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Books Like Alias Grace
Historical Crime Fiction Like Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace reconstructs a Victorian murder through the unreliable testimony of a woman who cannot — or will not — fully remember what she did. These 8 novels share its interest in contested female testimony, in the gap between what happened and what was recorded, and in women whose stories were told by others.
- 1Buy
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
A near-future theocracy in which fertile women are enslaved as Handmaids — Atwood's most celebrated novel shares Alias Grace's interest in women whose testimony is controlled and interpreted by men, and in female survival through the performance of compliant femininity; where Alias Grace is rooted in documented history, The Handmaid's Tale uses speculative extrapolation to make the same argument about female powerlessness
- 2Buy
My Brilliant Friend
by Elena Ferrante
Elena and Lila grow up together in a poor Neapolitan neighborhood — Ferrante's quartet shares Alias Grace's interest in female friendship as a relationship of mutual fascination and potential exploitation, in female narrators whose self-knowledge is partial and shaped by desire, and in the way that poverty defines the options available to women
- 3Buy
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Five sisters in suburban Michigan kill themselves within a year, and the neighborhood boys who were obsessed with them try to reconstruct their lives from fragments — Eugenides's novel shares Alias Grace's structure of a male narrative attempting to recover a female experience through incomplete evidence, and its sense that the women at the center of the investigation remain irreducibly mysterious despite the accumulation of testimony
- 4Buy
Burial Rites
by Hannah Kent
Agnes Magnúsdóttir, convicted of murder in Iceland in 1828, is billeted with a farming family while she awaits execution — Kent's 2013 debut is the closest contemporary parallel to Alias Grace: a historical novel about a woman convicted of murder whose guilt is ambiguous, whose story is reconstructed through official records and her own testimony, and who refuses to conform to the monster the legal record requires
- 5Buy
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
A Franciscan friar investigates murders at a medieval Italian monastery — Eco's novel shares Alias Grace's sense that the investigation of a crime is also an investigation of the investigator, and that the truth about what happened is inseparable from the interpretive framework the investigator brings to the evidence; the great scholar-detective novel
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The Paying Guests
by Sarah Waters
A widow and her lodger's wife begin an affair that leads to murder in 1920s London — Waters's 2014 novel shares Alias Grace's interest in a woman who commits a crime in the context of an impossible social situation, and in the way that the legal process transforms a private act into a public narrative that the actual participants can no longer control
- 7Buy
Fingersmith
by Sarah Waters
A Victorian pickpocket and a sheltered heiress caught in a con that cuts both ways — Waters's 2002 novel shares Alias Grace's Victorian setting, its double perspective on a criminal act that looks different depending on which woman is telling the story, and its refusal to provide a single authoritative account of what really happened
- 8Buy
The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Three women across three decades — Virginia Woolf in 1923, Laura Brown in 1949, Clarissa Vaughan in the 1990s — each confronting the question of what a life should be; Cunningham's novel shares Alias Grace's interest in recovering female interior experience that official history has obscured or misread, and in the impossibility of telling another person's story truly
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