Books like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”

What to read after “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” by Ken Kesey: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 1963
Similar setting: “Asylum”
- Asylum
- Outcast Hero
Esther Greenwood wins a magazine internship in New York, but the city and the pressure of her bright future leave her feeling hollow. Back home, her mind begins to slip and she is drawn toward a darkness she cannot name, even as she tries to recover.
2
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger · 1951
Similar plot moves: “Outcast Hero” and “Unreliable Narrator”
- Outcast Hero
- Unreliable Narrator
Expelled from prep school and drifting through New York before going home, teenager Holden Caulfield narrates a few days of restless encounters. He rails against adults he calls phonies while quietly grieving a brother and his own place in the world.
3
The Mad Women's Ball
Victoria Mas · 2019
Similar setting: “Asylum”
In 1885 Paris, women who defy their families can be locked away in the Salpetriere hospital. Eugenie, sent there by her father for hearing the dead, meets Genevieve, a senior nurse devoted to the famous doctor Charcot. Their bond grows as the hospital prepares its annual costume ball for the public.
4
Blindness
José Saramago · 1995
Same genre: “Psychological fiction”
- Asylum
A driver suddenly goes blind, and the same blindness spreads through the city in a wave. The first victims are quarantined in an abandoned asylum, where order collapses, and one doctor's wife pretends to be blind so she can stay with her husband.
5
The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie
Jennifer Ashley · 2009
Similar setting: “Asylum”
- Asylum
- Outcast Hero
Lord Ian Mackenzie is brilliant, eccentric and widely believed to be mad. Widow Beth Ackerley looks past the rumours and sees the man beneath. Drawn together in Victorian London and the Highlands, they must face his family's secrets and a danger that has haunted him since childhood.
6
Flowers from the Storm
Laura Kinsale · 1992
Similar setting: “Asylum”
- Asylum
- Outcast Hero
A stroke leaves the powerful Duke of Jerveaux unable to speak, and his family shuts him away in a grim asylum. Maddy Timms, a young Quaker nurse, is the only one who sees the man inside. Her care revives him, but their growing bond offends both his world and her strict community.
7
Shutter Island
Dennis Lehane · 2003
Similar setting: “Asylum”
- Asylum
- Unreliable Narrator
In 1954 two US marshals travel to a hospital for the criminally insane on an island off Massachusetts to find a patient who has disappeared. As a storm cuts the island off, one of them begins to suspect the investigation is not what he was told.
8
The Silent Patient
Alex Michaelides · 2019
Similar setting: “Asylum”
- Asylum
- Unreliable Narrator
Alicia Berenson shot her husband five times and then never spoke again. Six years later, psychotherapist Theo Faber takes a job at the secure unit where she is held, determined to make her talk. As he digs into her diary and her past, his own reasons for being there come into question.
9
The Outsiders
S.E. Hinton · 1967
Similar plot moves: “Outcast Hero”
- Outcast Hero
Ponyboy Curtis is a greaser in a city divided between poor kids and the richer Socs. After a fight turns deadly, he and his friend go into hiding, and he begins to see the people around him beyond their labels.
10
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925
Same genre: “Tragedy”
- Unreliable Narrator
Long Island, the 1920s. Nick Carraway becomes neighbour to the wealthy, secretive Jay Gatsby, who throws lavish parties for a single purpose: to win back Nick's cousin Daisy, married to the brutish Tom Buchanan.
11
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe · 1958
Same genre: “Tragedy”
- Rebellion
Okonkwo, a respected wrestler and farmer in a Nigerian village, builds his standing on a fear of appearing weak. When he is exiled and, years later, British missionaries and officials arrive, the customs that shaped him begin to collapse around him and his people.
12
The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris · 1988
Similar setting: “Asylum”
- Asylum
A young FBI trainee asks a brilliant imprisoned psychiatrist to help catch another serial killer who abducts women. Their bargain-driven conversations become a psychological duel in which every answer carries a price.