If you liked
Books like We Need New Names
Loved We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo? 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
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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2
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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3
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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4
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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5
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
The third Neapolitan novel follows Elena and Lila through the upheaval of the 1970s — Elena as a published novelist, Lila working in squalid factory conditions. Ferrante's novel is about how people escape poverty and what they give up in the process — and about whether the one who leaves can ever truly leave.
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6
MaddAddam
The third volume of Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy brings together the survivors of the biotech apocalypse — the Crakers, Toby, Zeb, Amanda and others — as they try to build a new world while the last of the old-world threats closes in. Atwood completes her argument about biotechnology, corporate power and what comes after the human.
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7
And the Mountains Echoed
A brother and sister are separated in 1950s Afghanistan — one sold by their impoverished father, one left behind — and the decision echoes through generations and continents. Hosseini's third novel is his most structurally ambitious: a multigenerational saga told through many voices, all connected by one act and its consequences.
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8
An Officer and a Spy
The Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason in 1894 — is told from the perspective of Colonel Georges Picquart, who discovers the cover-up and tries to expose it from within a hostile institution. Harris's Walter Scott Prize-winning novel is both a spy thriller and a study in institutional injustice.
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9
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.
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10
Me Before You
Louisa Clark, an awkward young woman in a small English town, takes a job as caregiver for Will Traynor, a former adventurer now paralysed following a road accident. Their relationship develops into love — but Will has already made a decision about his future that love cannot change. Moyes's novel raised passionate debates about disability, autonomy and what it means to support someone you love in a choice you find devastating.