If you liked
Books like The Bastard of Istanbul
Loved The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak? 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
Half of a Yellow Sun
The Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70 — one of the defining catastrophes of postcolonial Africa — is seen through four perspectives: an educated Nigerian couple, their houseboy and a British journalist. Adichie's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is about the specific collapse of a world that thought itself modern and secure.
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2
No Country for Old Men
A hunter finds a suitcase of drug money in the Texan desert and takes it, setting in motion a pursuit by the unstoppable killer Anton Chigurh. McCarthy's lean, violent novel is a meditation on fate, violence and the sense that the world has become too brutal for the old codes of honour to survive in.
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3
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Changez, a Pakistani man who built a successful career in New York but left after 9/11, tells his story to an American stranger in a Lahore café. Hamid's short, charged novel is both a thriller and an examination of what America asks of those who arrive hoping to belong — and what that demand costs.
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4
On Chesil Beach
On the night of their wedding in 1962, Florence and Edward — both in their early twenties, both carrying things they cannot say — find themselves unable to negotiate what both of them want. McEwan's novella is about the irreversible: the moment a life turns on a failure of communication, and the weight the past puts on those who have to live with it.
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5
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar is an overweight Dominican-American geek who wants to find love and write fantasy novels; his narrator Yunior tells the story of Oscar's doomed family across three generations and between the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, weaving together science fiction, Dominican history and the violence of the Trujillo dictatorship. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
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6
The Sea
Max Morden, a recently widowed art historian, returns to the Irish seaside resort where he spent a childhood summer — and where something happened to a family called the Graces that he has spent his adult life trying not to remember. Banville's Booker Prize-winning novel weaves between past and present in prose of exceptional, almost painful beauty.
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7
The Gathering
Veronica Hegarty assembles her family for the funeral of her brother Liam, who has drowned himself, and finds herself trying to reconstruct the truth of what happened to Liam in their grandmother's house when they were children. Enright's Booker Prize-winning novel is about family memory, silence, and the specifically Irish relationship to shame.
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8
The Lightning Thief
Twelve-year-old Percy Jackson discovers he is the son of a Greek god and finds himself at Camp Half-Blood, a summer camp for demigods. When Zeus's lightning bolt is stolen, Percy must retrieve it to prevent a war between the Olympians. Riordan's novel introduces one of the most popular series in contemporary YA and middle-grade fiction, reanimating Greek mythology for a new generation.
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9
Flights
A series of loosely connected narratives, fragments and reflections — some fiction, some essay, some travel writing — circling the themes of flight, the body, movement and what we leave behind. Tokarczuk's International Booker Prize and Nobel Prize-winning novel resists conventional form to create something that accumulates rather than argues.
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10
The Vegetarian
Yeong-hye, an ordinary Seoul housewife, stops eating meat after a violent dream — and her quiet refusal escalates into a total rejection of human violence that her family answers with force. Told in three sections by three different narrators, none of them Yeong-hye, Han Kang's International Booker Prize-winning novel is about the violence done to a woman who simply says no. Han won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.