If you liked
Books like Sula
Loved Sula by Toni Morrison? 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
Ceremony
Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo veteran traumatised by the Second World War, returns to New Mexico and seeks healing through ceremony — the traditional Pueblo healing ritual — while navigating the destruction that the modern world has visited on his community. Silko's novel interweaves myth, poetry and prose to show the relationship between individual healing and communal survival.
-
2
The Sea the Sea
Charles Arrowby, a famous theatre director, retires to a remote cottage by the sea to write his memoirs — and encounters his first love, whom he still believes is imprisoned by a bad marriage. Murdoch's Booker Prize-winning novel is about obsession, self-deception and the stories we tell about our own past.
-
3
The World According to Garp
T.S. Garp, the illegitimate son of a feminist icon who never wanted a husband, grows up in New England schools, becomes a novelist, and navigates a life of extraordinary personal loss. Irving's breakthrough novel is about accidents, violence, family and the bizarre randomness of fate — and it established the large, comic, tragic American novel as Irving's form.
-
4
The Bloody Chamber
Carter's collection of ten dark, sensuous fairy tale retellings — including reimaginings of Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots — transforms the source material through a feminist and psychoanalytic lens. The title story in particular is one of the most analysed texts in A-level English Literature, a dazzling study of desire, power and the violence concealed in romantic convention.
-
5
Sophie's Choice
Stingo, a young Southern writer in Brooklyn in 1947, becomes close to Sophie Zawistowski — a beautiful Polish survivor of Auschwitz — and her brilliant, tormented lover Nathan. The novel builds to Sophie's terrible secret: the choice she was forced to make in the camp. Styron's National Book Award-winning novel is about guilt, survival and the American encounter with European atrocity.
-
6
Portnoy's Complaint
Alexander Portnoy delivers a monologue to his psychoanalyst about his Jewish Newark childhood, his overbearing mother, his obsessive sexuality and his inability to reconcile his desires with his identity. Roth's breakthrough novel is both a comedy of Jewish American identity and one of the most formally uninhibited novels ever published — and one of the most controversial on its appearance.
-
7
A Grain of Wheat
On the eve of Kenyan independence in 1963, the residents of a village gather to celebrate — and to reckon with their different experiences of the Mau Mau uprising, the betrayals it produced, and the price paid by those who fought. Ngugi's novel examines what political independence means when it arrives and what it asks of those who survived the struggle.
-
8
Wide Sargasso Sea
Set in Jamaica and Dominica in the 1830s, Bertha Mason — the mad wife in the attic of Jane Eyre — tells her own story before she is silenced and imprisoned by Rochester. Rhys's novel is one of the foundational texts of postcolonial fiction, a fierce rewriting of Charlotte Brontë's portrait of Creole womanhood from the inside.
-
9
Housekeeping
Two sisters are left by their mother at their grandmother's house in the isolated town of Fingerbone, Idaho, and eventually passed between aunts until their eccentric Aunt Sylvie arrives to care for them. Robinson's debut is a slow, luminous meditation on memory, transience and the particular form of freedom that comes from having nothing left to lose.
-
10
Stoner
The quiet life of an ordinary university teacher, rediscovered decades later as a near-perfect novel about an unremarkable life lived fully.