Literary fiction recommendations

[WhoreDing]

I'm stumped for what my next batch of books should be.

I enjoy literary fiction and quite bleak stuff.

I've asked ChatGPT but it was pretty useless, recommending books I know I won't like or that are just too wide of the mark.

I've been through the back catalogue of:
Hanya Yanagihara
Kazuo Ishiguro
Yaa Gyasi
Mary Lawson
Charlotte Wood
Megan Nolan
Susanna Clarke
Siri Hustvedt
Benjamin Myers
Andrea Levy
Sarah Waters
Isabelle Allende
CJ Sansom
Daphne du Maurier
Rohinton Mistry
Bernadine Evaristo (apart from Soul Tourists)

To give you some more ideas:
I've enjoyed:
> Disgrace by JM Coetzee but not sure where to start with his other works.
> The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.
> Handmaid's Tale but I've found other Attwood works hard to get into.
> Stoner by John Williams but his other works seen quite different.

I didn't/don't enjoy:
> First Love by Gwendoline Riley (ChatGPT recommendation, just awful)
> Hamnet and MOFs other works actually
> Annie Proulx's work
> The Vegetarian
> God of Small Things
> Eleanor Ferrante's Neapolitan triology
> Long Road to the Deep North
> Anything by Hilary Mantel
> Anything which is too magic realism
> The classics

I'm just coming to the end of my last Charlotte Wood book and am completely out of ideas for where to go next. Help!

Jim Crace. Maybe start with Harvest.

If you want bleak, try Cormac McCarthy. He makes Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin look like P. G. Wodehouse.

Evelyn Waugh’s early stuff is strangely bleak as well. He is funny, and he writes like an angel, but he kills his characters off in awful, grotesque ways and has a real nihilistic edge.

Joseph Conrad is another very bleak writer.

Oh, and maybe Roald Dahl. Even his children’s books are dark and sinister.

The Inheritance of Loss - Anita Desai
The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead
The Patrick Melrose novels - Edward St Aubyn

Barbara Kingsolver
Ann Tyler
Anne Patchett
Curtis Sittenfield
Elizabeth Strout

I loved Cloud Atlas. I’d also really recommend The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard. It’s a debut novel with a really interesting concept, the writing is gorgeous and it’s a great story.

Oh I love almost everything on your dislike list so I’m not sure I am the right person to make a recommendation! That said, we have some overlapping likes too.

Have you read any Persephone books - Dorothy Whipple is a good author to start with.

You might enjoy
"There are rivers in the sky" by Elif Shafak
"Black Butterflies" by Priscilla Morris
"Home Fire" (and other titles) by Kamila Shamsie
anything by Donal Ryan

Sounds like we have similar taste, as we like and dislike the same literary authors.

Have you read:
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Demon Copperhead or Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

I liked Michael K by Coetzee ( loved Disgrace)
You could also try some Nadine Gordimer novels
I loved Old Filth trilogy by Jane Gardam

Do you read short stories? The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the best books I've ever read. Her novels are good but her short stories are sublime.

I agree about Patrick Melrose novels. Brilliant. Haven't read the others.

Pleased to see Ann Patchett mentioned. I don't think I've read anything of hers i didnt enjoy.

Also yy to the Bee Sting.

What about Prophet song by Paul Lynch?

And the Sugnature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (dont be automatically put off by the fact it's by her!).

The best Barbara Kingsolver imo is Prodigal Summer. A great way in.

And some newer curveballs. Yellowface? Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow?

I think Kevin Barry's work is amazing, one of my favourite authors -I just read the Heart in Winter.

Paul Lynch's Prophet Song is brilliant, couldn't put it down and I also loved the Bee Sting.

Was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie mentioned? Loved Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun in particular....

Kate Atkinson - anything, but maybe start with Life after Life
Douglas Stuart
Another vote for the Bee Sting
Pachinko
The Names
Half of a Yellow Sun, and then everything else by Adichie
Zadie Smith

Bleak, fantastic and relevant: Pat Barker's Women of Troy trilogy. Amazing retelling of the Trojan wars through the eyes of women.

If you’re open to 19th century - Zola. Try La Bête Humaine or Germinal.

What an excellent lot of recommendations, will be diving into it. My DH can’t understand why I love ‘bleak’ stories… I think I’m mostly grateful to not be living the life of the characters in The Road or Half a Yellow Sun.

Someone else on here recommended We, The Drowned by Danish writer Carsten Jensen. It’s long, and basically the story of the inhabitants of a small fishing town in Denmark through the centuries, but it’s utterly brilliant, and very bleak. I loved it.

Adding to this - the regeneration trilogy.

Love Pat Barker

Out by Natsuo Kirino. Also Grotesque and Real World.

Not enough of her books have been translated into English. Swallows has recently been published but is a very different genre to the previous three.

Oh how could I forget? For bleak you want Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. I'm a sucker for a debut and this possibly the best I have ever read.

Also, Hilary St.John Mandel?

I read the first page of this thread and thought Barbara Kingsolver and can see multiple recommendations for her on this page. The Poisonwood Bible is bleak. I have read many of her books and they are literary. I have struggled to get into Unsheltered because the start reads like it is written by Anne Tyler who I dislike and I saw you did too, so don't start with that one.

The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason is bleak, Dark Woods by the same author is brilliant, less bleak but some bleak bits.

I don't think the Bee Sting is bleak, it is a bit tawdry, covers many themes. I have mixed feelings about it so would struggle to recommed it.

Burial Rites is so bleak!

I know you said you didn't like the classics but have you tried Gone with the Wind, not too old and it can be very bleak. Half way through I wasn't sure I could keep reading.

I am revisiting years gone by with Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham and F Scott Fitzgerald. Loving it.

Oh if you want bleak, they don’t come much bleaker than A Fine Balance by (I think) Rohal Mistry. A challenging read but completely absorbing.

Thank you so much - some fabulous recommendations here.

I've read "Poisonwood Bible" and "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver and loved them. I couldn't get into her other books though - she seemed to go off on a weird tangent with boring books about nature and climate change for a few years.

I'm in the middle of "All My Puny Sorrows" at the moment and absolutely loving it. Thank you to the PP who recommended it. Its right up my street.

Another vote for Kate Atkinson.
Also Emma Jane Unsworth.
My favourite book of the year is Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley, but not sure that fits your brief.

Oh, I’m glad! I think she’s so good I’m practically evangelical about recommending her. There are several other novels, almost all set in some form of Mennonite setting, and two memoirs.

Agree re Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett.

Pat Barker is really good. Her Regeneration trilogy are amazing. Also read more recently The Silence of the Girls by her, a retelling of The Odyssey.

Elizabeth Strout, William Trevor, Rosamund Lehman, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Hocking, Clare Chambers.