Books like The Paper Palace

01

Normal People

Sally Rooney · Literary fiction

Normal People follows Connell and Marianne from their small-town Irish secondary school through their years at Trinity College Dublin.

A kindred literary fiction read.

02

Conversations with Friends

Sally Rooney · Literary fiction

Conversations with Friends is told by Frances, a twenty-one-year-old Dublin student who performs spoken-word poetry with her best friend and ex-girlfriend Bobbi.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides · Literary fiction

Madeleine Hanna graduates from Brown University in 1982 and is in love with two very different men: Leonard Bankhead, brilliant and bipolar, and Mitchell Grammaticus, a religious studies major searching for something larger than himself.

A kindred literary fiction read.

04

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald · Classics

The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner who moves to Long Island in the summer of 1922 and finds himself adjacent to the fabulous, mysterious parties of his neighbor Jay Gatsby.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

Beloved

Toni Morrison · Literary fiction

Beloved is set in post-Civil War Ohio, where Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, lives with her daughter Denver in a house shadowed by the ghost of a baby she killed rather than let be taken back into slavery.

A kindred literary fiction read.

06

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy · Literary fiction

Anna Karenina opens with a famous line — all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way — and then proceeds to test that claim across two interlocking stories.

Both dig into desire and consequence.

07

Ulysses

James Joyce · Literary fiction

Ulysses takes place on a single day — June 16, 1904 — in Dublin, following three characters: Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser; his wife Molly; and Stephen Dedalus, the young writer from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Both dig into marriage and fidelity.

08

Beach Read

Emily Henry · Contemporary fiction

January Andrews is a romance novelist who has completely lost faith in love after discovering her late father had a secret mistress for years.

Both dig into family secrets.

09

Remarkably Bright Creatures

Shelby Van Pelt · Contemporary fiction

Marcellus is a giant Pacific octopus living in the Sowell Bay Aquarium.

Both dig into family secrets.

10

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway · Literary fiction

A Farewell to Arms is set during the First World War in northern Italy and follows Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps, who falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse.

A kindred literary fiction read.

11

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry · Literary fiction

A Fine Balance is set in an unnamed Indian city during Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977, a period of suspended democracy, forced sterilization, and slum clearances that is barely taught in the West and barely taught in India.

A kindred literary fiction read.

12

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · Literary fiction

A Little Life follows four men from college into middle age and beyond — Willem, an actor; JB, a painter; Malcolm, an architect; and Jude, a lawyer with a past that is revealed in increasingly devastating detail as the novel progresses.

A kindred literary fiction read.