If you liked
Books like November 9
Loved November 9 by Colleen Hoover? 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 Nightingale
Two sisters in German-occupied France take different paths through the war: Vianne shelters Jewish children in her home while her husband is a prisoner of war; Isabelle joins the Resistance and guides downed Allied airmen over the Pyrenees. Hannah's novel about women's wartime experience became one of the most-read historical novels of the decade.
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2
The Buried Giant
In post-Arthurian Britain, an elderly couple undertake a journey through a land where memory has been mysteriously erased. Ishiguro's most fable-like novel asks whether a love built on forgotten pain can survive the return of what was buried — and whether communities can coexist peacefully if they remember the atrocities they committed against each other.
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3
The Sympathizer
A communist spy serves as a captain in the South Vietnamese army and escapes to America after the fall of Saigon, all while writing a confession to an unnamed commandant. Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut is a dazzling, angry novel about colonialism, complicity and the double consciousness of the man who belongs to every side and none.
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4
A Court of Thorns and Roses
When huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a beast claims her life as forfeit and drags her to the faerie lands of Prythian — where her captor Tamlin is more than he appears and an ancient blight threatens both worlds. Maas's Beauty and the Beast retelling launched the bestselling romantasy series of its era.
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5
The Sellout
A young Black farmer in a fictional suburb of Los Angeles is taken to the Supreme Court for reinstating slavery and segregation in his town — and somehow his actions have made his community happier. Beatty's Booker Prize-winning novel is a savage, absurdist satire of race in America that doesn't spare anyone: not the oppressors, not the activists, not the Supreme Court, not the narrator himself.
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6
Fates and Furies
The story of a marriage told twice: first through the husband Lotto's romantic, heroic account of his life as a playwright; then through his wife Mathilde's radically different account of the same events — the version she never shared, full of the things he chose not to see. Groff's novel was Barack Obama's favourite book of 2015 and a National Book Award finalist.
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7
The Goldfinch
When a bomb destroys the museum where he is visiting, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives but his mother does not. In the chaos, he takes a small Dutch painting — The Goldfinch — which will haunt his life for the next decade and a half, through foster care, antiques, addiction and a criminal underworld. Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on art, loss and the things we carry.
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8
The Underground Railroad
A reimagining of the escape from slavery as a literal railway; inventive, brutal and morally clear.
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9
How to Be Both
Two stories are bound together in a single novel: a grieving English teenager in the present and a 15th-century Italian fresco painter in the past. Smith's Booker Prize-winning novel exists in two editions with the stories in different orders — asking what changes about the meaning of a life story depending on where you begin.
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10
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans survives as a prisoner of war building the Burma Death Railway, haunted by a love affair that began just before his capture. Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel is a meditation on love, memory, survival and the particular moral difficulty of having lived through something that others did not.