The most-recommended books
Every reading list on NextBook answers one question: what should you read after a book you loved? These are the books that answer it most often.
Method: counted across all 171 reading lists on this site. A book earns one point per list that recommends it — never per mention — so a title can’t climb by being repeated, only by being the answer for many different books.
#1on 26 of 171 listsThe Maze Runner
James Dashner
Thomas arrives by lift in a walled glade with no memory and a group of boys who have been trying to solve the surrounding maze for two years. A girl arrives the next day with a message.
#2on 25 of 171 listsThe Giver
Lois Lowry
Jonas lives in a community that has removed colour, weather, choice and pain. At twelve he is assigned to be the Receiver of Memory and begins to learn what was traded away.
#3on 25 of 171 listsThe Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
A circus that opens only at night is the arena for a contest between two young magicians bound to it by their teachers. Neither fully understands the rules or how the game ends.
#4on 23 of 171 listsThe Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
In a nation divided into twelve districts, two teenagers from each are sent annually into a televised fight to the death. Katniss Everdeen volunteers in place of her younger sister.
#5on 21 of 171 listsEnder's Game
Orson Scott Card
Earth's military takes gifted children to an orbiting Battle School and trains them through war games to command a fleet against an alien species. Ender Wiggin, six years old at the start, is the one they are counting on.
#6on 19 of 171 listsRed Queen
Victoria Aveyard
In a kingdom split between Silver-blooded elites with powers and powerless Reds, a Red thief named Mare discovers she has an ability of her own and is passed off as a lost Silver princess.
#7on 16 of 171 listsShadow and Bone
Leigh Bardugo
An orphaned mapmaker in a war-torn, Russian-inflected nation discovers she can summon light and is taken to the royal court to train among the Grisha under the command of the Darkling.
#8on 16 of 171 listsThe Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins
Rachel, who has lost her job and her marriage to alcoholism, watches the same couple from her commuter train each morning and invents a life for them. When the woman goes missing, Rachel involves herself in the investigation. The story is told by three women.
#9on 16 of 171 listsThe Secret History
Donna Tartt
A scholarship student joins a small, insular Greek class at an elite Vermont college and is drawn into a killing among his new friends. The novel traces what led to it and what follows.
#10on 15 of 171 listsGone Girl
Gillian Flynn
Amy Dunne disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary and her husband Nick becomes the prime suspect. The story alternates between his account and her diary.
#11on 15 of 171 listsNeuromancer
William Gibson
Case, a burned-out console cowboy in Chiba City, is hired by a mysterious employer who repairs his nervous system in exchange for one last run. The job turns out to serve an artificial intelligence.
#12on 15 of 171 listsThe Bear and the Nightingale
Katherine Arden
In medieval Rus', a boyar's daughter named Vasya can see the household and forest spirits her neighbours have stopped believing in. When a new priest preaches those spirits away, the protection they offered the village goes with them.
#13on 15 of 171 listsThe Road
Cormac McCarthy
A father and his young son walk south through a burned America, scavenging for food and avoiding other survivors. The novel follows their journey toward the coast.
#14on 15 of 171 listsThe Selection
Kiera Cass
America Singer is one of thirty-five girls chosen by lottery to compete for the hand of Prince Maxon in a country organised by numbered castes. The first book of a series.
#15on 14 of 171 listsDivergent
Veronica Roth
In a walled Chicago divided into five factions by temperament, sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior leaves her family's faction for another and must survive its initiation. She also hides that her aptitude test returned an inconclusive result.
#16on 14 of 171 listsHyperion
Dan Simmons
Seven pilgrims travel to the planet Hyperion and the Time Tombs, where a creature called the Shrike is waiting. On the journey each tells the story of what brought them there. The novel is built as a set of nested tales and does not resolve on its own.
#17on 14 of 171 listsStation Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
A flu pandemic collapses civilisation, and twenty years later a travelling symphony performs Shakespeare around the Great Lakes. The narrative moves between characters connected to one actor who died the night the world ended.
#18on 14 of 171 listsThe Golem and the Jinni
Helene Wecker
A golem made in Poland arrives masterless in New York in 1899, and a jinni is released from a copper flask in a Lower Manhattan tinsmith's shop. The two meet and their histories converge.
#19on 14 of 171 listsThe Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
In the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy that has replaced the United States, fertile women are assigned to powerful households as Handmaids. Offred narrates her assignment and what she remembers of the life before it.
#20on 13 of 171 listsBig Little Lies
Liane Moriarty
Three mothers at an Australian primary school become entangled through their children, and a death at a school fundraiser is investigated. Witness statements are interleaved with the narrative.
#21on 13 of 171 listsDune
Frank Herbert
The Atreides family takes control of Arrakis, the only source of the spice melange, and is betrayed. Paul Atreides escapes into the desert and among its people.
#22on 13 of 171 listsLegend
Marie Lu
In a militarised Republic on the west coast of a flooded North America, a fifteen-year-old prodigy is sent to hunt the country's most wanted criminal, who is also fifteen. Their accounts alternate.
#23on 13 of 171 listsThe Cruel Prince
Holly Black
Jude Duarte, a human girl raised in the High Court of Faerie by the man who killed her parents, seeks a place among the fae by making herself useful in their politics.
#24on 13 of 171 listsThe Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In 1945 Barcelona, a bookseller's son is taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and chooses a novel by Julián Carax. Someone has been destroying every other copy, and Daniel sets out to find out why.
#25on 13 of 171 listsThe Ten Thousand Doors of January
Alix E. Harrow
In the early 1900s, January Scaller is raised as the ward of a wealthy collector while her father travels the world acquiring artefacts. A book she finds describes doors between worlds and the people who close them.
#26on 13 of 171 listsUprooted
Naomi Novik
Every ten years the wizard known as the Dragon takes a girl from the valley he protects. This time he takes Agnieszka, who turns out to have magic of a kind he does not recognise.
#27on 12 of 171 listsBefore I Go to Sleep
S.J. Watson
Christine Lucas wakes each morning with no memory of the past twenty years and is told her history by the man who says he is her husband. A journal she has been secretly keeping tells her something else.
#28on 12 of 171 listsLeviathan Wakes
James S.A. Corey
Book one of The Expanse. An ice hauler is destroyed and a detective looks for a missing heiress; both threads lead to an alien substance and the brink of war between Earth, Mars and the Belt.
#29on 12 of 171 listsThe Couple Next Door
Shari Lapena
A couple leave their baby monitored at home while attending a dinner party next door and return to find her gone. The investigation turns on what each parent is not saying.
#30on 12 of 171 listsThe Hazel Wood
Melissa Albert
Alice has spent her life moving from town to town, trailed by bad luck, while her grandmother's cult fairy-tale collection stays out of print. When her mother is taken, Alice goes looking for the world those stories came from.
#31on 12 of 171 listsThe Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
Genly Ai is sent alone to the frozen planet Gethen to invite it to join an interstellar federation. Its inhabitants have no fixed sex, and his failure to understand this shapes the mission.
#32on 12 of 171 listsThe Silent Patient
Alex Michaelides
A London painter shoots her husband and then never speaks again. A forensic psychotherapist takes a job at the secure unit where she is held, determined to get her to talk.
#33on 12 of 171 listsThe Starless Sea
Erin Morgenstern
A graduate student finds a library book containing a scene from his own childhood, which leads him to a vast underground archive of stories beneath the earth. The novel braids his search with fables, fragments and other lives.
#34on 11 of 171 listsAn Ember in the Ashes
Sabaa Tahir
In an empire modelled on ancient Rome, Laia becomes a spy in the household of a brutal commandant to save her brother, while Elias, a soldier at the military academy, plans to desert.
#35on 11 of 171 listsRed Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
The first hundred colonists arrive on Mars and begin terraforming it, while dividing over whether the planet should be changed at all. First book of a trilogy.
#36on 11 of 171 listsThe Magicians
Lev Grossman
Quentin Coldwater is admitted to a secret college of magic in upstate New York, and later finds that the children's fantasy world he grew up reading about is real.
#37on 10 of 171 listsAncillary Justice
Ann Leckie
Breq is the last surviving fragment of Justice of Toren, a troop carrier whose artificial intelligence once occupied thousands of human bodies at once. Nineteen years after the ship's destruction, she is working towards revenge on the ruler of the Radch empire.
#38on 10 of 171 listsBehind Closed Doors
B. A. Paris
Jack and Grace appear to be an enviable couple. Alternating between past and present, the novel reveals what Grace's marriage is actually like and what she plans to do about it.
#39on 10 of 171 listsFahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman in a society where books are outlawed and burned, and his job is to burn them. Meeting a neighbour and then a hidden circle of readers changes what he does with the job.
#40on 10 of 171 listsJonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Susanna Clarke
In an England where practical magic has died out, Mr Norrell revives it and takes a pupil, Jonathan Strange. Their partnership and quarrel unfold against the Napoleonic wars.
#41on 10 of 171 listsSnow Crash
Neal Stephenson
Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the Mafia and is a warrior prince in the Metaverse. A drug that works on people both online and in the flesh turns out to have roots in Sumerian language.
#42on 10 of 171 listsThe 5th Wave
Rick Yancey
An alien arrival wipes out most of humanity in successive waves. Cassie Sullivan, separated from her younger brother, crosses an emptied America trying to reach him.
#43on 10 of 171 listsThe Bone Season
Samantha Shannon
In a 2059 London where clairvoyance is a capital crime, Paige works for a criminal syndicate until she is captured and shipped to a hidden penal colony run by an otherworldly race.
#44on 10 of 171 listsThe Name of the Wind
Patrick Rothfuss
Kvothe, living in hiding as an innkeeper, tells a chronicler the story of his life: his travelling-player childhood, years on the streets of Tarbean, and his admission to the University. The first book of the Kingkiller Chronicle.
#45on 10 of 171 listsThe Wife Between Us
Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen
A woman watches her ex-husband prepare to marry someone younger, and the novel's account of who is who does not hold. Told across two timelines.
#46on 10 of 171 listsThe Woman in the Window
A.J. Finn
Anna Fox, an agoraphobic child psychologist, spends her days watching her Harlem neighbours through a camera lens and believes she has seen a woman across the park attacked.
#47on 9 of 171 listsBrave New World
Aldous Huxley
In a future World State, citizens are hatched to order into fixed castes and kept content with conditioning, casual sex and the drug soma. An outsider raised elsewhere is brought into it.
#48on 9 of 171 listsCirce
Madeline Miller
A retelling of the life of Circe, the witch of Aiaia, from her childhood in her father's halls to her exile and her encounters with Odysseus, Daedalus and the gods.
#49on 9 of 171 listsDelirium
Lauren Oliver
In a United States where love is classified as a disease, every citizen is cured at eighteen. Lena Haloway is counting down to her procedure when she meets a boy from outside the system.
#50on 9 of 171 listsFoundation
Isaac Asimov
A mathematician predicts the collapse of a galactic empire and establishes a foundation intended to shorten the dark age that follows. The novel covers several crises across successive generations.
#51on 9 of 171 listsGraceling
Kristin Cashore
Katsa is Graced with killing and has been used as her uncle's enforcer since childhood. Working with a secret council, she meets a prince from a neighbouring kingdom and uncovers what is behind a recent abduction.
#52on 9 of 171 listsMatched
Ally Condie
The Society chooses each citizen's work, food, lifespan and spouse. At her Matching banquet Cassia is paired with her best friend, and then a second face appears on the screen.
#53on 9 of 171 listsSharp Objects
Gillian Flynn
A Chicago reporter returns to her Missouri hometown to cover the killings of two girls, and moves back into her mother's house while she reports the story.
#54on 8 of 171 lists1984
George Orwell
Winston Smith edits old news stories to match the Party's current version of history, and begins a forbidden affair and a private rebellion. The novel follows what the state does when it finds out.
#55on 8 of 171 listsA Darker Shade of Magic
V.E. Schwab
Kell is one of the last magicians able to travel between four parallel Londons, carrying letters between their rulers and smuggling on the side. A stolen object from a dead London follows him home.
#56on 8 of 171 listsAltered Carbon
Richard K. Morgan
In a future where consciousness is stored on a cortical stack and can be loaded into any body, ex-soldier Takeshi Kovacs is resleeved on Earth and hired by a centuries-old billionaire to investigate his own murder.
#57on 8 of 171 listsNever Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Kathy H. looks back on her childhood at Hailsham, an English boarding school, and on her friendships with Ruth and Tommy. The purpose the students were raised for emerges gradually.
#58on 8 of 171 listsSix of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
Kaz Brekker recruits five other outcasts from the criminal district of Ketterdam to break a prisoner out of an impregnable fortress. Set in the Grishaverse.
#59on 8 of 171 listsThe Darkest Minds
Alexandra Bracken
A disease kills most American children and leaves the survivors with dangerous abilities. Ruby escapes the government camp she has lived in since she was ten and travels with three other kids.
#60on 8 of 171 listsThe Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin builds an anarchist society that mostly works, then shows the small conformities calcifying inside it. Orwell's warning taken seriously by someone who still wants the experiment to succeed.
#61on 8 of 171 listsThe Fault in Our Stars
John Green
Hazel Grace Lancaster, sixteen and living with thyroid cancer, meets Augustus Waters at a support group. They bond over a novel and travel to Amsterdam to find its author.
#62on 8 of 171 listsThe Lies of Locke Lamora
Scott Lynch
In the canal city of Camorr, an orphan raised by a priest of the thief god runs an elaborate confidence scheme against the nobility while a newcomer moves against the city's criminal hierarchy. First of the Gentleman Bastard series.
#63on 8 of 171 listsThe Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky
Charlie, a fifteen-year-old starting high school, writes anonymous letters to a stranger about his first year, the older friends who take him in, and the memory he has not yet faced.
#64on 8 of 171 listsThe Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
In 1964 South Carolina, fourteen-year-old Lily Owens runs away with Rosaleen, the Black woman who raised her, and is taken in by three beekeeping sisters. Lily is searching for the truth about her dead mother.
#65on 8 of 171 listsThe Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu
A secret Chinese military project makes contact with an alien civilisation while, decades later, physicists begin dying and their experiments stop making sense. First book of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.
#66on 7 of 171 listsNeverwhere
Neil Gaiman
A Londoner stops to help an injured girl on the pavement and finds himself erased from his own life and living in London Below, a city of the fallen-through beneath the streets. Gaiman's first solo novel.
#67on 7 of 171 listsOryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
Snowman may be the last human alive, living beside a species engineered to replace us. In flashbacks he recounts his friendship with the scientist who designed both them and the plague that cleared the way.
#68on 7 of 171 listsRed Rising
Pierce Brown
Darrow, a miner in the lowest caste on a terraformed Mars, is surgically remade as a member of the ruling Gold caste and sent into their brutal training academy. The novel follows his infiltration and the war games that decide rank.
#69on 7 of 171 listsThe Book Thief
Markus Zusak
Narrated by Death, the novel follows Liesel Meminger, a foster child in a German town during the Second World War, who steals books and reads them aloud in an air-raid shelter.
#70on 7 of 171 listsThe Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
Holden Caulfield, expelled from a Pennsylvania prep school, spends three days alone in New York before going home. Narrated in retrospect from an institution.
#71on 7 of 171 listsThe Forever War
Joe Haldeman
William Mandella is conscripted into an interstellar war against the Taurans. Relativistic travel means that months of service cost him centuries at home, and each tour returns him to a more unrecognisable Earth.
#72on 7 of 171 listsThe Good Girl
Mary Kubica
The daughter of a Chicago judge is abducted by a man hired to deliver her to someone else, and instead takes her to a cabin in rural Minnesota. The story is told before and after her return, by several narrators.
#73on 7 of 171 listsThe Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nick Carraway narrates a summer on Long Island in 1922, spent among the wealthy and beside his neighbour Jay Gatsby, who is trying to recover a love from before the war. Fitzgerald's fourth novel.
#74on 7 of 171 listsThe Knife of Never Letting Go
Patrick Ness
A book obsessed with what language does to people — who controls it, who is denied it, what one written page can cost. Condie's poem, taken seriously for 500 pages.
#75on 7 of 171 listsThe Lying Game
Ruth Ware
Four women who met at a boarding school on the Sussex coast are summoned back by a text message after human remains are found nearby. The narrative alternates between their school years and the present.
#76on 7 of 171 listsThe Passage
Justin Cronin
A military virus experiment escapes and collapses the United States. The novel follows the girl at the center of the trials and, a century later, a walled colony of survivors who leave it.
#77on 6 of 171 listsA Separate Peace
John Knowles
Boarding-school friendship between a watcher and a golden boy, narrated years later by someone still auditing his own guilt. The wallflower's position, in wartime.
#78on 6 of 171 listsCaraval
Stephanie Garber
Scarlett Dragna and her sister travel to Caraval, a once-a-year performance where the audience plays a part in the game. Scarlett is told none of it is real, and then her sister goes missing.
#79on 6 of 171 listsEleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant keeps a rigid routine, speaks with unusual formality and drinks alone at weekends. A chance act of assistance to an elderly man draws her into an unexpected friendship.
#80on 6 of 171 listsIn a Dark, Dark Wood
Ruth Ware
Nora, a reclusive writer, accepts an invitation to the hen weekend of a friend she has not seen in ten years. She wakes in hospital afterwards, injured, with the weekend in fragments.
#81on 6 of 171 listsNevernight
Jay Kristoff
Mia Corvere travels to the Red Church to train as an assassin so she can kill the men who executed her father. Narrated with extensive footnotes.
#82on 6 of 171 listsOld Man's War
John Scalzi
On his seventy-fifth birthday John Perry enlists in the Colonial Defense Forces, which transfer recruits into engineered young bodies and send them to fight alien species for colony worlds.
#83on 6 of 171 listsShatter Me
Tahereh Mafi
Juliette has been held in an asylum by the ruling Reestablishment because her touch is fatal. When they decide to use her as a weapon, she has to choose what to do with the power. First in a series.
#84on 6 of 171 listsThe Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
Esther Greenwood wins a magazine internship in New York, returns home to Massachusetts and suffers a breakdown that leads to psychiatric hospitalisation. Sylvia Plath's only novel, published a month before her death.
#85on 6 of 171 listsThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon
Haddon's fifteen-year-old detective explains the world with the same unembarrassed precision Don does, diagrams included. The book Simsion gets compared to most.
#86on 6 of 171 listsThe Girl Before
J.P. Delaney
Two women, one minimalist house, and a landlord whose rules keep escalating. Lapena's domestic anxiety relocated into architecture, with a lost baby at the centre.
#87on 6 of 171 listsThe Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Mary Ann Shaffer
In 1946 a London writer begins corresponding with the members of a book society formed on Guernsey during the German occupation. The novel is told entirely through letters and telegrams.
#88on 6 of 171 listsThe Poppy War
R. F. Kuang
A war orphan tests into an elite military academy in an empire modelled on twentieth-century China, discovers a talent for shamanic fire, and is sent into an invasion. The first book of a trilogy.
#89on 6 of 171 listsThe Stand
Stephen King
An engineered influenza escapes a military facility and kills most of the population. The survivors are drawn by dreams toward two settlements, one in Boulder and one in Las Vegas.
#90on 6 of 171 listsThrone of Glass
Sarah J. Maas
An assassin competing for the right to serve a king she despises. Less vicious than Mia and more romantic, but the same fantasy of lethal competence in a ballgown.
#91on 6 of 171 listsWe
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The book Orwell reviewed shortly before writing his own, and it shows: glass apartments, numbered citizens, a mathematician who falls for the wrong woman and stops adding up.
#92on 6 of 171 listsWe Were Liars
E. Lockhart
Cadence Sinclair Eastman spends summers on her wealthy family's private island. After an accident she cannot remember, she returns two years later to work out what happened.
#93on 5 of 171 listsA Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
Four college friends build careers and lives in New York over three decades, with the novel narrowing onto Jude, a lawyer whose past keeps surfacing. Contains sustained depictions of abuse and self-harm.
#94on 5 of 171 listsA Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
Ove, a widower who enforces the rules of his Swedish housing association, is interrupted in his plans by the family that moves in next door. Flashbacks fill in his earlier life.
#95on 5 of 171 listsAnimal Farm
George Orwell
The animals of an English farm drive out the farmer and run the place themselves under a set of seven commandments. The pigs take charge of the administration, and the commandments begin to change.
#96on 5 of 171 listsBefore I Fall
Lauren Oliver
A popular high-school senior dies in a car crash and then relives the same Friday seven times, reconsidering her friendships and the way she has treated a classmate. Lauren Oliver's first novel.
#97on 5 of 171 listsCity of Brass
S. A. Chakraborty
Nahri, a con artist in eighteenth-century Cairo, accidentally summons a djinn warrior and is taken to Daevabad, a city ruled by feuding magical tribes. Her arrival unsettles a political order built on old atrocities.
#98on 5 of 171 listsEleanor & Park
Rainbow Rowell
First love written with the same precision and none of the syrup — two clever teenagers finding each other over shared obsessions, and a world that will not let them keep it.
#99on 5 of 171 listsIt's Kind of a Funny Story
Ned Vizzini
A boy steps off the treadmill of high-school achievement for five days and reassesses everything. Same compressed timeframe, same reckoning, much more humour.
#100on 5 of 171 listsRevelation Space
Alastair Reynolds
An archaeologist on a distant world investigates a civilisation destroyed a million years ago, while the crew of a starship and an assassin converge on the same secret.
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