is the final book in the Truth of Things quartet, a devastatingly tender portrait of brotherly love and working-class life in northern England.
-
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.