100 books like The Girls

This book is about a young mother who takes her two daughters to Marrakech, Morocco in the 1960s so she can study Sufism, which, although not technically a “cult” does seem rather cult-like when described from the point of view of a five-year-old child who is watching her mother do strange ritual spinning to try to annihilate her ego.

You might remember the 1998 movie adaptation of this book starring Kate Winslet, but I think the book is better because of its dreamy, almost other-worldly descriptions of street life in Marrakech. This gem of a book is steeped in childlike wonder and longing and it will be over far too soon.

This is my favorite novel. I read it every year or so, and each time, I feel like it makes my own writing better.

Set in the latter years of the Vietnam War, it tells the story of two friends—Converse, a war-traumatized journalist, and Hicks, a world-weary, cynical marine—who smuggle three kilos of heroin back to Berkeley, California.

I love the realism of this book, but it might be too brutal were it not tempered by how intelligent and sympathetic the main characters are, even when doing terrible things. The book feels exactly like a crime/adventure novel, exploring the dark underbelly of the counterculture in the 1970s. It’s also an amazingly complex and philosophical novel about the balance between morality and ego. 

While I am a tremendous fan of Daphne DuMaurier’s uncanny short stories, in particular, The Birds and Don’t Look Now, I reserve my greatest love and admiration for her modern Gothic masterpiece Rebecca.

While Alfred Hitchcock’s film version is justifiably a classic, it cannot capture the richness of DuMaurier’s prose nor the powerful first-person perspective of the narrator, the unnamed newlywed of a wealthy widower who finds herself cursed to always be in the shadow of his first wife, the eponymous Rebecca. It also can’t quite evoke the oppressive atmosphere of Manderley, silent and secretive, ancient and beautiful, the gilded cage of a mansion ruled over by a domineering housekeeper, the unforgettable Mrs. Danvers. 

Who knew a book about sleeping could be so funny and engaging?

As someone who constantly wants and needs more rest, I related to the protagonist’s hunch that a year of (almost uninterrupted) sleep would change her life. And it does, though not at all in the way she expects.

Moshfegh writes about trips to the local bodega and the edgy conceptual art scene in such a brilliant way that the book will (perhaps, unfortunately!) keep you up late.

Okay, I might be stretching the definition of “cult” with this one, but hear me out.

This book—which is technically non-fiction, but reads an awful lot like a novel—tells the true story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ efforts to dose America with LSD-laced Kool-Aid in the 1960s. But it’s Kesey’s ramblings about creating a new religion and the devotion of the unhinged misfits who orbit around him that make me see the Merry Pranksters as cult-like.

Reading this book, I get the feeling that if Kesey hadn’t been stopped by the FBI, he very well might have changed the world. Or did he manage to change the world anyway? I’ll let you decide.

This novel is a masterclass in unreliable narration. It follows Will, a young man estranged from his family and religion, as he attends college and falls in love with Phoebe.

As Will takes over and narrates his recollections of their relationship, Phoebe’s friendship with a man named John Leal, and her inculcation into a religious cult, he becomes increasingly untrustworthy. Will rails against John Leal, his lies, and the damage he has done to Phoebe, revealing his complicity in toxic masculinity and his own harmful actions.

Kwon renders her characters as entirely believable, frightening people, in lyrical and considered prose.

I am a fan of Patchett’s novels and especially liked this one about a female Indian-American physician working for a pharmaceutical company whose lover-boss sends her on an adventure to rescue a colleague at their company’s research site in the Amazon.

At the beginning of the book, the protagonist is at a liminal stage in her life: she is not sure about her romantic relationship, about her medical career, or about who she can trust as she undertakes the dangerous journey in South America.

I like the way she gains confidence as she becomes more suspicious of others’ motives, and I hope to convince my book club to read it.

T.C. Boyle is the master of writing novels in which two seemingly disparate storylines are headed for a collision course.

In this novel, he writes about the inhabitants of Drop City, a drugged-out hippy commune in California. And, in alternating chapters, he writes about the inhabitants of a remote village in Alaska, who are struggling to prepare for winter. These two storylines may seem to have nothing to do with one another until you realize both worlds are at a breaking point.

Finding out how these two casts of characters would eventually collide kept me up way past my bedtime a few nights in a row and I’m not mad about it!

There is subtle genius in the way Miriam Toews pays such close attention to the humanity of her often heartbreaking characters while also being dryly funny. Set in a closed, conservative Mennonite community, the story unfolds as “minutes” taken by a young man as he listens to a group of women from the community who have discovered they were drugged and assaulted while sleeping, by men they know. (Their fathers, sons, husbands, and friends.) The story is based on a real case, and while the details are chillingly horrific, Toews finds a way for the characters to talk about these things that are warm, humorous, and compassionate, as the women become alive for the first time to their own unexamined power. 

This one’s actually the middle book of Attwood’s Maddaddam trilogy, which deals with the results of “the waterless flood,” a viral pandemic which has wiped out most of civilisation.

The Year of the Flood focuses on the lower classes, which again interests me in terms of the effect on “ordinary” people. There’s a dystopian element here, as Attwood explores the religious sect in which the protagonists find themselves.