100 books like The Strays

This, Sally Rooney’s first novel, was greeted with widespread critical acclaim. Fresh, witty, knowing, and au courant in its exploration of present-day sexual and romantic entanglements, the novel was clearly the work of a major talent. 

Both Conversations and Rooney’s highly popular second novel, Normal People, have been adapted for television. Perhaps you’ve seen one or both and have read the novels as a result. If not, I urge you to do so, beginning with Conversations. 

I haven’t yet watched either adaptation, but I believe that watching and reading have different sorts of advantages. Against the immediacy and vividness of watching TV shows, reading the novel will allow you to move at your own pace, to savor Rooney’s verbal dexterity, to revisit earlier scenes, and to discover their added significance. Watch (if you haven’t already), read, enjoy!

While many novels about female friendship focus on young women, The Weekend follows three women in their seventies, whose decades-long friendship has sustained them through illness, infidelity, divorce – and recently the death of their fourth close friend, Sylvie.

Drawn together over a weekend to clear out Sylvie’s house, the remaining women must grapple with their shared past and uncertain future. I loved this glimpse into the lives of older women – a reality not often portrayed in fiction – and admired Wood’s ability to make each of her three narrators flawed, relatable, and human.

If you like immersive character-driven novels, this book won’t disappoint.

Nothing Special follows Mae, a teenager in 1967, who drops out of school and becomes a typist in Andy Warhol’s Factory studio.

Transcribing taped conversations of Warhol and his contemporaries, Mae feels like she’s entered a new world – along with Shelley, a fellow typist who soon becomes a close friend. But is Shelley all she seems? This is a closely observed psychological novel exploring what it means to truly know another person, and how much we have the right to expect from our friends.

The writing zips along effortlessly, driven by Mae’s poised, ironic voice, which expertly captures the ersatz confidence of being young.  

I recommend The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez because I found it an absorbing portrait of a friendship in which I wasn’t sure if the two people in it even liked each other. Georgette, called George, is from a working-class family, and Ann is her wealthy college roommate. It is the late 1960s. For me, the book had a fresh angle on the protest movements. George’s focus in college is trying to pull herself up.

To me, George and Ann’s friendship is like a house on a cliff–dangerous, depending on what door you open. This book has stayed with me because it explores why people remain friends, even if the relationship is difficult to the point of pain. 

Hope Farm moved me so much because it conveys the bitter-sweetness of being thirteen, being privy to adults who make terrible choices, and having to adapt to the consequences of those choices. It is about parents who join cults (in this case, a hippy one) and the effects of this on their children. Peggy Frew has such a seductive and captivating way of engrossing the reader in the story through her stunning prose.  

I first read this YA novel as a teenager and have never forgotten it.

The book has long been out of print in the UK, but a few years ago, I laboriously tracked down an Australian ex-library copy to re-read. I was fascinated to realise the book actually falls into the (psychological) horror genre (having thought I hated horror after being traumatised as a kid by Nightmare on Elm Street!). I could also now see how, at heart, it is also a heartbreaking family drama.

Del-Del later became a huge inspiration for my debut novel Little White Lies, a psychological thriller about a family desperately struggling with the miraculous return of their teenage daughter Abigail following her abduction seven years previously.

No easy way describes Kaaron Warren’s darkest mind full of mischief and intensity. She’s a global legend, no worries, with her distinctive Australian tongue. Find wicked excitement in Warren’s horror, disturbing in its nature, leaving nothing untouched. Even babies are not safe. This primer is a quick introduction to ominous storytelling, that may pave way to curiosity into award-winning works, including Tide of Stone or Into Bones Like Oil. Starting here, with illustrations and an exegetical analysis by Michael Arnzen, is perhaps the soundest way to dip a toe into the humour, surreally, and darkness of this author’s alluring text. 

Although The Territory was published in the 1940s, the book is as vivid as if it came out last year. Neither a novel nor a history, it is an evocative account of Ernestine Hill’s extensive travels around Northern Australia, the Aboriginal and white people she met, the stories she came across, and the joys and hardships she faced. I view it as essential reading for anyone planning to visit the Top End of Australia. I first read it while I was mapping out the plot of my own book, and was blown away by Ernestine Hill’s evocation of The Territory. 

This is a cornucopia of the weird and wonderful in Australia: the origins of ‘mateship’, rural remedies, measuring the weather by the behaviour of birds, how ‘Waltzing Matilda’ had its origins in a shearers’ strike, and the bizarre life of the itinerant swagman, including hints on how to make a ‘swag’ and carry it according to the legendary writer Henry Lawson. There are wonderful tales of Australian ‘taciturnity’ and folks living so remotely they still thought Queen Victoria was on the throne in the mid-1900s. It may be light-hearted in tone but this book somehow gets to the heart of what makes Australians unlike anyone else in the world.  

Written by the revered god-daddy of Australian songcraft, Shots is a beat peek behind the curtain of what it is to be a young band on the road and on the rise, all lens flare vignettes; dry, brutal, and perfect, as cool as The Don himself. His uncanny way with words lets us bear witness to the country hall dances, Kings Cross streets, and back of the van like a poetic spy cam.