If you liked
Books like Bridget Jones Diary
Loved Bridget Jones Diary by Helen Fielding? 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
Alias Grace
In 1843, Grace Marks — a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant servant — was convicted of the murder of her employer and his housekeeper in Upper Canada. A young psychiatrist, assigned to assess her, tries to reconstruct what actually happened. Atwood's novel examines how stories about women — their bodies, their madness, their guilt — are constructed and what they conceal.
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2
The God of Small Things
Twins, forbidden love and a single terrible day in Kerala; lush, fractured and unforgettable.
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3
American Pastoral
The Swede — Newark's golden boy, a successful glove manufacturer — watches his perfect American life shatter when his daughter becomes a political bomber. Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel uses one man's ruination to examine the violence at the heart of the American Dream and the 1960s generation that detonated it.
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4
High Fidelity
Rob Fleming, owner of a failing London record shop, is left by his girlfriend and spends the novel revisiting his five greatest romantic failures, making lists and wondering what is wrong with him. Hornby's comedy of male arrested development was one of the novels that helped define the 1990s confessional male voice.
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5
Enduring Love
Joe Rose and his partner Clarissa are enjoying a picnic when they witness a hot air balloon accident. In the aftermath, Joe is targeted by another witness — Jed Parry — who becomes obsessively convinced they share a bond. McEwan's novel pits scientific rationalism against faith, reason against obsession, and asks what happens when no one believes you about a real threat.
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6
Brokeback Mountain
Two young Wyoming ranch hands — Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist — herd sheep one summer on Brokeback Mountain and begin a sexual and emotional relationship that neither can acknowledge or abandon, meeting intermittently across two decades in a world that gives them no space for what they are to each other. Proulx's short story is one of the most celebrated pieces of American fiction of the late 20th century.
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7
The Subtle Knife
The second volume of His Dark Materials introduces Will Parry, a boy from our world, and the Subtle Knife — a blade that can cut between worlds. Will and Lyra meet in the city of Cittàgazze and begin to understand the full scale of what they are caught in. Pullman develops the trilogy's theological argument and its critique of authoritarian certainty.
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8
The Reader
Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg in postwar Germany has an affair with Hanna Schmitz, a tram conductor twenty years his senior, who asks him to read aloud to her. Years later he discovers her in a war crimes trial, and realises what the reading meant and what she was hiding. Schlink's novella is one of the most read and most debated books about German guilt, literacy and the generation born after the Holocaust.
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9
Blindness
A sudden epidemic of blindness strikes an unnamed city, and the infected are quarantined in an abandoned mental asylum where social order rapidly collapses. Saramago's novel follows one woman — the only person who can see — through the catastrophe. It is both a philosophical fable about what civilisation actually requires and a viscerally disturbing account of what people do when structure disappears.
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10
My Name Is Red
In 16th-century Istanbul, an illustrator is murdered — and the miniaturists in the Sultan's atelier must discover which of their number committed the crime while navigating the debate between Eastern and Western styles of representation. Pamuk's Booker International-shortlisted novel is both a detective story and a meditation on artistic identity, tradition and the politics of seeing. He won the Nobel Prize in 2006.