Books like Babel
What should you read after R. F. Kuang’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- R. F. Kuang
- 2022
- 560 pages
- Fantasy
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Babel
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Secret History
Donna Tartt
The novel Babel is arguing with: a small elite seminar, an outsider desperate to be let in, and the precise moment at which belonging becomes complicity.
- Dark academia at Oxford
- A friend group fracturing
- Colonialism and complicity
- No magic, no empire
Best for colonialism and complicityA Memory Called Empire
Arkady Martine
An ambassador from a small station arrives in the empire whose poetry she has loved all her life, and has to decide what that love has made her.
- Colonialism and complicity
- Language and translation
- Open political anger
- Space opera, not academia
Best for language and translationEmbassytown
China Miéville
The other novel that makes translation the literal mechanism of its plot: an alien language incapable of lying, and a human colony that breaks it anyway.
- Language and translation
- Colonialism and complicity
- Magic with rules
- Far-future science fiction
- Jonathan Strange & Mr NorrellBest for footnotes and scholarship
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Susanna Clarke
The other great footnoted novel about English magic as a national institution, except Clarke is amused by the empire where Kuang is genuinely furious with it.
- Footnotes and scholarship
- Magic with rules
- Dark academia at Oxford
- Comic and arch in tone
Best for a friend group fracturingIf We Were Villains
M.L. Rio
For the cohort rather than the empire: seven Shakespeare students who love each other and their subject, right up until the pressure snaps the group apart.
- A friend group fracturing
- Dark academia at Oxford
- Footnotes and scholarship
- No politics, no magic
Worth a look — with a warningThe Poppy War
R. F. Kuang
Kuang's first, and the angrier one: a military academy, a colonial war she flatly refuses to aestheticise, and a cohort destroyed by what they enlisted in.
- Open political anger
- Colonialism and complicity
- A friend group fracturing
- Genocide depicted directly
What should you read after Babel?
Babel by R. F. Kuang works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Secret History by Donna Tartt — the novel Babel is arguing with: a small elite seminar, an outsider desperate to be let in, and the precise moment at which belonging becomes complicity.
If what stayed with you was colonialism and complicity, read A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine instead: an ambassador from a small station arrives in the empire whose poetry she has loved all her life, and has to decide what that love has made her. Embassytown by China Miéville is the other strong option — the other novel that makes translation the literal mechanism of its plot: an alien language incapable of lying, and a human colony that breaks it anyway.
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