100 Books Like The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde

There’s nothing better than a little gossip, especially when it’s about grown, mostly rich women, who enjoy knowing everything about everyone else but will do anything to protect their own secrets.

Big Little Lies lets the reader peek into the lives of a group of women and how their beliefs and actions are interwoven. Every action has a reaction, and consequences are very real, yet there is a fierce loyalty that drives the women to protect one another.

It’s not entirely clear who is “good” and who is “bad,” which makes it fun to play along and watch alliances shift or strengthen. You’re also not entirely certain what has happened, which I like because I usually always guess the ending!

Before reaching middle school, I pretty much believed that my friends—who they were and how many I had—determined my value. But my circle could be fickle; girls were ostracized for minor infractions (you bought the same coat as me!) I lived with daily fear of being dropped.

So Cat’s Eye captivated me with its lack of sentimentality in depicting (some) girls’ friendships. Elaine, a middle-aged artist, returns alone to Toronto, the city where she grew up,  for a retrospective of her work. The trip gives Elaine space to reflect on her life in that city, and Cordelia, her childhood “friend”, is central to her memories.

Cordelia tormented and humiliated Elaine, even putting her life in danger, yet Elaine remained loyal to her for years. It felt very real to me that this toxic relationship would continue to preoccupy Elaine into her functional adulthood. Girlhood friendships are often fraught, and Atwood… show more.

The Girls Are All So Nice Here uses one of my favorite literary devices: dual timelines.

We bounce back and forth between Ambrosia (Amb) Wellington’s freshman year of college and her ten-year college reunion, where she is confronted by the secrets she has been keeping for the last decade. I’m a sucker for dark academia, and this book’s setting felt so real, it could have been my own alma mater.

Shiver is one of the best books I read last year. Essentially it’s a locked room mystery set in the world of professional snowboarding. Milla gets an invitation to reunite with friends from her snowboarding days, but they’ve not been together since their friend, Saskia, went missing. And then, as is the way with edge-of-your-seat thrillers, they can’t get off the mountain, the storm’s closing in and someone is watching them. The truth about Saskia will come out one way or another. Milla and Saskia had been competitors, rivals, and then friends. It’s a complicated friendship and a fascinating look at professional sport and women at the top of their game, what they will sacrifice, and what they’ll do to win.

Spanning the decades between the 1920s and 1980s, this is the story of the Quintons of Kilneagh, County Cork, Protestant mill-owners but supporters of the Irish independence cause; of the revenge taken on them by the Black and Tans; and of its life-skewing consequences for the survivors of Kilneagh. The Quintons’ son, Willie, is confronted with an almost indescribable fork in the road: should he avenge the family for the Black and Tans’ atrocities? Or should he search his heart for forgiveness? His decision takes an enormous toll on his character, with ramifications for his ability to be truly close to any other human being, including his lover Marianne.

This is the first book of a fictionalized family history, starting with the omniscient narrator’s maternal grandparents and paternal aunt, who are all born in the late 1880s: the World War I generation. The story takes place near Nantes, which until 1956 was part of Brittany, but then was administratively moved to a new department, the Loire Atlantic—though most people in Nantes and Brittany continue to believe the Nantois are Breton. As with many things French, the issue is far from settled.

Rouaud creates character through vignettes—and they’re wonderful: grandpa smoking; grandpa driving; grandma complaining about grandpa smoking and driving; their car—the infamous, uncomfortable, 2CV, deux chevaux—in the rain, the wind, on hills, having to wipe the windshield by hand to see, clearing grandma’s side, not grandpa’s, whose vision is blocked by pouring rain, streaking mud, and cigarette smoke. The rain leaks through the windows, the vents, and canvas roof.… show more.

I grew up in the suburbs of a big city in an Italian American family that valued the “American Dream.” The path to success was marked by academic achievement and financial gain. These were among many tacit beliefs and stories, right alongside what it means to be in a marriage and to have children, that led me on a decades-long journey straight into the mid-life collapse of all I’d worked towards.

Frangello’s account of conditions, events, and an underlying, perilous terrain of female identity and romantic ideology treads so close to my own experience of catastrophic relational collapse and betrayal. As in my own life, the crisis extends backward and forwards in time, unearthing the buried ground on which I inadvertently founded my dreams and built my life. This book is a lens that reframed my history and refocused my future.

Orga’s memoir begins with scenes from his idyllic childhood as the son of a great beauty, adored by his autocratic grandmother and indulged by all. His was a prosperous family, their future secure under the Ottoman sultans until the First World War broke out and everything changed. They went from enjoying elaborate dinner parties, going to the hamam and sleeping on soft sheets, to living in poverty, waking in dank rooms, and never knowing if there’d be enough to eat. Orga writes without sentiment of the impact of the war on his upper-class family, and the complete reconstruction of society under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern Turkish republic. Orga lived and observed the tensions and struggles around sacred and secular life, the divide between rich and poor, and the importance of family to all. Despite the passing of the years, many of the events and… show more.

I’m Canadian and, like all theatre people of my era, I first fell in love with MacDonald’s writing when I saw her ingenious breakout play, Good Night, Desdemona, Good Morning, Juliet. Then she published this, a captivating Maritime gothic full of ghosts and other hauntings, as well as visual doublings, such as mistaken identities, breathtaking in their wit.

Loosely inspired by the author’s own family history on Cape Breton Island, including both Lebanese and Gaelic-Canadian strands, this novel is a stunning example of historical fiction that is deadly accurate in its evocations of societal, cultural, and geographic strictures while also being hugely inventive. Lush and compelling. 

The Railway Children is a rich family saga set in 1905 told from the perspective of the children, Bobbie, Phyllis, and Peter. They live a happy, comfortable life until their father is suddenly taken away by two police officers. The family is forced to move away and adapt to living in the countryside on a much-reduced income. The separation from their father is keenly felt by the children, whilst their mother hides her own distress to protect them. 

We eventually realise that an injustice has occurred, but how can the children hope to reunite with their father? The Railway might provide an answer. Edith Nesbit has created a warm and engaging novel where acts of kindness, sometimes misguided, are integral to the storytelling.