Books like My Brilliant Friend
Readers who cherish My Brilliant Friend tend to want female intimacy without sentimentality: fierce intelligence, envy tangled with love, and private ambition pressing against the limits of class and community.
If you liked My Brilliant Friend, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with My Brilliant Friend, and we tell you exactly what.
Nel Wright and Sula Peace grow up together in the Bottom, a Black community whose judgments are as vivid and consequential as either girl’s desires. Morrison treats friendship not as refuge but as a force that creates identity—and can also expose rivalry, resentment, and incompatible ideas of freedom.
Like Ferrante, she refuses to divide women neatly into loyal and selfish, conventional and rebellious. Her compressed, blazing prose makes an entire community feel alive around the central relationship. One of Morrison’s most enduring novels, Sula offers in fewer than two hundred pages the emotional magnitude of a saga.
A successful writer hires Emerence, an imperious, secretive older woman, as her housekeeper. What follows is a relationship of affection, dependence, class friction, and contested authority, narrated with the knowledge that something irreparable has happened.
The kinship with Ferrante lies in its moral discomfort. Szabó understands that intimacy can contain gratitude and condescension, devotion and exploitation, all at once. Emerence is an unforgettable creation: formidable, infuriating, and impossible to reduce to anyone else’s version of her. Long revered in Hungary and now regarded internationally as Szabó’s masterpiece, The Door leaves many readers feeling personally implicated in its central bond.
In a poor French village after the Second World War, Agnès and Fabienne turn their shared imagination into an audacious literary game. Fabienne supplies the dangerous energy; Agnès becomes the face the wider world can recognize. From that arrangement, Yiyun Li builds a piercing study of authorship, escape, and the unequal ownership of a friendship.
Ferrante readers will recognize the magnetic question beneath it: what happens when two brilliant girls invent themselves together, but only one is offered a route out? Li’s prose is cool and exact where the emotions are wild, making every shift in power register. Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Book of Goose is the rare novel that captures both the exhilaration of a shared private world and the lifelong ache of leaving it.