Books like Room
What should you read after Emma Donoghue’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Emma Donoghue
- 2010
- Literary fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Room
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold
Another child's voice narrating something no child should have to describe, and another book that spends more time on the family's afterwards than on the crime itself.
- A five-year-old narrator
- The outside as the hard part
- Captivity seen from inside
- Narrated from an afterlife
Worth a look — with a warningThe Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson
For the reader who wants the same subject handled as investigation rather than interior life: a woman survives men who confine her, and does something about it.
- Captivity seen from inside
- The outside as the hard part
- Explicit assault on the page
Great matchThe Fault in Our Stars
John Green
Green does what Donoghue does: takes a situation designed to be unbearable and finds the ordinary jokes people actually make inside it.
- A mother's improvised normality
- A five-year-old narrator
- YA romance at its centre
Best for confinement from the insideThe Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
Offred narrates a locked room too, and Atwood shares Donoghue's interest in the small routines and private jokes a captive invents to stay a person.
- Captivity seen from inside
- A world eleven feet square
- A mother's improvised normality
- Political allegory, not one family
Worth a look — with a warningWe Need to Talk About Kevin
Lionel Shriver
The other half of Donoghue's subject: Room is about a mother who does everything right, and Shriver's narrator is not at all sure that she did.
- A mother's improvised normality
- The outside as the hard part
- Cold and deliberately unlikeable
Great matchStill Alice
Lisa Genova
Genova pulls the same trick as Donoghue — trapping you inside a mind whose grasp of the world does not match yours — and refuses to step outside it for relief.
- A five-year-old narrator
- A world eleven feet square
- Captivity seen from inside
- Illness rather than crime
Great matchThe Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
A childhood that was objectively terrible, remembered by someone who also remembers loving her parents — the same double vision Jack has about Room.
- A mother's improvised normality
- A five-year-old narrator
- The outside as the hard part
- Memoir, not fiction
Worth a look — with a warningA Stolen Life
Jaycee Dugard
The real case that hangs behind Room, told by the woman it happened to, including the part Donoghue got right: that being found is where the difficulty starts.
- Captivity seen from inside
- The outside as the hard part
- A mother's improvised normality
- A real person's abuse, not fiction
Great matchThe Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead
Whitehead is writing about captivity and the flight out of it, and like Donoghue he knows the escape is a beginning rather than an ending.
- Captivity seen from inside
- The escape happens halfway
- The outside as the hard part
- Explicit historical brutality
Great matchBefore I Fall
Lauren Oliver
A life narrowed to one repeating day, which is a lighter cousin of Jack's eleven-foot world: the same claustrophobia, the same slow reassessment of everything in it.
- A world eleven feet square
- Objects treated as people
- YA high-school setting
Best for the narrating voiceThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon
The closest match to what makes Room work: a narrator whose way of describing things lets you see facts he cannot, especially about his own parents.
- A five-year-old narrator
- Objects treated as people
- The outside as the hard part
- Comic in stretches
Great matchThe Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
Hosseini writes childhood damage and its adult bill with the same directness, and readers who finished Room in one sitting tend to do the same here.
- The outside as the hard part
- A mother's improvised normality
- Adult narrator looking back
Great matchThe Book Thief
Markus Zusak
Another book that puts atrocity at a child's height and lets an odd narrating voice carry it, including a person hidden in a room nobody may know about.
- A five-year-old narrator
- Objects treated as people
- Captivity seen from inside
- Death narrates, with asides
What should you read after Room?
Room by Emma Donoghue 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 Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold — another child's voice narrating something no child should have to describe, and another book that spends more time on the family's afterwards than on the crime itself.
If what stayed with you was captivity seen from inside, read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson instead: for the reader who wants the same subject handled as investigation rather than interior life: a woman survives men who confine her, and does something about it. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is the other strong option — green does what Donoghue does: takes a situation designed to be unbearable and finds the ordinary jokes people actually make inside it.
Loved something else?
Start from any book and we’ll build the list around your reasons.
Find my next book →NextBook is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. We earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t affect which books we recommend or how we rank them.
More “what to read next” lists
- Books like 1984
- Books like 2312
- Books like A Clockwork Orange
- Books like A Darker Shade of Magic
- Books like A Gentleman in Moscow
- Books like A Little Life
- Books like A Man Called Ove
- Books like A Memory Called Empire
- Books like A Wrinkle in Time
- Books like All Systems Red
- Books like All the Bright Places
- Books like Altered Carbon