Books like The Girl on the Train
What should you read after Paula Hawkins’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Paula Hawkins
- 2015
- Psychological thriller
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Girl on the Train
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchGone Girl
Gillian Flynn
The book that made yours possible, and still the sharper of the two: two unreliable narrators, a missing wife, and a marriage taken apart with real cruelty.
- A twist you half-saw coming
- An unlikeable heroine
- A wife replaced
- Colder and more calculated
Best for the missing memoryBefore I Go to Sleep
S.J. Watson
Amnesia as the entire engine: a woman who wakes with no past, a journal she is not sure she can trust, and a husband whose account keeps shifting.
- A narrator who can't remember
- Gaslighting you can feel
- A twist you half-saw coming
- One narrator only
Great matchThe Woman in Cabin 10
Ruth Ware
A woman nobody believes, reporting a crime nobody can verify, drinking rather more than she should. Ware runs your central problem inside a locked ship.
- A narrator who can't remember
- Watching strangers from a train
- Gaslighting you can feel
- A whodunnit, not a character study
Worth a look — with a warningThe Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson
The other Girl book, and a very different animal: a cold-case investigation preceded by a hundred pages of Swedish financial journalism before anything happens.
- An unlikeable heroine
- A twist you half-saw coming
- Suburban houses with secrets
- Graphic sexual violence
Great matchIn a Dark, Dark Wood
Ruth Ware
Opens with a woman in hospital who cannot remember what she has done — Ware's most direct answer to the blackout problem, over one weekend in a glass house.
- A narrator who can't remember
- A twist you half-saw coming
- Suburban houses with secrets
- Slighter than yours
Best for the neighboursThe Couple Next Door
Shari Lapena
Lapena's whole business is the respectable street where everybody is lying — the same suburban dread, delivered at twice the speed and half the depth.
- Suburban houses with secrets
- Watching strangers from a train
- A wife replaced
- Characters are thin throughout
Best for the damaged narratorSharp Objects
Gillian Flynn
Flynn's first, and the best portrait here of a woman drinking her way through an investigation. Considerably nastier than Hawkins, and much better written.
- An unlikeable heroine
- A narrator who can't remember
- Suburban houses with secrets
- Self-harm described directly
Great matchThe Silent Patient
Alex Michaelides
Built entirely around one withheld fact, and the withholding is the whole point. If the twist was your reason for reading, this is the purest version of it.
- A twist you half-saw coming
- Gaslighting you can feel
- A narrator who can't remember
- Characters serve the trick
Great matchBig Little Lies
Liane Moriarty
The same school-gate suburb and the same violence behind a good address, except Moriarty is funny about it and will not leave you feeling grubby afterwards.
- Three women, three timelines
- Suburban houses with secrets
- An unlikeable heroine
- Comic tone, not dread
Great matchThe Widow
Fiona Barton
The wife who insists she knew nothing, told across shifting perspectives and years. Barton is chasing your question: how much can a woman refuse to see?
- Three women, three timelines
- A narrator who can't remember
- A wife replaced
- Quieter, with fewer shocks
Worth a look — with a warningBehind Closed Doors
B. A. Paris
The most claustrophobic book here: a perfect marriage from the pavement and a prison from inside it. Crude in places, and almost impossible to put down.
- Gaslighting you can feel
- Suburban houses with secrets
- A wife replaced
- A cartoonishly evil villain
Best for the wife replacedThe Wife Between Us
Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen
Explicitly about the discarded first wife and the younger woman taking her place, and it knows precisely which assumption you are going to make about that.
- A wife replaced
- A twist you half-saw coming
- A narrator who can't remember
- Second half loses tension
Best for the guiltThe Secret History
Donna Tartt
A step up in ambition rather than sideways: you know the killers from page one, so every ounce of tension comes from watching people live with it.
- An unlikeable heroine
- Gaslighting you can feel
- A twist you half-saw coming
- You know the killers immediately
What should you read after The Girl on the Train?
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins 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 Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn — the book that made yours possible, and still the sharper of the two: two unreliable narrators, a missing wife, and a marriage taken apart with real cruelty.
If what stayed with you was a narrator who can't remember, read Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson instead: amnesia as the entire engine: a woman who wakes with no past, a journal she is not sure she can trust, and a husband whose account keeps shifting. The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware is the other strong option — a woman nobody believes, reporting a crime nobody can verify, drinking rather more than she should. Ware runs your central problem inside a locked ship.
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