If you liked
Books like Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line
Loved Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara? 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
Hamnet
In 1580s Stratford-upon-Avon, Agnes — wife of a young Latin tutor who will become William Shakespeare — struggles to save their son Hamnet from an illness moving through the household. O'Farrell's novel imagines the loss of a child that may have given rise to the greatest play ever written, exploring grief, love and the way a mother's devotion can outlast death. Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020.
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2
Shuggie Bain
In 1980s Glasgow, Shuggie Bain worships his beautiful, deeply troubled mother Agnes — an alcoholic in a community where alcoholism is everywhere and escape almost impossible. Stuart's Booker Prize-winning debut is an unsparing portrait of poverty, addiction, love and the specific cruelty of a society that offers no way out.
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3
The Mirror & the Light
The final volume of Mantel's Cromwell trilogy follows Thomas Cromwell through the executions, marriages and political manoeuvres of the final years before his own fall. Mantel writes with the same extraordinary inhabited immediacy as Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, completing one of the greatest historical novel sequences in English. Winner of the Walter Scott Prize 2021.
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4
The Midnight Library
Nora Seed, at the worst moment of her life, finds herself in a library between life and death where every book is a different version of the life she could have lived. Each time she opens a book she lives that life and discovers what she gave up — and what she gained — in the one she chose. A novel about regret, possibility and the life you have.
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5
The Vanishing Half
Twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes run away from their small Southern Black community at sixteen — and their lives split: one returns home with her dark-skinned daughter, the other passes as white in a life her family knows nothing about. Bennett's novel spans generations to ask what race is, what it costs to perform an identity, and what is owed to the people you leave behind.
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6
The Ministry for the Future
In the near future, a new UN body — the Ministry for the Future — attempts to address the climate crisis through financial engineering, geoengineering, political pressure and occasional violence. Robinson's novel is structured as a series of chapters in radically different forms — news reports, speeches, interior monologues — making the case that the systems causing climate change can only be dismantled by the same forces that built them.
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7
The Night Watchman
Thomas Wazhashk, a night watchman on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in 1953, leads the fight against a congressional bill designed to terminate the tribe's legal status. Erdrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is based on her own grandfather's resistance to termination and is one of the defining works of Native American literature.
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8
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Nine stories about Black women and the Black church — their desires, their hypocrisies, their grace, their hidden lives. Philyaw's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning debut is a formally accomplished, deeply felt collection about what the church gives Black women and what it withholds from them.
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9
The Only Good Indians
Ten years after four young Blackfeet men do something they shouldn't have during an elk hunt, something is coming for them — and for the families and communities around them. Jones's Bram Stoker Award-winning novel is a horror story rooted in Indigenous experience, generational trauma and the specific landscape of the Blackfeet reservation.
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10
Interior Chinatown
Willis Wu, an actor perpetually cast as 'Generic Asian Man' in a police procedural filmed in his own neighbourhood, lives his life as if it were a screenplay — formatted as a script, complete with stage directions. Yu's National Book Award-winning novel is a satire of Hollywood's treatment of Asian Americans that becomes something much stranger and sadder as it develops.