If you liked
Books like The Secret History
Loved The Secret History by Donna Tartt? 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 English Patient
In a ruined Italian villa at the end of the Second World War, a Canadian nurse tends to a severely burned man — the English patient — whose identity remains mysterious. Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel interweaves four characters' stories and histories in a meditation on memory, identity, love and the violence of nations.
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2
Jesus' Son
A series of linked stories following an unnamed narrator through drugs, violence and accidental encounters in the American Midwest of the 1970s. Johnson's prose is hallucinatory and precise, shot through with dark comedy and unexpected grace — a study of addiction and its specific distortions of time, memory and moral awareness.
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3
Never Mind
Five-year-old Patrick Melrose spends a terrible day at his family's Provençal farmhouse while his brilliant, sadistic father, his numbed mother and their assorted guests inflict and absorb the particular cruelties of the English upper class. The first of the Patrick Melrose novels is the shortest and the most compressed — a day in childhood that contains everything.
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4
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.
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5
The Famished Road
Azaro is a spirit child — an abiku — who keeps choosing to remain in the world of the living rather than returning to the spirit world. His life in a Nigerian village is narrated in a torrent of vision, poverty, political upheaval and supernatural encounter. Okri's Booker Prize-winning novel is one of the great works of African magical realism.
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6
Trainspotting
A group of young heroin addicts in 1980s Edinburgh navigate addiction, friendship, violence and the occasional moment of transcendence. Told in Scottish vernacular dialect across multiple narrators, Trainspotting is both a formally radical novel and one of the most visceral portraits of the underclass since Zola.
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7
The Stone Diaries
Daisy Goodwill Flett narrates her own life — from birth in Manitoba in 1905 through to old age — in a biography that uses documents, letters, photographs and others' perspectives alongside Daisy's own unreliable account. Shields's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks what a woman's life looks like when she tries to see it clearly.
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8
The Shipping News
Quoyle, a failed journalist in upstate New York, takes his two daughters to the remote Newfoundland coast where his family originated after his wife's death. Working for the local newspaper covering the shipping news, he slowly assembles a life from its wreckage. Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about renewal in a harsh landscape and the community that makes it possible.
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9
The Things They Carried
A linked collection of stories about a fictional platoon of US soldiers during the Vietnam War — and about the narrator, also called Tim O'Brien, who mediates between the literal and the told story. O'Brien's most celebrated work asks what it means to tell true war stories and whether 'happening-truth' and 'story-truth' are ever the same thing.
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10
Possession
Two literary scholars — Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey — discover a cache of letters between two Victorian poets and gradually realise that the poets had a secret passionate affair. Byatt's novel interweaves the present-day scholarly detective story with poems, letters and fairy tales in the voices of the Victorian characters. Winner of the Booker Prize.