65 books like Arcadia

Vonnegut’s book is a unique combination of satire, science fiction, and raw war critique. Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, lives out the trauma of surviving the Dresden bombing by becoming "unstuck in time," drifting through different moments of his life, from past to future. This strange, nonlinear structure mirrors how we process trauma in fragments and waves, never in a neat, chronological order. The randomness of death, the meaninglessness of war—all these themes come together in a way that’s both absurd and deeply moving. As we witness terror and violence continually unfold across the globe, the echoes of Slaughterhouse-Five feel ever-present.

The phrase “So it goes” serves as a refrain throughout the novel, after every death—reminding us of the inevitability of loss in wartime, no matter the scale. This book hit me hard with its dark humor and cynical commentary on the glorification of war. Vonnegut forces you to laugh in… show more.

What is there not to love about this novel? Let me count the reasons, if I can, that I did love it:

It's unvarnished, simple, elegant prose. The searing vulnerability of not only the central protagonist but many surrounding characters as well. The theme of family failure but also family triumph. Its resonating depiction of life circumstances and survival collides head-on with legal norms and personal choice.

This stunning book puts me in the head of a young boy with a neurodivergent way of seeing the world. I picked up this book before a cross-country flight and couldn’t stand that we landed, and I would have to stop reading for the drive home.

It immersed me in Christopher’s dilemma of trying to make sense of people. The most trivial things become massive. I was hurtled along with him for a harrowing, incredible journey. Profoundly moving!

I was obsessed with this novel when it first came out, and every time I go back to it, it offers me another gift.

The writing is lean yet elegant, a perfect combination to tell such a heartbreaking story—of three women connected through time by Virginia Woolf’s singular novel Mrs. Dalloway.

It’s a book about how to sustain ourselves through challenging times—how to literally survive—but it’s also a treatise on creating remarkable characters, the call to be an artist, and a rare glimpse into the imagined writing process of one of the English language’s greatest wordsmiths. (I’m referring to Woolf, but I could just as easily be talking about Cunningham.)

The structure is inventive and compelling, but it is really what he shows us of the characters, how he opens their hearts and whispers their secret sorrows into our eager ears, desires they barely understand themselves, that makes this… show more.

Many books that tackle the AIDS crisis tend to focus on queer meccas like New York City and San Francisco, but Makkai’s The Great Believers illustrate just how hard the virus hit Chicago.

Jumping back and forth between 1985 and 2005, the book follows a close group of gay men and their straight allies as their communities begin to come under attack. In 1985, Yale Tishman is on the verge of great professional success just as his dreams begin to slip through his fingers.

Meanwhile in 2005, Yale’s friend Fiona Marcus finds herself looking for her runaway daughter in the streets of Paris, while also coming to terms with what she had to give up to care for these men. A masterful book. 

Thomasina’s musings in Arcadia lead us naturally to Nova Jacobs’ entertaining mystery: the titular equation is closely linked to Thomasina’s ‘theory of everything’ (in fact, a quote from Arcadia opens one of Jacobs’ chapters). When Isaac suddenly dies of an apparent suicide, his adoptive granddaughter Hazel is left to follow his enigmatic clues to discover where Isaac has hidden the equation he spent the last years of his life working on, what exactly it calculates, and who else is after it. 

The best thing about this book is the Severy family, a bunch of mathematicians and theoretical physicists living in a hilariously drawn world of academic pettiness, demanding PhD students, dry periods that seem like they might never end, judgmental relatives, and disappointingly un-academic offspring. Sounds just like our family!

This book loves to pretend to be a Raymond Chandler type thriller with a hard-boiled detective, but what might be a stereotype is offset by the detective's past and his personal struggle with depression, as well as a romantic interest in his client, an attractive female mathematician who hires him to figure out why three different mathematicians she contacted about the exact same topic have all died recently.  

Pieces are gathered and put together bit by bit to form a well-balanced mystery complete with false leads and a twist at the end. What makes this novel quite unique is the place given to the actual mathematics of fractals, with enough explanation to communicate not only their fascinating nature but also several applications, much of which is even relevant to the mystery. Best of all is the accurate depiction of the passion of the mathematicians for their subject, their lifestyle, and… show more.

This energetic mystery is populated by a range of extremely colourful characters from reclusive twin brother mathematicians to disreputable biographers and Belarusian Mafiosi, and it has a suitably hapless narrator to guide us through the mess of murder, stolen mathematical documents and unsavoury rumours. 

The final revelation is pretty crude and disappointing but it doesn't matter too much because the book up til there is very great (and very British) fun. There's plenty of mathematical trivia and some discussion of actual maths, including an interesting scene where we get to contrast how two brains - one mathematical and one not - approach a problem.

The Three Body Problem is a real-life unsolved math problem concerning the motion of three bodies (think a star and two orbiting planets), all acting on each other by the pull of gravity. Given their positions and movements at times, what will happen in the future? Will they eventually fly away or fall into the star?  

The Three Body Problem is also a mathematical mystery by Catherine Shaw (a pen name – shhh), set in Cambridge in Victorian times, which contains three actual dead bodies, all of the mathematicians working on the eponymous problem. Another mathematician, who knew all three well, is accused of the murders. Luckily for him, his fiancée, though not a mathematician herself, is as much a truth-seeker as any, and her actions unravel the mystery while the reader gets a close look into the world of maths and the people who do it. Our amateur detective… show more.

In Odenigbo, the Professor of Statistics at Nsukka University who is a main character in Adichie’s powerful novel, she gives us a mathematician who is both brilliant and flawed, both good and bad.

He is a mass of contradictions, as we all are: a fully-rounded person. Adichie’s parents were caught up in the Biafran-Nigerian civil war – the subject of this book – and her father James Nwoye Adichie was a real-life Nsukka statistician.

There’s a tell-tale gap in his research output: between 1967 and 1974 he published no papers. Call me sentimental, but when Adichie gives to Odenigbo’s lost research articles titles that might fit with her father’s work, I like to think that it’s a tribute to the work he also did not have the chance to complete.