If you liked
Books like Jade Legacy
Loved Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee? 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
Beautiful World Where Are You
Alice, a novelist exhausted by fame, and Eileen, her childhood friend, correspond by email while navigating damaged relationships and questions about beauty, meaninglessness and what it means to care about art in a world heading toward catastrophe. Rooney's third novel is her most overtly intellectual — a correspondence novel asking what the novel is for.
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2
The Four Winds
Elsa Wolcott, a Texas Panhandle farmer's wife during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, must choose between staying on the land that is killing her and her family, or heading to California with the tide of migrants seeking a better life. Hannah's novel is both a love letter to The Grapes of Wrath and a portrait of women's wartime and Depression-era resilience.
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3
Malibu Rising
Four siblings — Nina, Jay, Hud and Kit Riva, children of a famous but absent surf musician — come together for the annual party at Nina's Malibu house in August 1983. As the night unfolds, Reid weaves back through the family's history to show how they got here. A novel about celebrity, abandonment and the summer a world ends.
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4
Small Things Like These
In the weeks before Christmas 1985, coal merchant Bill Furlong makes a delivery to the local convent in a small Irish town and discovers something that forces him to choose between his community's complicit silence and his own conscience. Keegan's miniature masterpiece about the Magdalene laundries is one of the shortest novels ever shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
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5
The Promise
Three generations of a white South African family gather for funerals across four decades — 1986, 1996, 2004 and 2018 — and a promise made by the dying matriarch to leave a small house to the family's Black servant, Salome, remains unfulfilled at each one. Galgut's Booker Prize-winning novel is a portrait of South Africa from apartheid to the present, told through a family's accumulating broken promises.
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6
The Netanyahus
In 1959-60, a historian at a small upstate New York college hosts a visiting lecturer named Benzion Netanyahu — whose family, including his teenage son Benjamin, descends on the campus in chaos. Cohen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a satirical campus novel that is also a meditation on Jewish American identity, Zionism and a strange footnote of real history.
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7
The Book of Form and Emptiness
After his father's death, thirteen-year-old Benny begins hearing voices from objects around him — and finds refuge in the public library, where a mysterious book seems to be narrating his own life. Ozeki's Women's Prize-winning novel is about grief, mental health, consumerism and the objects that accumulate around loss.
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8
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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9
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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10
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.