Books like “We Were Liars”

What to read after “We Were Liars” by E. Lockhart: 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 Decagon House Murders
Yukito Ayatsuji · 1987
Similar setting: “Deserted Island”
- Deserted Island
- Twist Ending
Seven members of a university mystery club sail to a remote island that was the scene of an unsolved family murder a year earlier. Cut off by a storm, they are killed one by one, and the survivors must use the rules of detective fiction to name the killer before none are left.
2
Shutter Island
Dennis Lehane · 2003
Similar setting: “Deserted Island”
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.
3
Black-Eyed Susans
Julia Heaberlin · 2015
Similar plot moves: “Amnesia” and “Unreliable Narrator”
As a teenager, Tessa was the only victim to survive the killer who buried girls in a Texas field of wildflowers, and her testimony sent a man to death row. Nearly twenty years later, fresh flowers appear near her home, and lawyers ask her to recover the memories she lost.
4
A River Enchanted
Rebecca Ross · 2022
Similar setting: “Deserted Island”
- Deserted Island
Jack is summoned home to Cadence, an island of two peoples, to find girls who have vanished without trace. He must work with Adaira, the laird's daughter, and call on the spirits he abandoned. On an island steeped in old magic, old grudges and new feelings refuse to stay buried.
5
Before I Go to Sleep
S. J. Watson · 2011
Similar plot moves: “Amnesia” and “Unreliable Narrator”
Each morning Christine wakes with no memory of her life, and each day her husband explains who she is. When she starts a diary at a doctor's suggestion, she finds entries in her own hand that contradict what he tells her, and that suggest her past holds a crime.
6
The Wasp Factory
Iain Banks · 1984
Same genre: “Psychological fiction”
On a remote Scottish island, sixteen-year-old Frank lives by strange rituals and guards family secrets. His routine shifts when his older brother escapes from a hospital and comes home, and the story Frank tells about himself begins to come apart.
7
Sometimes I Lie
Alice Feeney · 2017
Similar plot moves: “Amnesia” and “Unreliable Narrator”
Amber Reynolds is in a coma, though she can hear the people around her and cannot move or speak. In her mind she sifts through the days before the accident and the diary entries from years earlier that do not quite match the life she thought she had.
8
The Inheritance Games
Jennifer Lynn Barnes · 2020
Similar plot moves: “Twist Ending”
- Twist Ending
Avery Grambs, a sharp high-schooler sleeping in her car, learns that a billionaire she never met has left her almost his entire fortune. To claim it she must move into the family mansion, where four disinherited grandsons and a house full of puzzles await.
9
The Raven Boys
Maggie Stiefvater · 2012
Similar plot moves: “Star-Crossed Lovers” and “Coming of Age”
- Star-Crossed Lovers
- Coming of Age
Blue has grown up in a house of psychics and is warned she will cause her true love's death. Drawn into the search for a lost Welsh king with a group of boys from a prestigious school, she finds her life tangled with theirs and with their dangerous families.
10
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone
Benjamin Stevenson · 2022
Similar plot moves: “Unreliable Narrator” and “Twist Ending”
- Unreliable Narrator
- Twist Ending
Crime-writing teacher Ernest Cunningham joins his family at a snowbound mountain lodge for his brother's release from prison. When a body turns up, Ernest decides to follow the rules of Golden Age detective fiction to work out which of his relatives is responsible.
11
The Woman in the Window
A. J. Finn · 2018
Similar plot moves: “Unreliable Narrator” and “Twist Ending”
- Unreliable Narrator
- Twist Ending
Child psychologist Anna Fox lives alone, unable to leave her home, and spends her days watching her neighbours through a camera. When she sees something in the house across the street, no one believes her, and she is left to work out whether the danger is real or in her mind.
12
Atonement
Ian McEwan · 2001
Shared in the plot: summer, memory
On one summer day in 1935, a girl misreads what she sees and tells a lie that destroys two lives. Years later, as war looms, she tries to understand and atone for what she did. A novel about memory, guilt and the stories we tell to survive.