If you liked
Books like Salvage the Bones
Loved Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward? 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
My Brilliant Friend
In 1950s Naples, two girls — Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo — form the friendship that will shape both their lives. Lila is brilliant and fierce and will not escape the neighbourhood; Elena, quieter and more pliant, will. The first of Ferrante's four Neapolitan novels is about female friendship, class, ambition and the specific violence of poverty in post-war Italy.
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2
The Song of Achilles
Patroclus, a young Greek prince, is exiled to the court of Peleus where he meets the brilliant, gold-haired Achilles. Their childhood friendship becomes love; their love leads to Troy. Miller's retelling of the Iliad through the eyes of Patroclus is one of the most beloved retellings of classical myth in recent years.
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3
The Sense of an Ending
Tony Webster remembers his school friendship with the brilliant Adrian Finn and the relationship they both had with a girl named Veronica — and discovers decades later that his memory of these events is dangerously self-serving. Barnes's Man Booker-winning novella is a study in the gap between how we remember our lives and what we actually did.
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4
Leaving the Atocha Station
Adam Gordon, an American poet on a fellowship in Madrid, navigates the cultural fallout from the 2004 train bombings while maintaining an elaborate performance of emotional depth he is not sure he possesses. Lerner's debut is one of the most precise accounts of artistic imposter syndrome and the specifically contemporary problem of being unsure whether your inner life is real.
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5
Me Before You
Louisa Clark, an awkward young woman in a small English town, takes a job as caregiver for Will Traynor, a former adventurer now paralysed following a road accident. Their relationship develops into love — but Will has already made a decision about his future that love cannot change. Moyes's novel raised passionate debates about disability, autonomy and what it means to support someone you love in a choice you find devastating.
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6
A Man Called Ove
Ove is a 59-year-old curmudgeon who has lived his whole life according to strict principles and following his wife's death sees no reason to continue living. He is repeatedly interrupted in his attempts at suicide by the new neighbours who have moved in next door. Backman's novel is a study in how connection persists even when a person has decided to reject it.
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7
The Story of a New Name
The second of the Neapolitan novels follows Elena and Lila into early adulthood — through Lila's catastrophic marriage, Elena's escape to university in Pisa, and the complicated attraction and rivalry that has always defined them. The novel expands the first book's world to encompass class, sex, politics and the specific violence of Naples in the 1960s.
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8
Room
Five-year-old Jack has spent his entire life in an eleven-foot-square room with his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier. His joyful, narrow perspective narrates their life in captivity and, eventually, their escape. Donoghue's Booker-shortlisted novel asks what it means to love someone completely within an impossible situation.
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9
Wonder
Auggie Pullman, a ten-year-old boy with a facial difference, attends mainstream school for the first time after years of home education. Told through multiple perspectives — Auggie's, his sister's, his friends' — the novel asks what it takes to see past appearance and what kindness actually requires of ordinary people. One of the most widely assigned middle school novels in America.
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10
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Music executive Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha are at the centre of a set of stories spanning decades and shifting perspectives, formal registers and even one chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation. Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks what time does to people, to music and to the stories we tell about both.