If you liked
Books like Love in the Time of Cholera
Loved Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? 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
White Noise
Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies at a small American college, lives with his family in a consumer-saturated suburban world — until an 'Airborne Toxic Event' forces an evacuation and makes death suddenly tangible. DeLillo's National Book Award-winning novel is one of the central texts of postmodern American fiction, satirising media, consumerism and the American terror of mortality.
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2
Perfume
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in 18th-century Paris without a body odour of his own, has the most extraordinary sense of smell in history. He devotes his life to creating the perfect perfume — through increasingly monstrous means. Süskind's philosophical thriller is a satire of genius, obsession and the aestheticisation of violence, set in a meticulously researched pre-revolutionary France.
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3
Annie John
Annie John grows up in Antigua through childhood and adolescence, her intense relationship with her mother slowly shifting from adoration to estrangement. Kincaid's autobiographical novel is about female independence, colonialism's effect on the self, and the specific loss of leaving the island that formed you.
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4
The Wasp Factory
Sixteen-year-old Frank Cauldhame lives with his secretive father on a small Scottish island, tending a private empire of totemic rituals including the Wasp Factory — a device for predicting the future through the deaths of wasps. Banks's debut novel keeps its secrets until a final revelation that reframes everything that has preceded it.
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5
Nights at the Circus
Sophie Fevvers, a trapeze artist who claims to have been hatched from an egg and to possess actual wings, captivates American journalist Jack Walser, who follows her from London to St Petersburg to Siberia trying to determine if she is genuine. Carter's carnivalesque novel is both a riotous adventure and a feminist meditation on spectacle, self-creation and what it means for a woman to own her own myth.
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6
The House on Mango Street
Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana girl, narrates her life in a Chicago barrio through a series of vignettes — lyrical, spare and exact — about her neighbourhood, her family and her growing awareness of what she will need to do to escape while also honouring where she came from. One of the most widely assigned texts in American schools for its exploration of identity, belonging and aspiration.
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7
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
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8
Waterland
Tom Crick, a history teacher who is about to lose his job, tells his class the story of the Fens — the flat, watery landscape of East Anglia — and of the events of his own past that have shaped him. Swift's formally inventive novel interweaves personal history with natural history, asking what history is and whether it teaches anything.
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9
The New York Trilogy
Three connected detective novels — City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room — in which the conventions of detective fiction are systematically dismantled: detectives lose their identities, the cases dissolve, the distinctions between investigator and subject collapse. Auster's debut fiction is a postmodern meditation on identity, language and the impossibility of knowing anything with certainty.
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10
The House of the Spirits
Four generations of the Trueba family in an unnamed Latin American country — from the clairvoyant Clara to her granddaughter Alba, who survives the military coup — are traced through love, violence, magic and political catastrophe. Allende's debut draws on García Márquez's magical realism while making it entirely her own, and is one of the foundational texts of Latin American feminist fiction.