Books like The Lying Life of Adults — picked by fans

This is a meta-fictional novel about the fragile state of memory and interpretation.

Stories can save us, and in the case of 13-year-old Briony Tallis, stories can ruin us. A single accusation is enough to destroy her sister, a young man’s life, and their future together. It shows us that the art of writing can be both sacred and profane.

It is a novel inhabited by ghosts, one that taught me the importance of absence in storytelling, of the silences and liminal spaces when writing about epic events. The style obfuscates the plot, then later renders it in vivid detail.

What lives between the lines is critical. It asks if forgiveness and acts of retribution can counter the death that eventually comes for all of us.

This is so much more than a love triangle story that I hesitate to reduce it to merely that. The novel explores interracial relationships, “blackness” in both an African and an African-American context, and the ways in which those worlds collide, etc., etc. At its broadest, the book describes the story of the Nigerian diaspora writ large. But at its core, this is the story of a love triangle—the sort of story I love most.

(I grew up a bit of a mama’s boy, and in our household, we loved love stories…)

As in Ishiguro and Jones, cited above, and in Garcia Marquez, noted next, the characters here submit to pressures and make difficult choices—as thoughtfully as they can, under the circumstances. And those choices have life-changing consequences that the characters eventually come to regret.

I love Toni Morrison's works and consider her one of my favorite authors. I would argue, as others have, that Morrison is one of the greatest American writers ever. I appreciate that the characters in all of her books, including this one, are always dynamic. I also appreciate how Morrison shares the main characters' traumas, tragedies, and triumphs.

I am in awe of the repressed, elegiac emotion that Ishiguro brings to his characters.

Never Let Me Go kept me in a state of constant tension between Kathy’s version of events (which is full of omissions and self-deception) and the version I was constructing in my own head (which was so often at odds with hers).

This is something Ishiguro also does brilliantly in other books, but here I was particularly drawn to the deft way he shows us a morally bankrupt adult world through the eyes of an adolescent protagonist – that’s exactly the territory I write.

Like the fish who doesn’t realise the water is there, Kathy struggles to understand the true nature of Hailsham until it’s far too late; and there’s real moral anger behind the quiet delivery.

I’ve always been fascinated by strange social enclaves and secretive, sealed-off, private worlds, and this book has both.

But in fact, the thing I admire most here is the sense of place and atmosphere. Tartt writes with a lush, immersive style which I found is increasingly compelling as the book went on.

Using a murder as the gateway drug to what’s really a literary fiction character study is both sneaky and brilliant: I was hooked by the story in the first chapter, but once I’d finished the book, it was Richard’s voice, those eerie characters, their strange insular co-dependency, and the biting Vermont winter landscape that really stayed with me.

This was my favorite book the year I read it, and I will read it again, with no doubt the same result. The narrator is an anonymous 18-year-old woman navigating family, community, and romantic relationships in the midst of the Irish Troubles.

Almost every character is identified by a local nickname, part town culture and part a way to keep both authorities and rebels off track. I loved the strong writing and the surprising but always plausible twists. I’ve recommended it to every reader I know.

I loved this book because it’s the best illustration of the stepmother-stepdaughter relationship that I’ve ever read. Flo and Rose’s conflicts over work, sex, and a woman’s place in the world made me remember exactly what it was like to be a teenager struggling to relate to older women in my life.

Like many of Alice Munro’s celebrated short stories, it’s about a young woman growing up in rural Ontario who strains against the prejudices of her small town, especially about girls’ education and ambition. “Who do you think you are?” is the question that comes up again and again in this novel-in-stories. Used as an insult, it challenges Rose to make a different life for herself without forgetting the women who came before her. 

This was the book that made me realize horror could terrify in a way that felt entirely familiar.

I read it when the cruelty of school was still a raw wound because I understood exactly how laughter is used to flatten a person until they start to disappear. It wasn’t the supernatural elements that stayed with me, but the profound loneliness of a girl shamed into a silence that eventually caught fire.

I finished it with the understanding that a "final snap" is never an accident, but the inevitable result of humiliation accumulating like a slow-burning medicine. King showed me that even the most quiet, discarded person carries a power that the world should be afraid of.

When the world ends, who will you turn to? For me, I’d turn to someone like Kainene in this book. Kainene isn’t beautiful, doesn’t play by the ridiculous rules of the feminine mystique, and is righteously bitter about a lot of things in her life. She’s also a guileless straight shooter people can count on, to tell the truth in any situation. That truth is never sugar-coated; it’s exactly what the characters in her life need to hear.

I love the bravery of her choice to keep her innermost thoughts private. I admire how steadfast she holds on to her commitment to what she believes will be a better future.

I loved Writers & Lovers because it captures something that isn’t talked about enough: the strange, in-between years of adulthood when you’re supposed to have things figured out but very much do not.

Casey is grieving, broke, juggling complicated romantic relationships, and trying to finish writing a book while the rest of the world seems to be moving forward. 

What resonated most with me is how honestly Lily King writes about ambition and uncertainty. Casey isn’t lost because she lacks intelligence or drive—she’s lost because life is complicated, money is stressful, and love rarely arrives in a neat, predictable form.