Books like Jeanette Winterson

Few novels match Winterson’s combination of intellectual play, physical extravagance and bawdy delight as closely as Carter’s exuberant masterpiece. Its heroine, Fevvers, is a celebrated aerialist who may—or may not—have wings, and her account of herself continually wrong-foots the journalist trying to pin down the facts.

Like the Dog-Woman, Fevvers is too magnificent for ordinary ideas of femininity, realism or good taste. Carter makes spectacle politically potent: tall tales expose the assumptions hidden inside respectable history. Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and now one of Carter’s defining novels, Nights at the Circus offers that rarest pleasure—a book whose wildness is also its precision.

Marian Leatherby is ninety-two, nearly toothless and presented with a hearing trumpet just in time to discover that her family intends to send her away. From that wonderfully dry beginning, Carrington ushers her into a world of sinister institutions, occult histories and increasingly sublime disorder.

What will delight a Winterson reader is the novel’s refusal to make women decorous, plausible or small. Old age becomes a gateway to adventure; absurdity becomes liberation. Long cherished as a cult classic, The Hearing Trumpet has acquired generations of devoted readers because it feels genuinely ungovernable—funny, visionary and gleefully hostile to common sense.

Poor Things arrives disguised as a recovered Victorian document, complete with editorial apparatus, contradictory testimony and Gray’s extraordinary illustrations. At its center is Bella Baxter, whose voracious appetite for experience threatens every man who attempts to define her story for her.

Gray shares Winterson’s suspicion that official narratives—especially those concerning women, sex and progress—are elaborate acts of possession. The novel keeps changing the ground beneath the reader: Gothic fantasy collides with social satire, while competing versions of Bella expose how storytelling manufactures authority. Winner of both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, it is audacious, filthy-minded and formally ingenious—the sort of book that makes conventional historical fiction seem timid afterward.

Two Australian sisters arrive in postwar England, where love, class and chance begin shaping their lives. Hazzard’s world appears realistic, but her audacious narration makes time feel almost supernatural: a sentence may suddenly disclose the future, turning an ordinary encounter into fate.

Like Winterson, Hazzard writes in polished, quotable flashes and treats romantic obsession as both revelation and self-deception. The novel’s social comedy is exquisitely sharp, but beneath it lies the dangerous conviction that love can become a private mythology. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and now widely regarded as Hazzard’s masterpiece, it offers the rare pleasure of a novel whose every sentence seems to know more than its characters do.

After catastrophe overturns her former life, Agnes DeWitt assumes the identity of Father Damien Modeste and serves an Ojibwe community in North Dakota. Erdrich does not reduce this transformation to a disguise: it becomes a profound inquiry into gender, vocation, bodily longing and the stories through which a person becomes real.

This is the match for readers who loved the spiritual ache beneath The Passion’s playfulness. Miracles and absurdities enter without fanfare; history is intimate, contested and carried by many voices; love repeatedly exceeds the names religion or society gives it. A National Book Award finalist and one of the most cherished novels in Erdrich’s formidable body of work, it is expansive where Winterson is compressed, but comparably fearless about the borderlands between faith and invention, identity and performance.