If you liked
Books like The Sellout
Loved The Sellout by Paul Beatty? 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 Nightingale
Two sisters in German-occupied France take different paths through the war: Vianne shelters Jewish children in her home while her husband is a prisoner of war; Isabelle joins the Resistance and guides downed Allied airmen over the Pyrenees. Hannah's novel about women's wartime experience became one of the most-read historical novels of the decade.
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2
The Buried Giant
In post-Arthurian Britain, an elderly couple undertake a journey through a land where memory has been mysteriously erased. Ishiguro's most fable-like novel asks whether a love built on forgotten pain can survive the return of what was buried — and whether communities can coexist peacefully if they remember the atrocities they committed against each other.
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3
The Sympathizer
A communist spy serves as a captain in the South Vietnamese army and escapes to America after the fall of Saigon, all while writing a confession to an unnamed commandant. Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut is a dazzling, angry novel about colonialism, complicity and the double consciousness of the man who belongs to every side and none.
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4
A Court of Thorns and Roses
When huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a beast claims her life as forfeit and drags her to the faerie lands of Prythian — where her captor Tamlin is more than he appears and an ancient blight threatens both worlds. Maas's Beauty and the Beast retelling launched the bestselling romantasy series of its era.
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5
November 9
On the day Fallon is moving from Los Angeles to New York, she meets Ben in a restaurant — and they agree to meet every November 9th for five years, with no contact in between, to see if what they feel survives the distance and the passage of time. Hoover's novel about love, fate and the stories people tell themselves is one of her most structurally inventive.
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6
Fates and Furies
The story of a marriage told twice: first through the husband Lotto's romantic, heroic account of his life as a playwright; then through his wife Mathilde's radically different account of the same events — the version she never shared, full of the things he chose not to see. Groff's novel was Barack Obama's favourite book of 2015 and a National Book Award finalist.
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7
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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8
The Underground Railroad
A reimagining of the escape from slavery as a literal railway; inventive, brutal and morally clear.
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9
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.
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10
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.