If you liked
Books like Middlesex
Loved Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides? 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
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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2
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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3
Atonement
A child's misunderstanding wrecks two lives; a novel about guilt, storytelling and the limits of saying sorry.
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4
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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5
The Kite Runner
Friendship, betrayal and the long road to redemption against the backdrop of Afghanistan's upheavals.
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6
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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7
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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8
Purple Hibiscus
Fifteen-year-old Kambili's father Eugene Achike is publicly revered in Nigeria for his democratic values and privately tyrannical at home — enforcing religious fundamentalism through violence. Adichie's debut novel is about the specific damage of sacred hypocrisy, the silence it imposes on those who love the perpetrator, and what it takes for a young woman to find her voice.
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9
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her estranged husband Franklin in the aftermath of their son Kevin's school massacre. Told entirely from Eva's perspective — and therefore unreliable in the most interesting ways — Shriver's novel asks whether some people are born evil, whether Eva failed Kevin, or whether she is simply unable to love him because she always knew what he was.
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10
Brick Lane
Nazneen arrives in London from Bangladesh at eighteen for an arranged marriage, spending years in a Tower Hamlets flat while her husband Chanu plans a return to Bangladesh that never comes. Through her relationship with a younger man and the political upheavals around her, Nazneen slowly discovers what she actually wants. Ali's debut was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.