If you liked
Books like The Boy Lost in the Maze
Loved The Boy Lost in the Maze by Joseph Coelho? 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
Lessons in Chemistry
In 1960s California, Elizabeth Zott — a chemist who is not taken seriously in her field — becomes the unlikely host of a daytime cooking show, where she treats cooking as chemistry and accidentally inspires a generation of women to think differently about their intelligence and their lives. A witty, determined novel about how women change the world from the room they're allowed to occupy.
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2
Demon Copperhead
Damon Fields — nicknamed Demon Copperhead for his copper hair and his will — grows up in rural Appalachian Virginia in the opioid epidemic, ageing out of foster care into addiction, loss and an attempt to survive a world that has been systematically stripped of its economic future. Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning retelling of David Copperfield is the most urgent American novel about the opioid crisis.
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3
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Sam and Sadie meet as children in hospital, reunite as adults and spend thirty years making video games together — through creative intensity, falling out, reconciliation and loss. Zevin's novel is about creative partnership, what art requires of those who make it, and the games people play with each other over the course of a life.
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4
The Marriage Portrait
Lucrezia de' Medici, married at fifteen to Alfonso II of Ferrara, becomes convinced that her husband is planning to kill her. O'Farrell's novel is based on the real woman who may have been the subject of Browning's 'My Last Duchess', and asks what it meant to be a young woman of extraordinary ability given in marriage to a powerful man who required her compliance.
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5
Trust
Four separate texts — a novel, a memoir, a manuscript and a diary — together tell the story of a 1920s New York financier and his wife, each contradicting or qualifying the others. Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks who controls the narrative of a life — and what is erased in the process.
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6
Young Mungo
Mungo Hamilton, a sensitive sixteen-year-old in 1990s Glasgow, is in love with James, a Catholic boy from across the sectarian divide. His mother, dealing with addiction, sends him away on a fishing trip with two strangers whose presence becomes increasingly threatening. Stuart's second novel returns to the world of Shuggie Bain — Glasgow poverty, damaged masculinity — while extending his emotional range.
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7
Babel
Robin Swift, taken from Canton to Oxford to study at the Royal Institute of Translation — Babel — discovers that the British Empire's power runs on magical silver activated by translation, and that his education is inseparable from the empire's exploitation of the languages and people it has colonised. Kuang's novel is a dark academia fantasy that is also a sustained argument about language, colonialism and the violence embedded in empire.
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8
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Maali Almeida — a war photographer, gambler and closeted gay man — wakes up dead in a celestial visa office in 1990 Colombo, with seven moons to discover who killed him and to retrieve photographs that could end Sri Lanka's civil war. Karunatilaka's Booker Prize-winning novel uses ghosts, bureaucratic afterlife and dark comedy to confront the atrocities of Sri Lanka's conflict.
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9
The Rabbit Hutch
In a crumbling apartment complex in a Rust Belt city, a group of residents — including eighteen-year-old Blandine, fresh out of the foster care system and obsessed with medieval mystics — converge toward a single shocking night. Gunty's National Book Award-winning debut is a portrait of American decline rendered with formal inventiveness and unexpected tenderness.
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10
The Book of Goose
Two girls in postwar rural France collaborate on a book of brutal, brilliant stories that becomes a literary sensation — credited to only one of them. Decades later, the other reflects on what their friendship and their fraud cost each of them. Li's PEN/Faulkner-shortlisted novel is about authorship, female friendship and the specific violence of being used by someone you love.