10 books like Beloved

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is a book that only became understandable after multiple readings. When I was younger, I was bored struggling through this book; I didn’t enjoy the whaling history or whale biology and none of it added up to a novel. Still, I wanted to know why so many people believed it was the finest novel ever written. And now, having read the book at least a dozen times, I see that Melville’s wild construction justifies the epic confrontation between whale and man. I see the relationship of the Old Testament God to the White Whale that Ahab cannot best. I can honestly say that I love this book I once hated.

Kate Atkinson must be my favourite author (up there with Jane Austen).

I highly recommend all and any of her novels as her characters are all at odds with the world. She writes strong women well, (even in her tales of P.I. Jackson Brody).

Her stunning novel Life After Life is not only structured around the different parallel lives of her main character Ursula growing up before and then during WWII, but also because it tackles that age-old question i.e. ‘If you could go back in time would you kill Hitler?’

Ursula Todd is a wonderful main character and the love for her brother, like a heartbeat, resonates with me particularly as my own novel features sister and brotherly love.

Hilary Mantel’s trilogy following the life of Thomas Cromwell is absolutely peerless as far as historical fiction goes.

One of my favourite challenges of the genre is how to take a time and place that is completely unfamiliar, where characters are motivated by ideas and concepts that modern readers find strange, and yet still find that kernel of universal feeling that allows a reader to anchor themselves in the text.

This novel in particular does that perfectly, showing the desperate ambition and cunning of both Cromwell and Anne Boleyn.

The result is completely captivating – and means that the story unfolds as if its final destination is not fixed, even though we all know what must happen in the end. 

I loved this novel because it was haunting, historical, and existential with an experimental format that blew my mind almost like an intense meditation session.

While some people may find the experimental format jarring, it transported me to a surreal disorienting dimension similar to a dream or bardo state. If you’re not familiar with the Bardo, it’s worth researching.

The word Bardo in the title is what originally attracted me to the novel because of my interest in Buddhism. Yet the bardo in this novel reminded me more of Dante’s Inferno!

The technique used at the beginning to establish the time and setting was ingenious, yet I did wonder if it was entirely fiction or pulled from the historical record. It seems people either really love this novel or have some synapses blown. In my case, it was both. 

Invisible Cities is a surreal fantasy classic that blurs reality by describing it with poetic specificity. Marco Polo and Genghis Khan hold a number of conversations in the Khan’s beautiful garden and Polo regales the great conqueror with descriptions of the various cities Polo has visited. Are any of these cities real? Does it matter? Each one is weird and cool and seems to allude to dreamy truths about existence. Every time I teach a fiction workshop, this is on the syllabus. Each city is a mini-exercise in world building.    

Reading this book made me stop writing my own Southern gothic ghost book in the middle, rethink it completely, and start over again from scratch, and I wasn’t even mad about it. It’s just that good. It’s about thirteen-year-old Jojo and his family—his much-loved and very much dying grandmother, his strong, silent, and protective grandfather, his wild child mother, Leonie, his baby sister, Kayla, who looks to Jojo to keep her safe, and his white father, Michael, who just got out of jail. Everybody has secrets, and everybody sees ghosts. This literary novel won the National Book Award, but I promise you, horror readers, it will scare you silly and break your heart. 

I always try to find reasons to read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the painfully sad story of a family hauling their mother’s body to her hometown in order to bury her. Addie Bundren’s life has been sad and dreary, but the path to her resting place is even more so, replete with flood and fire, as well as a post-death monologue that contains one of the most psychologically complete rationalizations in literary history. Every time I read this book, I understand each of the Bundren family members more deeply, and have greater sympathy for the yoke their circumstance has harnessed them to.

Contemporary suspense, psychological fiction, the afterlife, family dynamics, and heaps of disturbing are the ingredients mixed together in The Lovely Bones. Fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon was raped and murdered. Only none of the living know who did it. But Susie knows. Her soul is stuck in the “Inbetween,” where she can watch the Earth below. She sees her family grieve. Sees her murderer, Mr. Harvey, who lives in her neighborhood near her school. Will he get caught? Or will Susie’s sister or another young girl be his next victim? As a ghostly “watcher” from the Inbetween, Susie narrates this compelling story and elevates it with her amazing voice. The message and emotional weight of The Lovely Bones will keep readers fully invested.

This memoir is a gripping narrative of Eva's survival as a gifted dancer and gymnast in pre-war Hungary, the Nazi concentration camps, and her long journey toward wholeness after immigrating to the United States. 

She details the mental and interpersonal ravages of complex trauma poignantly describes her struggle to gain mental wellness in a world that contains suffering.

She is one of the world's experts on healing from trauma and it shows in her riveting descriptions of how she and her patients learned to bear the pain of great suffering while reclaiming the beauty of compassion, forgiveness, and loving relationships.

Before the U.S. entered the war in Vietnam, Graham Greene forecast its disastrous consequences. His love triangle, set amid the escalating conflict, perfectly captures the naiveté of American interventionism overseas. I love the subtext of the tale, which is narrated by an embittered British journalist. Although it’s never spoken, we intuit that he is addicted to opium and living the life of a dissolute expatriate. Fowler watches in horror as a U.S. diplomat tries to steal both the woman and the country he has adopted. He claims impartiality and indifference until he cannot any longer.