If you liked
Books like The Remains of the Day
Loved The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro? 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 Joy Luck Club
Four Chinese women who emigrated to America after World War II and their American-born daughters explore their relationships through sixteen interconnected stories — told alternately from each generation's perspective. Tan's debut novel is about the gap between cultures and between generations, and the weight of the stories mothers and daughters cannot tell each other.
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2
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Owen Meany, a small boy with an unnaturally high voice who believes he is God's instrument, kills his best friend John's mother with a foul ball — and then reveals he has seen a vision of how and when he will die. Irving's most celebrated novel interweaves the Vietnam era, New Hampshire prep school life and a meditation on faith as something you are forced into, not chosen.
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3
Matilda
Matilda Wormwood is a precocious five-year-old with parents who ignore her brilliance. She teaches herself to read, devours the local library, and eventually discovers she has telekinetic powers — which she uses to bring justice to her terrifying headmistress Miss Trunchbull. Dahl's most beloved novel for children is about the power of intelligence, reading and kindness in a world that prefers children to be seen and not heard.
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4
The Alchemist
An Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago travels from Spain to Egypt following a dream of treasure, guided by the concept of a Personal Legend — the path one is meant to take. Coelho's spiritual parable has sold over 150 million copies and is one of the most-read books in history, presenting a philosophy of destiny, signs and the courage to follow one's heart.
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5
Breathing Lessons
Maggie and Ira Moran drive to a friend's funeral and back across a single day, the journey surfacing forty years of marriage, compromise and what each has given up and kept. Tyler's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on the ordinary marriage as the site of everything — love, resentment, disappointment and the kind of durable intimacy that asks no great questions.
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6
The Satanic Verses
Two Indian actors survive a plane explosion over the English Channel by falling — and land transformed: one into a figure of divine radiance, one into something diabolical. Rushdie's novel is a meditation on identity, migration, good and evil, and the nature of revelation — and it became the most politically explosive novel of the 20th century.
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7
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
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8
The New York Trilogy
Three connected detective novels — City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room — in which the conventions of detective fiction are systematically dismantled: detectives lose their identities, the cases dissolve, the distinctions between investigator and subject collapse. Auster's debut fiction is a postmodern meditation on identity, language and the impossibility of knowing anything with certainty.
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9
White Noise
Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies at a small American college, lives with his family in a consumer-saturated suburban world — until an 'Airborne Toxic Event' forces an evacuation and makes death suddenly tangible. DeLillo's National Book Award-winning novel is one of the central texts of postmodern American fiction, satirising media, consumerism and the American terror of mortality.
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10
Perfume
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in 18th-century Paris without a body odour of his own, has the most extraordinary sense of smell in history. He devotes his life to creating the perfect perfume — through increasingly monstrous means. Süskind's philosophical thriller is a satire of genius, obsession and the aestheticisation of violence, set in a meticulously researched pre-revolutionary France.