Books like Jane Harris

Sue Trinder, raised among thieves in Victorian London, is recruited into a scheme against a secluded heiress. What follows begins with the same irresistible combination that powers The Observations: a boldly colloquial narrator, wicked comedy, Gothic menace and an intense relationship between women divided by class and deception.

Waters makes houses, books and manners feel like instruments in an elaborate confidence trick. Like Bessy, Sue is shrewd about other people and dangerously mistaken about what she thinks she knows. Shortlisted for both the Booker and Orange prizes, Fingersmith is not merely ingenious; it has the emotional force that makes its revelations matter. Reading it for the first time is a pleasure worth envying.

Grace Marks is a convicted murderess whose memories are examined by a doctor eager to turn her into a legible case. Admirers of Jane Harris will recognize the delicious reversal: the supposedly scrutinized servant may understand her educated observer far better than he understands her.

Grace’s voice is restrained where Bessy’s is exuberant, but it has the same sly control, dark humor and alertness to class hypocrisy. Atwood builds the novel from testimony, gossip, letters and contested memory, continually asking whether confession reveals a self or manufactures one. Winner of the Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Booker, Alias Grace is a masterclass in ambiguity—and Grace is one of those narrators who continues quietly revising your judgment after the book is closed.

Presented through competing manuscripts and editorial claims, Poor Things offers a fantastical Victorian life story involving the fearless Bella Baxter—and then invites another voice to dispute the entire account. Its deepest kinship with The Observations lies in that battle over narrative possession: men observe, classify and explain a woman who keeps escaping their categories.

Gray’s novel is bawdy, argumentative, grotesque and extremely funny. Its pseudo-scholarly apparatus turns documents into comic traps, much as Harris makes private records and experiments both revealing and suspect. Winner of the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, it is a Scottish cult classic with serious intellectual bite beneath its exuberance. Readers who loved Bessy’s irreverence should meet Bella before accepting anyone else’s version of her.