If you liked
Books like Human Acts
Loved Human Acts by Han Kang? 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 Goldfinch
When a bomb destroys the museum where he is visiting, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives but his mother does not. In the chaos, he takes a small Dutch painting — The Goldfinch — which will haunt his life for the next decade and a half, through foster care, antiques, addiction and a criminal underworld. Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on art, loss and the things we carry.
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2
How to Be Both
Two stories are bound together in a single novel: a grieving English teenager in the present and a 15th-century Italian fresco painter in the past. Smith's Booker Prize-winning novel exists in two editions with the stories in different orders — asking what changes about the meaning of a life story depending on where you begin.
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3
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans survives as a prisoner of war building the Burma Death Railway, haunted by a love affair that began just before his capture. Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel is a meditation on love, memory, survival and the particular moral difficulty of having lived through something that others did not.
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4
Everything I Never Told You
When sixteen-year-old Lydia Lee is found drowned in a lake in Ohio, the family that had built its hopes around her must confront the secrets they kept from each other and from her. Ng's debut novel is a precise study of the pressures families place on their most gifted members — and of what happens when the weight becomes too much.
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5
Outline
A novelist travels to Athens to teach a writing course and has a series of conversations — on the plane, on a boat, at dinner, in workshops — which slowly reveal the outline of her own character through what others choose to tell her. Cusk's novel invented a form: a narrator defined entirely by absence, and by the stories of others that pour into that absence.
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6
Big Little Lies
Three women in a wealthy Sydney suburb are connected by a school-gate friendship and a secret that culminates in a death at a trivia night. Moriarty's novel investigates domestic violence concealed by privilege, the performance of perfect motherhood and the surprising loyalties of female friendship. The mystery structure is the delivery mechanism for the real subject.
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7
Dept of Speculation
A marriage under strain is told in fragments — aphorisms, observations, diary entries — by a woman who refers to herself in the third person as 'the wife.' Offill's novel is formally radical and emotionally precise: a portrait of a relationship, a creative crisis and the ordinary catastrophe of trying to live alongside another person.
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8
The Lost Child
The fourth and final Neapolitan novel follows Elena and Lila through the 1970s, 80s and 90s — careers, marriages, children and political upheaval — to a devastating ending that reframes the whole series. Ferrante's conclusion asks whether any escape from Naples was ever truly made, and what the brilliant friendship cost both women.
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9
A Brief History of Seven Killings
The attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 Jamaica radiates outward through decades and continents, told through more than seventy voices — gang members, CIA operatives, journalists, ghosts. James's Booker Prize-winning novel is enormous in ambition and in length, capturing the chaos and violence of a specific political moment through an extraordinary polyphony.
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10
Redeployment
Fourteen stories about American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan — some combat veterans, some rear-echelon, some still in country. Klay's National Book Award-winning debut collection is one of the most clear-eyed accounts of what the Iraq War did to the people who fought it and to the civilians who didn't.