What to read after “The Best of Everything” by Rona Jaffe: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Janie Crawford tells her friend the story of her life: three marriages, a long search for love and independence, and the storm that changes everything. Set in the Black towns and farms of Florida, the novel follows her from a silent girl to a woman who speaks for herself.
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.
While photographing covered bridges in Iowa, Robert Kincaid asks a farmer's wife, Francesca Johnson, for directions. With her family away for a few days, the two begin an affair that becomes the defining love of her life and forces her to weigh passion against duty.
In 1987 El Paso, two Mexican American boys meet at a swimming pool and slowly become friends. Over long summers they share books, secrets and fears, and each begins to understand the love and longing he has been afraid to name.
Port and Kit Moresby travel from New York to North Africa with their friend Tunner, hoping the trip will mend their marriage. As they move deeper into the Sahara, the heat, illness and emptiness of the landscape strip away the habits that held them together, and each of them drifts toward a different kind of loss.
Chloe Mills is finishing her MBA while interning at Ryan Media Group, where Bennett Ryan, the boss's son, demands perfection and makes her work late. Their arguments turn into a charged contest of wills, and neither can stay away from the other. The affair is reckless, secret, and complicated by the fact that Bennett signs her paychecks.
Tess Durbeyfield, a poor country girl, is sent to wealthy relatives who share her family name. There she is wronged by a young man and later falls in love with Angel Clare, who knows nothing of her past. Society's judgement of her becomes the story's central cruelty.
Oliver Barrett IV, a wealthy Harvard student, and Jenny Cavilleri, a sharp-tongued Radcliffe student from a different background, meet and marry against his father's wishes. Their happiness is tested by illness and by the class divide they thought love could overcome.
A young woman in colonial Korea, Sunja, leaves home for Japan with a husband she barely knows and raises a family that lives as outsiders for generations. Through war and poverty, the household holds on to its dignity and its secrets.
Hazel Grace, a teenager with terminal cancer, meets Augustus Waters at a support group. Their cautious romance grows through shared wit and a planned trip to Amsterdam, while both confront what they can and cannot control.
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.
Anna Sun's life falls apart when her boyfriend suggests an open relationship and her family demands more of her. She decides to spend one night with Quan Diep, a tattooed businessman recovering from his own losses. What begins as a casual fling becomes a tender, difficult connection that asks both of them to be honest.
Paul Baumer and his classmates enlist in the German army straight from school, urged on by a patriotic teacher. Trench life strips away everything they were taught, and the friends cling to each other as the war grinds them down.
In fourteenth-century Norway the headstrong Kristin defies her devout father to marry the charming Erlend. Their life together brings seven sons, guilt and hardship as the world shifts around them and her early choices return to weigh on her.
Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland in old New York society when May's cousin, the Countess Olenska, returns from Europe after leaving her husband. Newland and the Countess are drawn to each other, but the rules of their world demand that he marry May and hide what he feels.
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.
Zahra Gulian works at Dreamland's Magic Wand Salon and has long been frustrated by the park's uninspired new rides. After a drunken critique of Dreamland accidentally lands in the company's creative proposal contest, she is promoted to the Creator team—directly under Dreamland's cold, exacting director, Rowan Kane. Working for him was not part of her plan, and neither was the attraction that grows between them.
On the day they both receive a call saying they will die within twenty-four hours, Mateo and Rufus meet through an app for people facing their last day. The two teenagers spend it together, trying to live a lifetime in the time they have left.
Linked stories follow human expeditions to Mars, from the first landing to later settlements, where the abandoned cities of an older civilisation still hold traces of its people. Against the red desert and the empty seas, the settlers bring their own dreams and failings, while Earth moves toward war.
Connell and Marianne are drawn together in a small Irish town, then meet again at university in Dublin. Over the years they keep circling each other, hurting and rescuing one another, unable to say plainly what they feel or where they belong.
Narrated by Death, the story follows Liesel Meminger, a girl sent to live with a foster family in Nazi Germany. She steals books, shares them with a Jewish man hiding in the basement, and grows up amid bombs, loss and small acts of kindness.
Melinda begins high school as an outcast after calling the police at a summer party, and barely speaks. Through art class and small moments she slowly confronts what happened to her that night and finds the words to name it.
A doctor and poet grows up in late imperial Moscow and lives through revolution and civil war. Between his wife and Lara, whose path keeps crossing his, he tries to hold on to ordinary life and to his writing.
Clay Jensen receives a box of tapes recorded by Hannah Baker, a classmate who has taken her own life. As he follows her voice around town, she explains the thirteen reasons behind her decision, and Clay learns his own place in her story.
What should I read after “The Best of Everything”?
Start with “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, “The Catcher in the Rye”, “The Bridges of Madison County”: they are the closest to “The Best of Everything” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “The Best of Everything” these are Office Romance, Coming of Age, Melancholic), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe”, “Beautiful Bastard”, “Pachinko”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
