If you liked
Books like Me Before You
Loved Me Before You by Jojo Moyes? 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
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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2
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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3
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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4
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Harold Fry, a retired man, sets out to post a letter to a dying old friend and decides instead to walk the 500 miles to visit her, convinced that his walking will keep her alive. Joyce's debut novel is about grief, guilt, the marriages we construct and the pilgrimages we take — alone — to find something we lost long before we started walking.
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5
The Testament of Mary
Mary, the mother of Jesus, is old and living in Ephesus, watched over by two men who are compiling her son's story. Her testimony is bitter, frightened and devastatingly human — the account of a mother who was there and who remembers it differently from the story that is being written. Tóibín's novella is one of the most formally bold works of contemporary literary fiction.
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6
Americanah
Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman, moves to the United States for university and spends fifteen years discovering what it means to be Black in America — a category she did not inhabit in Nigeria. Meanwhile Obinze, her first love, tries and fails to build a life in England and returns to Lagos. Adichie's richly observed novel is about race, class and the specific discovery of race-consciousness that comes from leaving home.
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7
Tenth of December
Ten stories in Saunders's distinctive voice — comic, tender, formally inventive, morally serious — about ordinary Americans in extraordinary situations: a man contemplating suicide, a test subject for experimental mood drugs, a child imagining a rescue fantasy. One of the most celebrated short story collections of recent decades.
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8
The Luminaries
In 1866, on the goldfields of New Zealand's West Coast, a young man stumbles into a meeting of twelve men who have gathered secretly to discuss four unsolved mysteries. Catton's Booker Prize-winning novel is structured around astrological charts and is one of the most formally elaborate works in contemporary fiction — a Victorian detective novel that turns its genre inside out.
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9
Life After Life
Ursula Todd is born in 1910 and dies — and is born again, and dies again — repeatedly, each life varying slightly from the last. Living through the same decades of the 20th century in different ways, she is moved closer and closer to a specific moment that might change everything. Atkinson's formally inventive novel asks what we would do if we could do it again.
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10
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.