If you liked
Books like The Wasp Factory
Loved The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks? 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
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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2
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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3
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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4
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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5
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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6
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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7
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.
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8
The Color Purple
Celie writes letters to God and to her sister Nettie from the American South of the early 20th century, charting her journey from abuse and silence through love, friendship and creative voice to a hard-won selfhood. Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is one of the defining works of American feminist literature.
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9
The Women of Brewster Place
Seven Black women live in the dead-end street of Brewster Place — an alley walled off from the rest of the city — and each brings her own story of struggle, love and community. Naylor's debut won the American Book Award and explores the specific forms of resilience and pain in a Black urban community that the mainstream world has literally walled off.
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10
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.