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Recommendations based on There but for theby Ali Smith
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The Accidental
by Ali Smith
A stranger's arrival disrupts the lives of a family, leading to unexpected connections and revelations.
Set in 2003, the novel consists of three parts: "The Beginning," "Middle" and "The End." Each part contains four separate narrations, one focusing on each member of the Smart family: Eve, the mother, ... (Wikipedia)
How to Be Both
by Ali Smith
Exploring duality and interconnectedness through the life of a girl and a Renaissance artist.
Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literary sensation. Her novels consistently ... (Goodreads)
NW
by Zadie Smith
A story of a group of friends in London navigating love and identity in their complex lives.
Set in northwest London, Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragicomic novel follows four locals—Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan—as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their ... (Goodreads)
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
by Eimear McBride
A young woman's inner journey through trauma and emotional turmoil.
Eimear McBride's debut tells, with astonishing insight and in brutal detail, the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. Not so ... (Goodreads)
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald
A man discovers his past and identity through the story of a Jewish boy who escaped Nazi Germany.
Jacques Austerlitz, the main character in the book, is an architectural historian who encounters and befriends the solitary narrator in Antwerp during the 1960s. Gradually we come to understand his ... (Wikipedia)
The Art of Fielding
by Chad Harbach
A college baseball team's success and failures are intertwined with the lives of five individuals.
Henry Skrimshander begins the novel as a 17-year-old playing on a Legion baseball team in Lankton, South Dakota. Although physically short and not muscular, Henry has an unusual gift for fielding, ... (Wikipedia)
The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes
An exploration of memory and its impact on the present, looking at the choices we make in life.
By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be ... (Goodreads)
Autumn
by Ali Smith
A novel about the friendship between an elderly man and a young woman, exploring themes of memory, time, and the changing of seasons.
Daniel Gluck, a 101-year-old former songwriter, lies asleep and dreaming in his care home. He is regularly visited by 32-year-old Elisabeth Demand, who had been his next door neighbour as a young ... (Wikipedia)
Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen
A family saga revealing the struggles of a divided nation, and the power of love to heal.
The novel opens with a brief look at the Berglund family during their time living in St. Paul, Minnesota , from the perspective of their nosy neighbors. The Berglunds are portrayed as an ideal ... (Wikipedia)
Stoner
by John Williams
An academic's life of quiet desperation, finding solace in literature.
William Stoner is born on a small farm in 1891. After high school, the county agent advises he go to agriculture school. Stoner enrolls in the University of Missouri , where all agriculture students ... (Wikipedia)
The Marriage Plot
by Jeffrey Eugenides
A young woman's exploration of love, life, and her place in the world.
It's the early 1980s - the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to the ... (Goodreads)
Swimming Home
by Deborah Levy
A haunting tale of a poet's family vacation in the French Riviera, disrupted by the arrival of a disturbed young woman.
In the summer of 1994 the poet Joe Jacobs (Polish émigré Jozef Nowogrodzki) is on vacation in a summer home in the south of France with his wife Isabel, his daughter Nina, and their friends, the ... (Wikipedia)
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
A fantastical, satirical examination of Soviet life, intersecting with the supernatural.
The novel has two settings. The first is Moscow during the 1930s, where Satan appears at Patriarch's Ponds as Professor Woland . He is accompanied by Koroviev, a grotesquely-dressed valet; Behemoth , ... (Wikipedia)
Small Island
by Andrea Levy
A story of post-WWII immigration, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and racism.
Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received ... (Goodreads)
Transit
by Rachel Cusk
A woman's journey of rediscovering herself after divorce, through encounters with others.
The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with, Outline, one of, The New York Times Book Review,’s ten best books of 2015 . In the wake of family collapse, a writer and her two young sons ... (Goodreads)
The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
The story of a young gay man in Thatcher's England, navigating his identity and sexuality.
The novel is set in Britain in three parts, taking place in 1983, 1986 and 1987. The story surrounds the young gay protagonist, Nick Guest. Nick is middle-class and from the fictional market town of ... (Wikipedia)
The Shock of the Fall
by Nathan Filer
A young man's struggle with mental illness and his journey to find understanding and acceptance.
What begins as the story of a lost boy turns into a story of a brave man yearning to understand what happened that night, in the years since, and to his very person. While on vacation with their ... (Goodreads)
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
Exploration of the complexities of human relationships and family life.
The novel is set in the Ramsays' summer home in the Hebrides , on the Isle of Skye . The section begins with Mrs Ramsay assuring her son James that they should be able to visit the lighthouse on the ... (Wikipedia)
Sexing the Cherry
by Jeanette Winterson
A fantastical journey through time and space, exploring gender, sexuality, and the fluidity of identity.
In a fantastic world that is and is not seventeenth-century England, a baby is found floating in the Thames. The child, Jordan, is rescued by Dog Woman and grows up to travel the world like Gulliver, ... (Goodreads)
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
A family drama exploring the complexities of relationships, aging and life’s choices.
The novel shifts back and forth through the late 20th century, intermittently following spouses Alfred and Enid Lambert as they raise their children Gary, Chip, and Denise in the traditional ... (Wikipedia)
Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
A historical fiction about the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII.
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry ... (Goodreads)
Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
Story of a man's struggle to reconcile his Jewish identity and the expectations of English society.
Daniel Deronda contains two main strains of plot, united by the title character. The novel begins in late August 1865 , with the meeting of Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth in the fictional town ... (Wikipedia)
Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
A spiritual exploration of death, exploring the afterlife through the eyes of President Lincoln.
In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by ... (Goodreads)
Canada
by Richard Ford
A family's relocation to a small Canadian town, exploring the depths of human relationships.
After his parents are arrested for robbing a bank, fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is left to fend for himself. His twin sister Berner has run off, leaving him to a family friend who secrets him away ... (Wikipedia)
The Sea, the Sea
by Iris Murdoch
A man's voyage of self-reflection, finding redemption in the depths of the ocean.
The Sea, the Sea is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs . Murdoch's novel exposes the motivations that drive her ... (Wikipedia)
The Strange Library
by Haruki Murakami
A young boy's surreal journey inside a mysterious library, discovering its secrets.
From internationally acclaimed author Haruki Murakami—a fantastical illustrated short novel about a boy imprisoned in a nightmarish library. Opening the flaps on this unique little book, readers will ... (Goodreads)
Mansfield Park
by Jane Austen
Social satire exploring morality and class in 19th century England.
Fanny Price, at age ten, is sent from her impoverished home in Portsmouth to live as one of the family at Mansfield Park, the Northamptonshire country estate of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram. There ... (Wikipedia)
One Day
by David Nicholls
A story of friendship and love, exploring the complexities of life and relationships.
Dexter and Emma spend the night together following their graduation from the University of Edinburgh , in 1988. They talk about how they will be once they are 40. While they do not become ... (Wikipedia)
Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
An exploration of race, identity, and belonging as two Nigerian immigrants experience life in America and beyond.
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to ... (Goodreads)
Quicksilver
by Neal Stephenson
Epic fantasy adventure set in a world of magic, politics and alchemy.
The first book is a series of flashbacks from 1713 to the earlier life of Daniel Waterhouse. It begins as Enoch Root arrives in Boston in October 1713 to deliver a letter to Daniel containing a ... (Wikipedia)
