If you liked
Books like The Power and the Glory
Loved The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene? 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 Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
In a small Georgia mill town, a deaf-mute named John Singer becomes the unlikely confessor to a series of lonely people — a teenage girl, a Black doctor, an itinerant communist, a drunken café owner. McCullers's debut, written when she was twenty-two, is a meditation on isolation, the impossibility of communication and the American South on the eve of WWII.
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2
The Stranger
A man feels nothing at his mother's funeral and drifts toward catastrophe; the cornerstone of existential fiction.
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3
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Francie Nolan grows up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 20th century — in a family defined by a charming, alcoholic father and a relentlessly practical mother, by poverty and by an extraordinary hunger for books and beauty. Smith's novel is one of the great American coming-of-age stories and a portrait of immigrant aspiration that never sentimentalises the struggle.
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4
The Plague
A bubonic plague descends on the Algerian port city of Oran, and the citizens find themselves quarantined in an absurd situation of suffering, solidarity and moral reckoning. Camus's most widely read novel is both a realistic chronicle of epidemic and an allegory of occupied France — and of any human community confronting an indifferent catastrophe that demands a collective response.
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5
Invisible Man
An unnamed Black narrator, living underground in a basement lit by stolen electricity, recounts his journey through Southern education, the Communist Party and the depths of Harlem, always unseen by a society that refuses to acknowledge his full humanity. Ellison's sole novel is one of the great works of American literature.
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6
Wise Blood
Hazel Motes returns from the war to Tennessee determined to found the Church Without Christ — a religion without need of redemption. O'Connor's first novel is grotesque, violent and relentlessly theological: a black comedy about someone who resists grace so hard that grace comes for him in the most brutal possible way.
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7
East of Eden
Two families — the Trasks and the Hamiltons — play out variations of the Cain and Abel story across generations in the Salinas Valley of California. Steinbeck's most ambitious novel is his explicit attempt to write the great American novel, weaving biblical myth, family saga and the philosophy of timshel — the Hebrew word that became his central argument about human freedom and choice.
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8
Giovanni's Room
An American man in Paris, engaged to a woman, falls in love with an Italian bartender named Giovanni and cannot bring himself to acknowledge what this means. Baldwin's second novel is set almost entirely among white Europeans and is one of the earliest and most searching explorations of gay love and self-deception in American fiction.
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9
On the Road
Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty make a series of cross-country journeys through postwar America, seeking experience, jazz and a freedom that keeps receding over the horizon. Kerouac's autobiographical novel defined the Beat Generation and became the template for the American road narrative.
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10
The Tin Drum
Oskar Matzerath, born in Danzig in 1924, decides at age three never to grow up and beats his tin drum obsessively, watching the rise of Nazism from below adult eye level. Grass's Booker Prize-winning novel is one of the 20th century's great satirical novels — grotesque, comic and devastating — told from the unreliable perspective of a wilfully stunted narrator.