Recommendations

Books Like Gone Girl

What to read after Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

If Gone Girl's dark and structurally inventive portrait of a marriage — the two unreliable narrators, the brilliant midpoint revelation, Amy Dunne as one of the most memorable characters in recent fiction — left you wanting more psychological thriller, these are the novels readers find next.

  1. 1

    Sharp Objects

    by Gillian Flynn

    Flynn's debut — a journalist returns to her small Missouri hometown to cover a murder and confronts her own dark history. More compressed and darker than Gone Girl, with the same unflinching willingness to write female characters who are not sympathetic.

    Buy
  2. 2

    Dark Places

    by Gillian Flynn

    A woman who survived the murder of her family as a child has spent decades profiting from the story — until a true crime club pays her to investigate whether the brother convicted of the murders is actually innocent. Flynn's second novel — the full dark Flynn trilogy.

    Buy
  3. 3

    The Girl on the Train

    by Paula Hawkins

    Rachel, who commutes past a house and constructs a fantasy about the couple she sees, becomes involved in a disappearance. The most direct commercial descendant of Gone Girl: unreliable female narrator, missing woman, marriage in crisis, late-novel revelation.

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  4. 4

    Behind Closed Doors

    by B.A. Paris

    A couple with a perfect-seeming marriage — the kind of couple all their friends envy — conceals something sinister. The domestic thriller in its most direct form, without Gone Girl's literary ambition but with the same mechanism of a marriage that is not what it appears.

    Buy
  5. 5

    The Silent Patient

    by Alex Michaelides

    A famous painter shoots her husband and refuses to speak afterward — a criminal psychotherapist becomes obsessed with making her talk. A psychological thriller with the same structure as Gone Girl: one perspective that seems reliable, a revelation that transforms what you've been reading.

    Buy
  6. 6

    Big Little Lies

    by Liane Moriarty

    Three women in an elite school community and a death at trivia night. Shares Gone Girl's interest in what happens inside marriages that look good from the outside and what communities choose to see and not see about domestic violence.

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  7. 7

    The Woman in the Window

    by A.J. Finn

    An agoraphobic woman living alone in New York believes she has witnessed a murder through her window — but nobody believes her. The thriller version of Gone Girl's unreliable witness premise: a narrator whose perception is genuinely compromised and who has no way to prove what she knows.

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  8. 8

    Verity

    by Colleen Hoover

    A struggling writer discovers a disturbing manuscript hidden in the home of a bestselling author she's been hired to complete — and must decide whether the manuscript is fiction or confession. The dark romance thriller that became a BookTok phenomenon; shares Gone Girl's interest in an unreliable female narrator who may or may not be telling the truth about violence.

    Buy

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