Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books Like Poor Things
Poor Things is not a feminist novel in the obvious sense. It does not argue. It demonstrates. Bella Baxter wakes up as an adult body with a fresh mind — unconditioned, unashamed, curious about everything and constrained by nothing. She wants things. She takes them. She refuses to be explained. The book is dark and funny and formally strange, but the question underneath it is not really about science or Victorians or unreliable narrators. It is about what a woman would actually be like if nobody had spent her whole life telling her who to be. These five books ask the same question from different angles — some more quietly, some more violently, all with the same seriousness.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Literary Fiction · Updated May 2026
Fiction · Short Stories
The Bloody Chamber
Carter takes the fairy tales you were told as a child — Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood — and rewrites them from inside the skin of the woman. Not to make them safe. To make them honest. These stories are erotic and violent and wickedly funny, and they are the literary origin of everything Gray does in Poor Things. Carter invented the territory. Gray moved in.
If you loved Poor Things, you will find its DNA here. Carter understood before anyone else that the stories women are given are not neutral — that fairy tales are instruction manuals for how to be passive, grateful, and saved. What she did instead was give her women desire, rage, and the capacity to eat the wolf rather than be eaten by it. Bella Baxter is Carter’s daughter, written by a man who had read her carefully.
Fiction
Wide Sargasso Sea
Rochester’s first wife — the madwoman in the attic of Jane Eyre — has a name. It is Antoinette Cosway. Rhys gives her back her story, her voice, her history, and the specific series of events that led to a woman being locked in a room and called insane. It is one of the most precise and devastating acts of literary reclamation ever written.
Poor Things does something structurally similar — it takes a woman who was defined and controlled by the men narrating her and gives her the chance to narrate herself. Rhys did it first and in a register of grief rather than dark comedy. Read them together and the project becomes clearer: the madwoman and the created woman are both asking the same question about who gets to write a woman’s life.
Fiction
Piranesi
Piranesi lives in a house of infinite halls filled with statues and tides and birds. He does not know who he was before. He catalogues the world around him with meticulous, loving attention, uncontaminated by the self he has forgotten. The novel is short, completely absorbing, and operates according to its own flawless internal logic. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021.
What Bella and Piranesi share is a mind encountering the world fresh — without the accumulated weight of other people’s explanations. Piranesi does not know he should be afraid, or bored, or cynical. He is simply curious. That quality — the radically open attention of a consciousness without social conditioning — is what makes both books feel unlike anything else. Piranesi is the quieter, more melancholy version of what Gray does with Bella.
Fiction
Never Let Me Go
Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth grew up together at Hailsham, an idyllic English boarding school. They were always told they were special. The novel is about what that means — about what they were made for, and what they do with that knowledge once they have it. Ishiguro writes in Kathy’s measured, careful, heartbreaking voice, and the horror arrives so slowly you almost miss it.
This is the melancholy inverse of Poor Things. Bella is created and refuses to be contained by her creation. Kathy and her friends are created and accept their fate with a dignity that is also, in some reading, a tragedy. Both novels ask what it means to be a person whose existence was designed by someone else. Gray answers with rebellion and dark comedy. Ishiguro answers with grief and restraint. The contrast between them is the argument.
Fiction
Frankissstein
Winterson writes two stories simultaneously: Mary Shelley in 1816, creating Frankenstein while sleeping with Percy and competing with Byron; and Ry Shelley in the near future, a non-binary doctor navigating a world where artificial intelligence is becoming capable of love. Both stories are about creation, bodies, desire, and what it means to make a person. It is bold, funny, and formally inventive.
Poor Things is, at its root, a Frankenstein story — a man who creates a woman and cannot control what she becomes. Winterson takes the same myth and runs it through gender, technology, and queer identity. What they share is the conviction that the body is not destiny, and that whoever or whatever created you does not get to decide who you are. Winterson is noisier than Gray, less elegant, but she is asking exactly the same question at full volume.
Not sure where to start?
If you want the book that is most directly connected to Poor Things
→ Start with The Bloody Chamber. Carter is Gray’s literary mother in this. Reading her first makes Poor Things make more sense — and makes it more extraordinary.
If you want something shorter and stranger that operates on the same frequency
→ Read Piranesi. It is unlike anything else. Give it twenty pages and it will have you completely.
If you want the novel that argues the opposite of what Bella does — and is equally devastating for it
→ Read Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro’s answer to the same question is the one that will stay with you longest.
Frequently asked questions about books like Poor Things
From the bookshelf
“I am not a woman. I am a human being.” — Bella Baxter
If this list resonated with you, you'll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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