If you liked
Books like The Kite Runner
Loved The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini? 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
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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2
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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3
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.
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4
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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5
Cloud Atlas
Six narratives nested inside each other like Russian dolls — spanning 1850 to a post-apocalyptic future — tell connected stories of exploitation, resistance and survival. Mitchell's formally ambitious novel is both a meditation on time, history and human cruelty, and a demonstration of what the novel can structurally achieve.
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6
The Line of Beauty
Nick Guest, a young gay man from a modest background, moves into the Notting Hill home of his Oxford friend Toby Fedden, whose father is a Tory MP. The novel follows Nick across three pivotal years in 1980s Thatcher Britain — through parties, affairs, AIDS and the inevitable end of his borrowed life. Winner of the Booker Prize.
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7
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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8
Small Island
Two couples — the Jamaican migrants Gilbert and Hortense, newly arrived in London in 1948, and the English couple Queenie and Bernard — share a house in the years after the Second World War. Levy's Orange Prize-winning novel asks what Britain promised the Windrush generation and what it actually gave them, exploring the gap between the coloniser's idea of England and its daily reality.
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9
Suite Francaise
Written between 1940 and 1942 while Némirovsky was in hiding from the Nazis — she died in Auschwitz in 1942 — Suite Française consists of two novellas about the fall of France: one following Parisians fleeing the German advance, one set in a village under occupation. Published sixty years after her death from a manuscript her daughter carried across Europe without reading.
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10
Atonement
A child's misunderstanding wrecks two lives; a novel about guilt, storytelling and the limits of saying sorry.