Books like The Great Gatsby
What should you read after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- 1925
- Literary fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Great Gatsby
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
Another young American narrator circling a world he has decided is phony, except Holden says out loud what Nick is too well-mannered to admit. Same disillusionment, far less champagne.
- Careless rich people
- Parties nobody actually enjoys
- A narrator who won't judge
- No glamour and no parties
Best for the narrator on the edge of itThe Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky
Charlie watches other people's lives the way Nick watches Gatsby's — from the side of the room, taking notes, half in love with everyone he describes.
- A narrator who won't judge
- Parties nobody actually enjoys
- The prose itself
- Suburban Nineties, no wealth
Great matchThe Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
New York glitter examined from inside: Esther is handed the summer everyone claims to want and finds it hollow. Fitzgerald's emptiness beneath the glamour, without the consolation of a love story.
- The prose itself
- Parties nobody actually enjoys
- Careless rich people
- Depression rendered clinically
Best for the careless richThe Secret History
Donna Tartt
Tartt's students are Tom and Daisy with better Greek: beautiful, monied, destructive and quite sure somebody else will clean up. Narrated by an outsider desperate to be let in.
- Careless rich people
- Reinventing yourself from nothing
- A narrator who won't judge
- 560 pages, slow burn
Great matchWhite Oleander
Janet Fitch
Fitch writes beauty, money and self-invention with the same lush cruelty, following a girl who has to build a self from scratch every time a new household reshapes her.
- Reinventing yourself from nothing
- The prose itself
- Careless rich people
- Foster care, not old money
Best for love aimed at a memoryWuthering Heights
Emily Bronte
Heathcliff spends a lifetime and a fortune trying to win back a woman who is already gone — Gatsby's obsession, given moors, decades and a considerably worse temper.
- Love aimed at a memory
- The green light across the water
- Reinventing yourself from nothing
- No sympathy anywhere in it
Best for the proseThe Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Wilde and Fitzgerald share a suspicion that a beautiful surface is the whole crime. Dorian gets to keep his surface and pays for it somewhere upstairs.
- The prose itself
- Careless rich people
- An ending that indicts everyone
- Overt fantasy premise
Worth a look — with a warningThe Book Thief
Markus Zusak
Shares the trick of a narrator who tells you the ending early and makes you care anyway, plus the same ache for a life glimpsed from outside somebody's window.
- The prose itself
- A narrator who won't judge
- An ending that indicts everyone
- Nazi Germany, not Long Island
Great matchThe Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
Another man narrating his own complicity from a safe distance and a later country, still trying to explain the afternoon when his family's money ruined somebody else's life.
- A narrator who won't judge
- Careless rich people
- An ending that indicts everyone
- Kabul and California
Great matchThe Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A young man narrates his obsession with a vanished figure whose life keeps rhyming with his own — the Gatsby structure transplanted to postwar Barcelona and dressed in gothic.
- Love aimed at a memory
- The green light across the water
- Reinventing yourself from nothing
- Gothic mystery machinery
Best for the partiesThe Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
If what you loved was the spectacle — the lights, the crowds, the sense that somebody spent a fortune conjuring a dream for strangers — Morgenstern gives you five hundred pages of it.
- Parties nobody actually enjoys
- Love aimed at a memory
- The prose itself
- Fantasy, with actual magic
Great matchA Separate Peace
John Knowles
A man returns to the place where he did the thing he cannot undo, and tells it slant. Knowles has Fitzgerald's chill: privilege, envy and one irreversible second.
- An ending that indicts everyone
- A narrator who won't judge
- Careless rich people
- Boys' boarding school, wartime
Worth a look — with a warningNorwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami
Murakami's narrator is also looking back at one lost year and a girl he could not hold, with the same conviction that the past is a place you could nearly reach.
- Love aimed at a memory
- The green light across the water
- A narrator who won't judge
- Frank sexual content throughout
What should you read after The Great Gatsby?
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 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 Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger — another young American narrator circling a world he has decided is phony, except Holden says out loud what Nick is too well-mannered to admit. Same disillusionment, far less champagne.
If what stayed with you was a narrator who won't judge, read The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky instead: charlie watches other people's lives the way Nick watches Gatsby's — from the side of the room, taking notes, half in love with everyone he describes. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is the other strong option — new York glitter examined from inside: Esther is handed the summer everyone claims to want and finds it hollow. Fitzgerald's emptiness beneath the glamour, without the consolation of a love story.
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