If you liked
Books like James
Loved James by Percival Everett? 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 Safekeep
In 1961 in the rural Netherlands, Isabel lives alone in the house she inherited, suspicious of everyone — until her brother's girlfriend Eva comes to stay, and Isabel's careful, controlled life begins to unravel as she discovers what the house actually conceals about the war years. Van der Wouden's Women's Prize-winning debut is a slow-burn novel about desire, guilt and the things postwar Europe chose not to remember.
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2
Small Rain
A poet experiences a sudden, excruciating pain that leads to a hospitalisation for a rare cardiac emergency, and the days that follow — confined to an ICU during the pandemic — become an extended meditation on the body, illness, love and what matters when survival itself is uncertain. Greenwell's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel is an intensely interior account of crisis, told with extraordinary precision about pain, fear and tenderness.
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3
The First State of Being
In the summer of 1999, twelve-year-old Michael, anxious about Y2K and obsessed with survival preparation, encounters a boy who has time-travelled from the future — and the encounter changes how Michael understands time, fear and what actually matters. Kelly's Newbery Medal-winning novel is about anxiety, friendship and the strange comfort of knowing the future doesn't end the way you fear.
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4
Someone You Can Build a Nest In
Shesheshen, a shapeshifting monster who has lived in a ruined keep for centuries, falls in love with Homily, the woman sent by a group of monster-hunters to kill her — and must navigate romance while hiding what she really is. Wiswell's Nebula Award-winning novel is a horror-romance that takes its monster's perspective entirely seriously, asking what love looks like when one partner literally cannot show their true self.
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5
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
In 1972, workers digging a water main in Pottstown, Pennsylvania uncover a skeleton that unravels the hidden history of a neighbourhood shared by Black and Jewish communities in the 1930s. McBride's warm, morally complex novel is about the unlikely alliances between the marginalised and what a community of outcasts can offer each other.
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6
The Bee Sting
Four members of an Irish family — father, mother, teenage son, teenage daughter — each give their own account of the crisis tearing their world apart, in chapters that get progressively shorter as the disaster accelerates. Murray's novel is a formally daring, darkly funny account of family collapse, financial catastrophe and the things families never say to each other.
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7
Flesh
Following one Hungarian-British man — István — from his teenage years on a Budapest housing estate through decades of life in the economic shadow of London's super-rich, Szalay's spare, propulsive novel tracks a man who is emotionally detached yet persistently unravelled by events beyond his control. Winner of the Booker Prize 2025.
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8
Orbital
Six astronauts orbit Earth every ninety minutes, watching sixteen sunrises a day, as storms and fires rage below and one crew member waits for news of her dying mother. Harvey's Booker Prize-winning novella asks what it means to look at the Earth from outside it — and whether distance creates clarity or only the illusion of it.
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9
Fourth Wing
Violet Sorrengail, trained for the scribe's quiet life, is forced by her commanding-general mother into the brutal dragon riders' college at Basgiath, where cadets die routinely and her physical frailty makes her a target. Yarros's romantasy phenomenon — dragons, deadly trials and an enemies-to-lovers romance — defined the genre's mainstream breakout and sold millions through BookTok.
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10
The Covenant of Water
In Kerala, South India, a family is afflicted across three generations by a peculiar condition — in every generation, someone dies by drowning. Spanning 1900 to 1977, Verghese's saga interweaves medicine, faith, caste and the extraordinary changes of 20th-century India. An Oprah's Book Club selection and one of the most-read literary novels of its year.