Books like A Complicated Kindness
—because what lingers is Nomi’s impossible combination of acid wit, bruised love, and clear-eyed resistance, these three novels feel like natural next companions.
If you liked A Complicated Kindness, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with A Complicated Kindness, and we tell you exactly what.
Here Toews brings the tragicomic gift of A Complicated Kindness to adulthood. Yoli’s beloved sister, Elf, is brilliant, accomplished, and determined to die; Yoli responds with the same kind of desperate joking Nomi uses—not to trivialize suffering, but to remain alive beside it.
This is not simply another sad family story. It asks, with unusual honesty, what love can demand and what it cannot repair, while retaining Toews’s exhilaratingly unruly dialogue and Mennonite shadows. Winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and a Giller finalist, it is arguably the fullest expression of the emotional alchemy that made Nomi unforgettable.
Baby, the twelve-year-old narrator, has Nomi’s ability to make deprivation sound funny, strange, and momentarily beautiful. Living in Montreal with a heroin-addicted father, she describes danger with a child’s skewed confidence; the reader sees what she cannot yet name. That tension makes her voice both enchanting and devastating.
O’Neill transforms shabby rooms, discarded objects, and unreliable adults into a private mythology without sentimentalizing neglect. The novel’s victory in Canada Reads reflects the fierce attachment it inspires: Baby is the sort of narrator readers feel compelled to protect, even as her verbal sparkle makes her seem capable of saving herself.
Jason Taylor is thirteen, secretly struggling with a stammer, and trying to survive the viciously precise social order of an English village while his family begins to fracture. Like Nomi, he studies his small world’s rules because breaking them can mean exile—and because exposing their absurdity is one way to resist them.
Told across thirteen months, the novel captures adolescent consciousness with astonishing accuracy: the rehearsed conversations, humiliations magnified into catastrophes, sudden perceptions adults miss. Mitchell is famous for elaborate, globe-spanning fiction, but this quieter novel displays his virtuosity at human scale. Its comedy, linguistic inventiveness, and accumulating ache make it a superb match for anyone who loved how A Complicated Kindness turns one teenager’s voice into an entire endangered world.