Bonnie Garmus wrote a book that shouldn't work: 1960s sexism, a cookery show, a dog with opinions — and it's funny. These twelve share the trick, clever women against the grain of their time, written with wit rather than despair.
Editor's Picks
- Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine — the closest in voice
- Small Pleasures — the English one
- Hidden Figures — the true version
01Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
A rigidly precise woman with a terrible past and no idea how to be with people. Funny, then quietly devastating — the closest match in voice. The comedy does a lot of work early on, which makes the last third land much harder than you expect.
02The Rosie Project
A geneticist designs a questionnaire to find a wife and meets someone who fails it entirely. The same warmth about a mind that works differently. Genuinely funny rather than whimsical, and Simsion never makes Don the joke.
03The Marriage Portrait
A teenage duchess in Renaissance Florence, married off and certain she is to be murdered. A different century, the same refusal to be disposed of. O'Farrell writes the fifteenth century as though she has been there. Tense from the first page.
05The Authenticity Project
A notebook of confessions passed between strangers in a London cafe. Big-hearted and slightly improbable, in the way that makes people love a book. Slight, warm and very readable — the book to hand someone who wants cheering up.
06The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
An ageing film star finally tells the truth about her seven marriages. A woman using every tool available in a system built against her. Structured as an interview, which keeps it moving, and the reveal is properly earned. Our full list of read-alikes is <a href='/reading-room/books-like-the-seven-husbands-of-evelyn-hugo/'>here</a>.
07The Midnight Library
A library of the lives you didn't choose. Gentler and stranger than Garmus, with the same interest in a woman rebuilding from nothing. Divisive — some find it too neat. Worth it for the premise and the pace.
08Britt-Marie Was Here
A woman of extreme opinions about cutlery drawers takes over a football team. Backman's speciality: awkward people you end up loving. Backman's warmth can tip into sugar, but Britt-Marie herself is a genuinely original creation.
09The Bee Sting
An Irish family coming apart, told from four sides. Much bigger and blacker, but that same knack for comedy sitting on top of grief. Long, and the final fifty pages are relentless. The funniest of his four narrators is the teenager.
10Small Pleasures
A local reporter in 1957 investigates a woman claiming a virgin birth. Wonderfully drawn suburban England and a heroine with no room to move. Beautifully observed on 1950s respectability and what it costs a clever woman. Underrated.
11Weyward
Three women across five centuries, connected by the natural world and men who underestimate them. Angrier, and rather good on it. Three timelines, one of them a seventeenth-century witch trial. Not subtle, but it moves.
12The Time Traveler's Wife
A love story told out of order, with a wife who does most of the waiting. Here for readers who wanted the marriage, not the chemistry. The structure is the whole novel and it holds together on a reread, which is rarer than it sounds.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is genuinely most like Lessons in Chemistry?
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine for the voice — precise, funny, wounded — and Small Pleasures for the period and the constraint. Most readers go to one of those two next.
I want the funny bits more than the sad bits.
The Rosie Project and Britt-Marie Was Here. Both are comedies with real feeling underneath, and neither will break your heart on a train.
Is there a true story like it?
Hidden Figures — the same decade, the same institutional nonsense, and women doing extraordinary science through it. It reads faster than you expect.
What about the television adaptation?
Read the novel first. The book gives you far more of Elizabeth's interior argument with the world, which is the part people actually love.
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