If you liked
Books like Purple Hibiscus
Loved Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? 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 Kite Runner
Friendship, betrayal and the long road to redemption against the backdrop of Afghanistan's upheavals.
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2
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her estranged husband Franklin in the aftermath of their son Kevin's school massacre. Told entirely from Eva's perspective — and therefore unreliable in the most interesting ways — Shriver's novel asks whether some people are born evil, whether Eva failed Kevin, or whether she is simply unable to love him because she always knew what he was.
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3
Brick Lane
Nazneen arrives in London from Bangladesh at eighteen for an arranged marriage, spending years in a Tower Hamlets flat while her husband Chanu plans a return to Bangladesh that never comes. Through her relationship with a younger man and the political upheavals around her, Nazneen slowly discovers what she actually wants. Ali's debut was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
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4
Everything Is Illuminated
Jonathan, a young American, travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, accompanied by an exuberant Ukrainian guide and his grandfather. Intercut with a reimagining of the history of the shtetl Trachimbrod, Foer's debut is formally playful, emotionally devastating and one of the defining American novels about the Holocaust's long reach.
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5
Cloud Atlas
Six narratives nested inside each other like Russian dolls — spanning 1850 to a post-apocalyptic future — tell connected stories of exploitation, resistance and survival. Mitchell's formally ambitious novel is both a meditation on time, history and human cruelty, and a demonstration of what the novel can structurally achieve.
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6
The Line of Beauty
Nick Guest, a young gay man from a modest background, moves into the Notting Hill home of his Oxford friend Toby Fedden, whose father is a Tory MP. The novel follows Nick across three pivotal years in 1980s Thatcher Britain — through parties, affairs, AIDS and the inevitable end of his borrowed life. Winner of the Booker Prize.
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7
Fingersmith
Sue Trinder, a London pickpocket, is hired to play a lady's maid to an heiress named Maud Lilly, assisting a conman who plans to steal her inheritance. The plot turns on itself twice in ways that completely reframe everything that came before. Waters's Victorian thriller is also a novel about female desire and the institutions that punish it.
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8
Small Island
Two couples — the Jamaican migrants Gilbert and Hortense, newly arrived in London in 1948, and the English couple Queenie and Bernard — share a house in the years after the Second World War. Levy's Orange Prize-winning novel asks what Britain promised the Windrush generation and what it actually gave them, exploring the gap between the coloniser's idea of England and its daily reality.
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9
Suite Francaise
Written between 1940 and 1942 while Némirovsky was in hiding from the Nazis — she died in Auschwitz in 1942 — Suite Française consists of two novellas about the fall of France: one following Parisians fleeing the German advance, one set in a village under occupation. Published sixty years after her death from a manuscript her daughter carried across Europe without reading.
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10
Atonement
A child's misunderstanding wrecks two lives; a novel about guilt, storytelling and the limits of saying sorry.