Reading List

Authors Like Celeste Ng

Ng was eleven or twelve, waiting for a bus in downtown Cleveland with her sister and an aunt and uncle visiting from Hong Kong, when a man came up and screamed in their faces and told them to go back where they came from. A woman at the stop stepped in, told him to leave them alone, and drew the shouting onto herself until the bus arrived. That intervention — somebody choosing to act — is the question underneath all three novels. Everything I Never Told You (2014) opens with a dead teenager in 1970s Ohio and works backwards through what her parents needed her to be. Little Fires Everywhere (2017) sets a custody fight over a Chinese-American baby loose in Shaker Heights, a suburb planned down to the permitted paint colours, and spent more than a year on the bestseller list before Hulu filmed it with Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Our Missing Hearts (Penguin Press, October 2022) moves into a near-future America under an act called PACT, where libraries pull unpatriotic books and the children of dissidents are removed; a twelve-year-old goes looking for his mother, a poet who disappeared. Ng grew up in Pittsburgh and Shaker Heights and studied at Harvard and Michigan. The ten below are chosen on the same fault lines.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · Families, suburbs, dissent · Three novels · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Celeste Ng, the closest match for Little Fires Everywhere is Tom Perrotta, who has been writing American suburbs from inside their committees for thirty years, with Kiley Reid and Bruce Holsinger the sharpest contemporaries on the same class fault line. For the Asian-American family material, read Charles Yu, Jhumpa Lahiri and C Pam Zhang. For Our Missing Hearts, read Octavia Butler and Kazuo Ishiguro. And Percival Everett is the argument against her tidiness.

Every book by Celeste Ng →

Where to start if you loved Celeste Ng

If you loved Little Fires Everywhere, read Tom Perrotta.

Little Children. Bored parents, a playground, and a neighbourhood choosing a target.

If you want the same fault line now, read Kiley Reid.

Such a Fun Age. A babysitter accused in a supermarket, and an employer's guilt.

If you want the Asian-American story made formal, read Charles Yu.

Interior Chinatown. Written as a screenplay, because that is the argument.

If you loved Our Missing Hearts, read Octavia Butler.

Parable of the Sower. The same collapsing America, thirty years earlier and harder.

If you want the argument against her, read Percival Everett.

Erasure. The same subjects, with the machinery taken apart.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

10 authors like Celeste Ng

01
The suburb, from inside its committees · Closest match

Tom Perrotta

American · Election (1998), Little Children (2004), The Leftovers (2011)

Perrotta writes American suburbs at the level of the school board and the paddling pool: a high school election that turns on adult resentment, bored parents at a playground, a town in which two per cent of the world's population has simply vanished and everyone still has to get to work. Election became the 1999 film with Reese Witherspoon, Little Children a 2006 film with Kate Winslet, and The Leftovers an HBO series he co-created with Damon Lindelof.

The closest match for Little Fires Everywhere, and the writer who established that a planned community can carry a whole moral argument. Both are very good on the specific vanity of educated liberal parents and on how quickly a neighbourhood organises against someone. Perrotta is funnier and less forgiving; Ng gives her characters more interiority and takes the class and race questions further than he does. Read Little Children.

— Lisanne
02
The Asian-American frame, made formal

Charles Yu

American · How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010), Interior Chinatown (2020)

Interior Chinatown is written as a screenplay: Willis Wu lives in a single-room occupancy above a restaurant and works as Generic Asian Man in a police procedural filmed downstairs, hoping one day to be promoted to Kung Fu Guy. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 2020 and became a Hulu series in 2024. Yu trained as a lawyer, wrote for Westworld, and the form of the book is the argument it is making.

The same subject as Ng — what an Asian-American family is permitted to be in the American story — approached through form rather than through realism. Where Ng writes a family novel and lets the racial politics accumulate underneath it, Yu makes the reader read a script and notice which parts exist. He is funnier and stranger. Read Interior Chinatown if the parts of Everything I Never Told You about being looked at stayed with you.

— Lisanne
03
The same fault line, one generation on

Kiley Reid

American · Such a Fun Age (2019), Come and Get It (2024)

Such a Fun Age begins with a young Black babysitter accused of kidnapping the white child she is minding in an upmarket supermarket, and then follows what her wealthy employer does with her own guilt about it. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. Come and Get It moves to a university residence hall and money: who has it, who is performing not having it, and what a visiting researcher does with what she overhears.

The novel Little Fires Everywhere made room for, published two years later. Both take a well-meaning affluent white woman convinced of her own decency and let her behaviour make the argument; both are careful to give the person she is condescending to a full interior life rather than a role. Reid is more comic and more merciless about class, and she keeps her thumb further off the scale. Read Such a Fun Age.

— Lisanne
04
The parents, competing

Bruce Holsinger

American · The Gifted School (2019), The Displacements (2022), Culpability (2025)

The Gifted School puts five families in a Colorado town in competition for places at a new school for gifted children and shows what each is prepared to do about it. The Displacements follows a family through the evacuation of a category five hurricane, and Culpability, an Oprah's Book Club pick in July 2025, turns on a fatal crash involving a self-driving minivan and a family that cannot say who was in control.

The nearest contemporary to Little Fires Everywhere, and the two novels are in open conversation. Same self-consciously progressive community, same discovery that its stated values hold exactly until somebody else's child benefits. Holsinger runs a larger cast and keeps the plot machinery more visible; Ng writes the mothers with more sympathy and less satire. Read The Gifted School next.

— Lisanne
Every book by Bruce Holsinger →

Authors like Bruce Holsinger →

05
The quiet version

Jhumpa Lahiri

American · Interpreter of Maladies (1999), The Namesake (2003), Whereabouts (2021)

Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 for her first collection, stories about Bengali families in New England and Calcutta. The Namesake follows a son named after Gogol and the parents whose arranged marriage brought them to Boston. She later moved to Rome, learned Italian and began writing in it, translating her own work back into English.

The same immigrant-family material with the plot machinery removed. Ng builds her novels around an event — a drowning, a custody case, a disappearance — and Lahiri mostly declines to, letting a dinner or a name carry the weight instead. She is the finer sentence-writer by some distance and the less propulsive storyteller. Read Interpreter of Maladies if what held you in Everything I Never Told You was the parents rather than the mystery.

— Lisanne
Every book by Jhumpa Lahiri →

Authors like Jhumpa Lahiri →

06
The formally restless one

C Pam Zhang

American · How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020), Land of Milk and Honey (2023)

How Much of These Hills Is Gold follows two children of Chinese immigrants across a mythic, drought-ruined American West, carrying their father's body and looking for somewhere to bury him; it was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Land of Milk and Honey puts a chef in a walled community on an Italian mountaintop where the wealthy still have access to food that no longer exists elsewhere.

What the same inheritance looks like in a writer who will not stay inside realism. Zhang is working Ng's territory — Chinese-American families, what a country tells them they are, what parents cannot say to children — at the level of language and myth rather than plot. She is harder work and more rewarding per page. Read her if Our Missing Hearts made you want the prose to be stranger.

— Lisanne
07
Older than the genre · The prophetic one

Octavia Butler

American · Kindred (1979), Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998)

Parable of the Sower is set in a collapsing 2020s California of walled neighbourhoods, water scarcity and private security, narrated by a teenage girl who feels other people's pain physically and is building a belief system as she walks north. Its sequel introduces a presidential candidate promising to make America great again and the camps that follow. Butler was the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, in 1995, and died in 2006.

The book Our Missing Hearts is standing on, written thirty years earlier and considerably harder. Both imagine an America that removes people quietly and legally, and both are finally about whether an individual can do anything; Butler refuses every comfort Ng permits herself, including the possibility that finding one person changes anything. Read Parable of the Sower and the newer book looks gentler than it did.

— Lisanne

Every book by Octavia Butler →

08
The dystopia nobody raises their voice in

Kazuo Ishiguro

British · The Remains of the Day (1989), Never Let Me Go (2005), Klara and the Sun (2021)

Never Let Me Go is narrated by a young woman raised at an English boarding school where the children are being prepared for something the reader works out long before they say it, in a voice so mild that the horror arrives sideways. The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989. Ishiguro received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.

The technique Our Missing Hearts reaches for: a state doing something monstrous, described by people who have absorbed it as ordinary. Ishiguro withholds far more than Ng does and never explains the system at all, which is why it stays with readers for decades. If the near-future material was what gripped you, this is the better book on the same shelf.

— Lisanne
Every book by Kazuo Ishiguro →

Authors like Kazuo Ishiguro →

09
The template, and its afterlife

Margaret Atwood

Canadian · The Handmaid's Tale (1985), The Testaments (2019)

The Handmaid's Tale imagines a theocratic United States in which fertile women are assigned to households as property, and Atwood has said repeatedly that she included nothing that had not already happened somewhere. The Testaments, which returns to Gilead thirty-odd years later, shared the Booker Prize in 2019. She has published more than fifty books across fiction, poetry and essays.

The novel every literary dystopia since has been measured against, including this one. Atwood's rule — nothing invented that has not already been done — is the standard by which the plausibility of Our Missing Hearts gets judged, and it is a fair test: the removal of children from dissenting parents has plenty of historical precedent, which is exactly Ng's point. Read The Handmaid's Tale for the original and the argument.

— Lisanne
Every book by Margaret Atwood →

Authors like Margaret Atwood →

10
The argument against her

Percival Everett

American · Erasure (2001), The Trees (2021), James (2024)

Everett has published more than thirty books and refuses to write the same one twice. Erasure is about a Black novelist whose difficult work is ignored until he writes a parody of the ghetto memoir the industry wants and it becomes a phenomenon; it became the film American Fiction in 2023. The Trees is a revenge novel about lynching written as a comedy, shortlisted for the Booker. James retells Huckleberry Finn from Jim and won the National Book Award for fiction in 2024.

The strongest objection to what Ng does, and it is about form rather than politics. Her novels arrange a moral situation carefully and then resolve it; the reader usually knows by page fifty who is going to be shown to be wrong. Everett writes the same subjects — race, class, who is permitted to tell a story — and dismantles the machinery instead, so that the reader never gets to feel settled. Read Erasure, then decide which you actually want from a novel.

— Lisanne
Every book by Percival Everett →

Authors like Percival Everett →

Frequently asked questions about authors like Celeste Ng

Who should I read if I love Celeste Ng?

Tom Perrotta is the closest for Little Fires Everywhere, with Kiley Reid and Bruce Holsinger the sharpest contemporaries on the same suburban class fault line. For the Asian-American family material, Charles Yu makes it formal, Jhumpa Lahiri makes it quiet and C Pam Zhang makes it strange. For Our Missing Hearts, Octavia Butler wrote the harder version thirty years earlier, Kazuo Ishiguro the quieter one, and Margaret Atwood the template both are measured against. Percival Everett is the argument against Ng's tidiness.

Which Celeste Ng book should I start with?

Little Fires Everywhere (2017) if you want the one people press on each other: Shaker Heights, a custody fight over a Chinese-American baby, and a town discovering what its values are worth. Everything I Never Told You (2014) if you want the tightest: it opens with a dead sixteen-year-old and moves backwards through a family that had decided who she was going to be. Our Missing Hearts (2022) is the most political and the most divisive, and works best if you already know her.

Is Celeste Ng writing a new book?

Nothing has been announced as of September 2026. Her three novels appeared in 2014, 2017 and 2022, and Penguin issued a new paperback of Our Missing Hearts in June 2026, which is a reissue rather than new work. She continues to appear at festivals — she spoke about the book at the WBUR festival in Boston in 2026 — and writes essays and criticism.

What is Our Missing Hearts about?

A near-future United States governed by an act called PACT, the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act, under which libraries remove unpatriotic books and the children of dissidents can be relocated. Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives with his father in Cambridge, Massachusetts; his mother, the Chinese-American poet Margaret Miu, disappeared three years earlier, and her poems have been removed too. He goes looking for her. Ng has said she began simply writing a book about a mother and a son.

Is the Hulu series faithful to Little Fires Everywhere?

Broadly in plot, and it makes one significant change: in the novel Mia Warren's race is not specified in the way the series fixes it, and casting Kerry Washington makes the racial dynamic between the two mothers explicit throughout rather than something the reader assembles. It also expands several storylines and gives the teenagers more room. Ng was involved as a producer and has spoken warmly about the adaptation. Read the book first; the ambiguity is part of what it does.

What is the criticism of Celeste Ng?

That the moral architecture is visible early and holds. Her novels set up a situation carefully — a custody case, a suburb, a state that removes children — and most readers can tell by the first third which position the book will end up endorsing, which some find satisfying and others find airless. Our Missing Hearts drew the sharpest version of this, with reviewers split over whether the dystopia was chillingly plausible or too neatly arranged. Percival Everett is the writer to read if that objection is yours.

Do her books connect to each other?

No. Three separate novels, no shared characters, three different decades — the 1970s, the 1990s and a near future. What connects them is a preoccupation rather than a plot: a family holding something unsaid, a community that has agreed on a story about itself, and a child who pays for both. Read them in any order, though most people arrive through Little Fires Everywhere.

Where does the anti-Asian material in her books come from?

Partly from her own life. Ng has described being eleven or twelve at a bus stop in Cleveland with her sister and visiting relatives when a man screamed at them to go back where they came from, and a woman at the stop intervened and drew his anger onto herself until the bus came. She has said the intervention stayed with her as much as the abuse, and the question of whether an ordinary person can actually do anything runs through all three novels.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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— Celeste Ng, on Our Missing Hearts.

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