Books like The Lovely Bones
What should you read after Alice Sebold’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Alice Sebold
- 2002
- Literary fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Lovely Bones
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Fault in Our Stars
John Green
Green does what Sebold does: puts a teenage voice at the centre of a death and refuses to make it either tidy or unbearable. You will cry and be glad you did.
- Whether the living can let go
- Narrated by the murdered girl
- Dreamlike, image-heavy prose
- No supernatural frame
Best for the child's-eye narrationRoom
Emma Donoghue
Another appalling crime told entirely in a child's vocabulary, which is precisely what makes it bearable and precisely what makes it land. Same trick, tighter frame.
- Narrated by the murdered girl
- A family coming apart in slow motion
- Watching the killer walk free
- Claustrophobic first half
Best for love that outlasts a bodyThe Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
A love story where one person keeps vanishing and the other keeps waiting, which is roughly what the Salmons do for ten years with better weather.
- Whether the living can let go
- A heaven built to personal taste
- Dreamlike, image-heavy prose
- Far more romance
Great matchWe Were Liars
E. Lockhart
A privileged family, a summer that goes wrong, and a narrator you slowly realise cannot be trusted about what happened. It hits the same nerve, faster.
- A family coming apart in slow motion
- Dreamlike, image-heavy prose
- Suburbia in the mid-seventies
- The twist is the whole engine
Great matchBefore I Fall
Lauren Oliver
A girl dies on page one and keeps living the day anyway. Same bargain as Susie's: an afterlife that exists mainly so someone can watch what they left behind.
- Narrated by the murdered girl
- Whether the living can let go
- Groundhog Day structure repeats
Best for the voice from beyondThe Book Thief
Markus Zusak
Death himself narrates this one, and like Susie he is more tender about the living than they are about each other. The distance is what makes it hurt.
- Narrated by the murdered girl
- Dreamlike, image-heavy prose
- A family coming apart in slow motion
- Nazi Germany, not Pennsylvania
Best for the family aftermathEverything I Never Told You
Celeste Ng
Opens with a dead daughter and spends the rest of the book on what her parents and siblings had already failed to see. The Salmon house, essentially, in Ohio.
- A family coming apart in slow motion
- Whether the living can let go
- Suburbia in the mid-seventies
- No afterlife, no killer
Great matchThe Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
A girl carrying a mother-shaped hole finds a household willing to hold her. Sebold's ache, but pointed toward repair rather than the crime.
- Whether the living can let go
- A family coming apart in slow motion
- Much gentler throughout
Worth a look — with a warningThe Nightingale
Kristin Hannah
Two sisters, occupied France, and losses that keep arriving. If what you wanted from Sebold was the sustained ache of a family enduring, this delivers it at length.
- A family coming apart in slow motion
- Whether the living can let go
- War novel, not domestic
Great matchIf I Stay
Gayle Forman
A girl hovers outside her own body after the crash and listens to everyone decide what she means to them. Susie's vantage point, compressed into one hospital night.
- Narrated by the murdered girl
- A family coming apart in slow motion
- A heaven built to personal taste
- Very slight, read in an evening
Best for the strange afterlife logicThe Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman
Gaiman does what Sebold does with heaven: builds a private otherworld out of one person's memory and refuses to explain the rules. It works better unexplained.
- A heaven built to personal taste
- Dreamlike, image-heavy prose
- Narrated by the murdered girl
- Under 200 pages
Worth a look — with a warningMy Sister's Keeper
Jodi Picoult
Picoult builds a family around one dying child and lets every member narrate their own version of the damage. Same architecture, courtroom instead of cornfield.
- A family coming apart in slow motion
- Whether the living can let go
- Legal procedural in the middle
Worth a look — with a warningMister Pip
Lloyd Jones
A girl on a war-torn island survives on borrowed stories, then meets violence that the book does not soften. Quiet, then brutal, in Sebold's exact pattern.
- Dreamlike, image-heavy prose
- Watching the killer walk free
- Whether the living can let go
- One scene is genuinely brutal
What should you read after The Lovely Bones?
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold 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 Fault in Our Stars by John Green — green does what Sebold does: puts a teenage voice at the centre of a death and refuses to make it either tidy or unbearable. You will cry and be glad you did.
If what stayed with you was narrated by the murdered girl, read Room by Emma Donoghue instead: another appalling crime told entirely in a child's vocabulary, which is precisely what makes it bearable and precisely what makes it land. Same trick, tighter frame. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is the other strong option — a love story where one person keeps vanishing and the other keeps waiting, which is roughly what the Salmons do for ten years with better weather.
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