If you liked
Books like Big Little Lies
Loved Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty? 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
-
1
The Goldfinch
When a bomb destroys the museum where he is visiting, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives but his mother does not. In the chaos, he takes a small Dutch painting — The Goldfinch — which will haunt his life for the next decade and a half, through foster care, antiques, addiction and a criminal underworld. Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on art, loss and the things we carry.
-
2
How to Be Both
Two stories are bound together in a single novel: a grieving English teenager in the present and a 15th-century Italian fresco painter in the past. Smith's Booker Prize-winning novel exists in two editions with the stories in different orders — asking what changes about the meaning of a life story depending on where you begin.
-
3
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans survives as a prisoner of war building the Burma Death Railway, haunted by a love affair that began just before his capture. Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel is a meditation on love, memory, survival and the particular moral difficulty of having lived through something that others did not.
-
4
Everything I Never Told You
When sixteen-year-old Lydia Lee is found drowned in a lake in Ohio, the family that had built its hopes around her must confront the secrets they kept from each other and from her. Ng's debut novel is a precise study of the pressures families place on their most gifted members — and of what happens when the weight becomes too much.
-
5
Outline
A novelist travels to Athens to teach a writing course and has a series of conversations — on the plane, on a boat, at dinner, in workshops — which slowly reveal the outline of her own character through what others choose to tell her. Cusk's novel invented a form: a narrator defined entirely by absence, and by the stories of others that pour into that absence.
-
6
Dept of Speculation
A marriage under strain is told in fragments — aphorisms, observations, diary entries — by a woman who refers to herself in the third person as 'the wife.' Offill's novel is formally radical and emotionally precise: a portrait of a relationship, a creative crisis and the ordinary catastrophe of trying to live alongside another person.
-
7
The Lost Child
The fourth and final Neapolitan novel follows Elena and Lila through the 1970s, 80s and 90s — careers, marriages, children and political upheaval — to a devastating ending that reframes the whole series. Ferrante's conclusion asks whether any escape from Naples was ever truly made, and what the brilliant friendship cost both women.
-
8
A Brief History of Seven Killings
The attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 Jamaica radiates outward through decades and continents, told through more than seventy voices — gang members, CIA operatives, journalists, ghosts. James's Booker Prize-winning novel is enormous in ambition and in length, capturing the chaos and violence of a specific political moment through an extraordinary polyphony.
-
9
Human Acts
The Gwangju Uprising of 1980 — when South Korean paratroopers massacred pro-democracy protesters — is told through seven perspectives, living and dead, across different years. Han Kang's formally radical novel asks how a community survives the memory of mass violence — and whether the survivors have any obligation to the dead. Han won the Nobel Prize in 2024.
-
10
Redeployment
Fourteen stories about American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan — some combat veterans, some rear-echelon, some still in country. Klay's National Book Award-winning debut collection is one of the most clear-eyed accounts of what the Iraq War did to the people who fought it and to the civilians who didn't.