Recommendations
Books Like The Lovely Bones
What to read after The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
If The Lovely Bones' narrator — Susie Salmon watching from heaven as the years pass below her — and its portrait of grief, family, and what loss does to the people who are left affected you, these are the books readers find next.
- 1Buy
A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Four college friends' friendship over decades in New York, centering on one member's history of childhood abuse. Shares The Lovely Bones' unflinching engagement with violence done to a young person and what it takes to survive — or not survive — its aftermath.
- 2Buy
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
An elite classics study group at a small Vermont college commits a murder — we know from the first line. Shares The Lovely Bones' reverse-mystery structure (we know the death before we know the story) and its interest in the complicity of people who knew something was wrong.
- 3Buy
Where the Crawdads Sing
by Delia Owens
A girl who grew up alone in the North Carolina marshes is accused of murder. Shares The Lovely Bones' interest in what a community does with the death of a young woman and whose story gets believed.
- 4Buy
Big Little Lies
by Liane Moriarty
Three women in an elite school community navigate friendship and domestic abuse toward a death at trivia night. A more comedic and genre-adjacent approach to the same question: what does a community know, and what does it choose to do with that knowledge?
- 5Buy
Lucky
by Alice Sebold
Sebold's memoir about her own rape as a college student and its aftermath. The nonfiction companion to The Lovely Bones — the real experience that the novel translates into fiction. Very short and very direct.
- 6Buy
Room
by Emma Donoghue
A five-year-old boy who has lived his entire life in a single room with his mother (who has been held captive for years) narrates the story of their world and their escape. Donoghue shares Sebold's ability to use an unusual narrative position — a perspective that is both inside and outside the horror — to make unbearable material bearable.
- 7Buy
What Remains
by Carole Radziwill
A journalist's memoir about her husband's death from cancer and the death of John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette — her close friends — in the same year. Nonfiction that occupies the same emotional space as The Lovely Bones: grief from inside, in real time.
- 8Buy
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
The men of a 1970s Michigan suburb reconstruct the lives of the five Lisbon sisters, all of whom died by suicide over the course of a year. Shares The Lovely Bones' retrospective structure — narrators trying to make sense of deaths they witnessed from the outside — and the same question of what a community does with girls who die.
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