Want something like Emily St. John Mandel? We get this question quite a lot from fans of the author’s best-selling dystopian novel Station Eleven or her more literary mysteries starting with her debut Last Night in Montreal. Here are some read-alikes with similar qualities to St. John Mandel’s beautiful and haunting novels:
There is a lyrical, melancholy tone to St. John Mandel’s writing, and her characters feel unmoored from the world, adrift from others. One novel that a fan may enjoy is Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead which posits that we live on in the afterlife so long as people in the world still remember us; it is a meditation on memory and loss.
Karen Thompson Walker writes melancholy, philosophical speculative stories that share a tonal quality with St. John Mandel’s work. The Dreamers starts as a sleeping sickness on a college campus, and bleeds from there, weaving a sense of mystery and interconnectedness.
Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton tells the story of an astronaut and a scientist on an Arctic outpost as their worlds go silent. Also try Mike Chen’s all too prescient but somehow uplifting The Beginning at the End.
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips conveys that mystery in every day life with a little explored setting in literary fiction–Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula. It starts with the disappearance of two young girls and becomes a story that prismatically enters the lives of people within this small rural outpost town. The kidnapping ripples through the narrative in a kind of undertow of small town sadness.
Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine tells parallel stories in the past and present, surfacing long-buried secrets and connections, with a crescendo of character and prose.
Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden is a more direct narration than St. John Mandel’s usual third person, distanced narrative, but it gives rise to a sense of how unreliable we can be when narrating our own lives, and offers its own subterfuge.
Finally, also try Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy. This slow burn debut features an unreliable narrator with a complicated past whose jagged edges emerge throughout the novel. Franny Stone/Lynch boards a fishing boat, despite her distaste for the trade in a world devastated by over-fishing, to follow the tern, a bird with the largest migration pattern whose numbers are down to single digits. As she gets to know the crew, it becomes clear they have more in common than she thought. Her love for her husband, the loss of her stillborn child, her time in prison, and her search for her mother whose disappearance has haunted her life frame Franny’s thoughts and actions, but also offer distraction from truths and memories she actively avoids. The characters also feel unmoored from others–there is a melancholy undertow here that mirror’s the tone and feel of St. John Mandel’s novels, so it’s no surprise that she is blurbed on the cover, saying it is “as beautiful and as wrenching as anything I’ve ever read.”
What else has reminded you of St. John Mandel’s work? We are open to more read-alikes suggestions from you!
~ posted by Misha
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