Books like The Lying Game
What should you read after Ruth Ware’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Ruth Ware
- 2017
- Psychological thriller
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Lying Game
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins
Ware and Hawkins write the same woman: someone whose account of events fails her at exactly the wrong moment, in a very damp and unglamorous English landscape.
- A narrator protecting herself
- Creeping English atmosphere
- Friendship built on secrets
- Leans on alcohol blackouts
Best for the reversalGone Girl
Gillian Flynn
If it was the moment the story you had been told collapses, Flynn does it harder and colder than anybody. Two accounts, one of which is a sustained performance.
- A narrator protecting herself
- Friendship built on secrets
- A boarding-school lie
- A marriage, not schoolfriends
Great matchThe Couple Next Door
Shari Lapena
A crime, a circle of people who all behave suspiciously afterwards, and a plot that keeps reassigning the guilt. Faster than Ware and considerably less atmospheric.
- A narrator protecting herself
- Four friends and one summons
- Plain, functional prose
Great matchBefore I Go to Sleep
S.J. Watson
The past arriving in fragments, each one worse than the last, and a woman assembling her own history out of documents she is not certain she wrote.
- A narrator protecting herself
- Slow-burn dread
- Past and present alternating
- Amnesia premise does the work
Great matchThe Woman in the Window
A.J. Finn
Another woman whose testimony everybody discounts, in a house she cannot leave, remembering something she would rather not. Ware's dread with the pace turned up.
- A narrator protecting herself
- Slow-burn dread
- American, urban, all indoors
Great matchBig Little Lies
Liane Moriarty
Women bound together by something they have agreed not to say aloud, in a school community that would much rather gossip than look. Warmer than Ware and just as pointed.
- Friendship built on secrets
- Four friends and one summons
- Comic, chatty register
Great matchThe Silent Patient
Alex Michaelides
For the pleasure of a withheld truth: a woman who stops speaking after a death, and a narrator whose interest in her is not remotely what he claims.
- A narrator protecting herself
- Slow-burn dread
- No friendship story here
Great matchThe Wife Between Us
Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen
Built on a trick Ware likes too — letting you assume the obvious relationship between two women, then quietly correcting you about a hundred pages in.
- A narrator protecting herself
- Friendship built on secrets
- Loses steam after the reveal
Worth a look — with a warningBehind Closed Doors
B. A. Paris
Then-and-now chapters tightening around a woman who cannot tell anyone what is happening to her. The structural rhythm you liked, at maximum unpleasantness.
- Past and present alternating
- Slow-burn dread
- Sustained domestic abuse
Great matchThe Good Girl
Mary Kubica
Kubica splits her story across before, after and several narrators the way Ware splits hers between school and now, and holds one fact back until the last page.
- Past and present alternating
- A narrator protecting herself
- Four friends and one summons
- Abduction plot, higher concept
Best for the school settingThe Cheerleaders
Kara Thomas
Five dead girls, a town that settled on the story it preferred, and a teenager picking at it years later. The boarding-school lie, relocated to an American high school.
- A boarding-school lie
- Past and present alternating
- Friendship built on secrets
- YA voice and pacing
Great matchTwo Can Keep a Secret
Karen M. McManus
A town where girls go missing and everyone's parents were teenagers together — the same idea that a lie told at school does not stay at school.
- A boarding-school lie
- Friendship built on secrets
- Four friends and one summons
- YA, with a romance subplot
Worth a look — with a warningGossip Girl
Cecily von Ziegesar
Here for the social machinery rather than the crime: a closed circle of privileged teenagers in which information is the only currency anybody respects.
- A boarding-school lie
- Friendship built on secrets
- No mystery and no body
What should you read after The Lying Game?
The Lying Game by Ruth Ware 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 Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins — ware and Hawkins write the same woman: someone whose account of events fails her at exactly the wrong moment, in a very damp and unglamorous English landscape.
If what stayed with you was a narrator protecting herself, read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn instead: if it was the moment the story you had been told collapses, Flynn does it harder and colder than anybody. Two accounts, one of which is a sustained performance. The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena is the other strong option — a crime, a circle of people who all behave suspiciously afterwards, and a plot that keeps reassigning the guilt. Faster than Ware and considerably less atmospheric.
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