If you liked
Books like Atonement
Loved Atonement by Ian McEwan? 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 Corrections
The three grown children of Alfred and Enid Lambert return home for a final Christmas as Alfred's Parkinson's progresses and Enid refuses to accept what is happening to her marriage and family. Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel moves between the Lambert children's separate American lives and their parents' Midwestern home in a portrait of family, decline and the late-20th-century United States.
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2
American Gods
Shadow Moon, recently released from prison, takes a job with the mysterious Mr Wednesday and finds himself at the centre of a war between the old gods brought to America by immigrants — Anansi, Odin, Anansi, Czernobog — and the new gods of media, technology and globalisation. Gaiman's novel is a myth of America as a land that forgets its gods.
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3
The Shadow of the Wind
In post-Civil War Barcelona, a boy named Daniel is taken by his father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where he chooses a novel by Julian Carax — and begins to discover that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of Carax's work. Zafon's novel is a love letter to books, to Barcelona and to the Gothic tradition.
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4
Austerlitz
Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, begins to recover the buried memory of his own identity — he was brought to England as a child on the Kindertransport and never knew his origins. Sebald's narrator encounters him across forty years of chance meetings. The novel weaves together architecture, memory and the slow emergence of a traumatic history in prose saturated with photographs.
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5
Bel Canto
When terrorists seize a South American vice-president's mansion during a soprano's recital, they take dozens of hostages — and the weeks of captivity that follow become a strange, suspended world in which music, love and an unlikely community develop in the middle of a political crisis. Patchett's PEN/Faulkner winner is about beauty, connection and the life that forms in confinement.
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6
Everything Is Illuminated
Jonathan, a young American, travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, accompanied by an exuberant Ukrainian guide and his grandfather. Intercut with a reimagining of the history of the shtetl Trachimbrod, Foer's debut is formally playful, emotionally devastating and one of the defining American novels about the Holocaust's long reach.
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7
Moth Smoke
Daru Shezad, a former banker in 1990s Lahore, loses his job, becomes addicted to heroin, falls in love with his best friend's wife and descends into a spiral of crime and self-destruction. Hamid's debut is a stylish, fractured narrative set against the backdrop of Pakistan's nuclear tests and the society of privilege and exclusion they exposed.
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8
Fingersmith
Sue Trinder, a London pickpocket, is hired to play a lady's maid to an heiress named Maud Lilly, assisting a conman who plans to steal her inheritance. The plot turns on itself twice in ways that completely reframe everything that came before. Waters's Victorian thriller is also a novel about female desire and the institutions that punish it.
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9
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
In 1930s New York, Josef Kavalier — a Czech Jewish refugee with an escape artist's training — and his cousin Sammy Clay create a superhero comic called The Escapist. Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about escape in every sense: from Prague, from poverty, from the closet, from death, and finally from the stories we tell about ourselves.
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10
The Amber Spyglass
The final volume of His Dark Materials brings Lyra and Will to the land of the dead while their parents and allies fight to determine the fate of consciousness itself. Pullman completes his rewriting of Paradise Lost, making Lyra's choice — and its cost — the theological and emotional climax of the trilogy. Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year.