If you liked
Books like The Reader
Loved The Reader by Bernhard Schlink? 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
High Fidelity
Rob Fleming, owner of a failing London record shop, is left by his girlfriend and spends the novel revisiting his five greatest romantic failures, making lists and wondering what is wrong with him. Hornby's comedy of male arrested development was one of the novels that helped define the 1990s confessional male voice.
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2
Blindness
A sudden epidemic of blindness strikes an unnamed city, and the infected are quarantined in an abandoned mental asylum where social order rapidly collapses. Saramago's novel follows one woman — the only person who can see — through the catastrophe. It is both a philosophical fable about what civilisation actually requires and a viscerally disturbing account of what people do when structure disappears.
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3
Alias Grace
In 1843, Grace Marks — a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant servant — was convicted of the murder of her employer and his housekeeper in Upper Canada. A young psychiatrist, assigned to assess her, tries to reconstruct what actually happened. Atwood's novel examines how stories about women — their bodies, their madness, their guilt — are constructed and what they conceal.
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4
Paradise
Yusuf is taken by his merchant father as payment of a debt to the wealthy trader Uncle Aziz, and travels with him through East Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. Gurnah's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel draws on the Quranic story of the Garden of Eden and Joseph and his brothers, examining colonialism, slavery and the African world the European encounter destroyed.
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5
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Toru Okada, a Tokyo man between jobs, searches for his missing cat — and finds himself drawn into increasingly strange events involving a dry well, the Manchurian campaigns of WWII, and his wife's disappearance. Murakami's most ambitious novel moves between domestic suburban Japan and wartime history in a meditation on violence, passivity and the hidden life of things.
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6
Bridget Jones Diary
Bridget Jones, a thirty-something London singleton, keeps a diary of her calories, cigarettes, alcohol units and disastrous romantic encounters, including her boss Daniel Cleaver and the aloof Mark Darcy. Fielding's novel — a deliberate Austen retelling set in 1990s London — defined a new comedy of manners and spawned a cultural phenomenon that changed how women's commercial fiction was published and discussed.
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7
In the Time of the Butterflies
The Mirabal sisters — Patria, Dedé, Minerva and María Teresa — are heroines of the Dominican resistance to the Trujillo dictatorship. Three were murdered on Trujillo's orders in 1960; Dedé survived to remember them. Alvarez's novel imagines their inner lives from childhood through to the assassination, telling the story of how ordinary women become revolutionaries.
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8
Breath Eyes Memory
Sophie Caco grows up with her aunt in Haiti before being sent to New York to join the mother she barely knows — a woman whose trauma is transmitted to her daughter in ways Sophie spends the novel trying to understand and survive. Danticat's debut is about the specific legacy of sexual violence, the bond between mothers and daughters, and what it means to carry your country in your body.
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9
The God of Small Things
Twins, forbidden love and a single terrible day in Kerala; lush, fractured and unforgettable.
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10
Birdsong
In 1910, Stephen Wraysford falls in love with the wife of his host in Amiens; six years later he is in the trenches of the Somme, and the tunnellers who dig beneath the battlefield carry a barely suppressed world of feeling. Faulks's novel interweaves the love story of 1910 with the war of 1914-18 and a 1978 frame narrative, creating one of the most beloved British war novels.