78 books like The Guest

Very few books have affected me more than this autobiographical Japanese manga. The book's author, artist, and protagonist is a young woman navigating her family relationships, mental health, and sexuality. In the grips of depression, desperate to be touched, the protagonist goes to an escort agency—but the plot is not the point.

Nagata’s willingness to “go there” feels so fresh, and is so vulnerable and heartfelt. As a queer person there was a lot to identify with, as a writer I took away a determination to try and be even half as vulnerable in my writing, and as a young woman I felt seen in a new way. 

This is a book about many things—guilt, artmaking, and love among them—but when I think of it, I think of a novel that depicts the complexities of making and sustaining a life more deftly than anything else I’ve read. How things like cruelty and beauty, innocence and evil, truth and lies all coexist. How we move forward despite this uneasy balance.

The novel follows Fee, a boy who grows up in Maine and sings in an all-boys choir. The choir director turns out to be an abuser, and his actions haunt Fee and the other boys in the choir into adulthood.

On a prose level alone, Chee’s writing is unparalleled, his sentences sharp enough to cut glass. I don’t see how anyone could read this book and come away unchanged. 

This thriller is a compulsively readable novel.

In dueling POVs of a gay couple, Vernon explores their relationship, with its power imbalances and manipulations, in all its messiness. Neither narrator is being honest with the other, and the novel is set in motion when Oliver decides to visit a bathhouse where a would-be trick attacks him, making him fear for his life.

The rest of the novel ping-pongs between the narrators, both of whom are concealing so much from each other for very different reasons. 

Guide is the fourth book in Cooper’s George Miles Cycle. This short novel is packed with so much to think about, even if what that includes will make your skin crawl.

If you are unfamiliar with Cooper’s work, this isn’t the book I’d recommend you start with, but his language is so precise that it’s hard to imagine the sentences being written in any other way. The shifting POV chapters take readers on a tour of the seedier parts of L.A., forcing us to examine and interrogate not only how we all tell our own stories, but also how some people then use those to erase or justify their complicity. 

Habib’s novel is an interesting and disturbing debut following a single father who unexpectedly reconnects with a former bully who has ulterior motives.

The first part of the novel jumps back and forth between their high school days and the present, leading to a moment of shocking violence. It’s the aftermath of that violence and how the protagonist deals (or fails to deal) with it that stands out the most, leading to a gut-wrenching conclusion.

This book kicked off my obsession with stories about young women who are trying to make sense of all the versions of themselves they have inside and weighing up which one to present to the world at any given time. The protagonist, Ruth, is an American living in London who works at a department store, spritzing perfume during the day, watching all the people go past, and trying to understand how the other young women who work there seem so self-assured. This is not a plot-driven book so much as a character study of a character who doesn’t know who she is yet.

Kate Zambreno’s writing is absolutely gorgeous. She creates a distance between Ruth—the ‘green girl’—and the world, like she’s looking through a window and can see people inside talking but not understand what they’re saying. At the same time, I recognized myself in Ruth,… show more.

A young woman working in a pet library reads Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and decides that, moving forward, she must stop wasting her life and begin living it according to the book’s Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing.

Far from a motivational story, this is about a ridiculous protagonist who behaves in increasingly outrageous ways—very much an unlikeable character (I noticed that someone had tagged Treasure Island!!! under the category ‘unhinged women,’ which feels right). But gosh, did this book make me giggle? Humor can be hit-and-miss as it’s so subjective and sometimes tries too hard, but women behaving irrationally or badly just hits me in the right place.

This could be a polarizing book, but if you’ve picked this recommendation list from all the others and have gotten this far, there’s a good chance you’re also into books about young women making questionable choices. The protagonist, Hera, is starting a relationship with her older colleague at her workplace, where she’s an online comment moderator.

The story is written from Hera’s point of view, who has a sense of ironic self-awareness but is also desperate to feel something, which is probably what leads her into a course of action she knows is going to bite her in the arse, eventually.

I have always been drawn to stories that are ripped from the headlines but are still so entirely their own.

When I first got the book, I was a little daunted by the length but as I read, I discovered I couldn’t put it down and was so sorry when it was over. A missing girl, a desperate mother—all set against the backdrop of an island that’s the playground of the ultra-wealthy. What’s not to love?

Terrible things happen to the women in this book, but they all, every single one of them, rock the boat to try and make their own lives. In this retelling of The Great Gatsby that centers the POVs of three women critical to the story (Jordan Baker, Daisy Buchanan, and Myrtle Wilson’s suffragist sister), we get the story that was always hiding between the lines.

I found myself proud of and mourning the lives of each of these women. I felt furious on their behalf and hopeful that the generations that came after them would reap the benefits of their mistakes and their work. 

Perhaps most surprising to me, I found myself wanting to know these women more than I ever, ever wanted to get to know Gatsby’s world.