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Reading List · Narrative NonfictionThe Best Nonfiction That Reads Like Fiction
Narrative non-fiction uses the tools of the novel, such as scenes, dialogue, characters and suspense, to tell stories that actually happened. The facts come from reporting, archives and interviews, but the reading experience is closer to a thriller or a family saga than a textbook. People look for these books when they want the momentum of fiction alongside something true: a crime, a disaster, a fraud or a life that would seem implausible if it were invented.
Every book here is true, but each is built around a story rather than an argument. The list mixes true crime, history, adventure, investigative journalism, biography and memoir, from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood to recent books by David Grann and Patrick Radden Keefe. Many have been adapted for film or television.
Fifteen true stories that read like fiction
Killers of the Flower Moon
David Grann · 2017
In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma became some of the wealthiest people in the world after oil was found beneath their land. Then they began to be murdered, one after another. Grann reconstructs the killings, the conspiracy behind them and the investigation that helped shape the early FBI.
Grann structures the book like a mystery, holding back the full scale of the conspiracy until late on, and draws on archives, trial records and interviews with Osage descendants. Martin Scorsese adapted it for film in 2023.
Read it if you want a historical true-crime story told with the pacing of a thriller.
Read my full recommendation →In Cold Blood
Truman Capote · 1966
In November 1959, four members of the Clutter family were murdered in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote travelled to Kansas, with his childhood friend Harper Lee helping him win the trust of local residents, and followed the case through the investigation, the trial and the fates of the two killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith.
Capote called it a ‘non-fiction novel’, and the book is often cited as a founding text of the form. It uses scenes, dialogue and shifting points of view drawn from fiction. It was serialised in The New Yorker in 1965 and filmed by Richard Brooks in 1967.
Read it if you want the book that is most often named as the starting point of narrative non-fiction.
Bad Blood
John Carreyrou · 2018
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup tells the story of Theranos, the blood-testing company founded by Elizabeth Holmes, which claimed it could run a wide range of tests from a few drops of blood. Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who first exposed the company, reconstructs how the technology failed and how that failure was hidden.
It moves like a corporate thriller, with secrecy inside the company and, as Carreyrou’s investigation gathers pace, Theranos’s lawyers threatening his sources with lawsuits. It won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award in 2018.
Read it if you want a fast-paced, recent story of deception inside a celebrated start-up.
Read my full recommendation →Say Nothing
Patrick Radden Keefe · 2018
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland starts with the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, in Belfast. From there Keefe follows IRA members including Dolours and Marian Price and Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, McConville’s children, and the Boston College oral history project that recorded former paramilitaries.
Keefe weaves several lives into one story about the Troubles and their aftermath, and keeps one question open until the end. It won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction and the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was adapted as a television series in 2024.
Read it if you want history told through a cast of characters and a mystery that runs to the final pages.
The Devil in the White City
Erik Larson · 2003
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America follows two men in Chicago around the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition: Daniel Burnham, the architect who led the building of the fair, and H. H. Holmes, a killer often described as the first serial killer in the United States.
Larson alternates between the two stories in short chapters, a technique borrowed from the suspense novel. The book won the 2004 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and was a National Book Award finalist.
Read it if you want history and true crime braided together in two parallel storylines.
Into Thin Air
Jon Krakauer · 1997
Krakauer went to Mount Everest on assignment for Outside magazine to report on the commercialisation of the mountain, and joined a guided expedition led by Rob Hall. In May 1996 a storm struck climbers near the summit, and eight people died, among them Hall and the rival guide Scott Fischer.
It is a first-person account written by a survivor soon after the events, and it reads with the tension of a survival story. Some of its judgements were disputed, notably by the guide Anatoli Boukreev in his own book, The Climb.
Read it if you want a gripping first-hand account of a disaster on the mountain.
Educated
Tara Westover · 2018
Tara Westover grew up in an isolated survivalist family in the mountains of Idaho, where her father distrusted doctors, the government and public schools. She had no formal schooling before entering Brigham Young University at 17, and went on to study at Cambridge, where she completed a PhD, and at Harvard.
The memoir is written in vivid scenes, with injuries, family conflict and a gradual break from home, and it has the shape of a coming-of-age novel. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.
Read it if you want a memoir with the narrative pull of a novel.
Read my full recommendation →The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot · 2010
In 1951, cells were taken from a tumour of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman being treated for cervical cancer. They became the HeLa cell line, used in medical research around the world, while her family knew little about it. Skloot tells both stories, drawing on years of work with the Lacks family, especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah.
Part science history and part family story, the book follows Skloot’s own search alongside Deborah Lacks. It won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize and was filmed by HBO in 2017, with Oprah Winfrey as Deborah.
Read it if you want science and ethics told through a family’s story.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
John Berendt · 1994
Berendt moved to Savannah, Georgia, and wrote about the city’s eccentric residents, including the performer The Lady Chablis. At the centre is Jim Williams, an antiques dealer tried for shooting Danny Hansford, a case that went through four murder trials before ending in acquittal.
It reads like a Southern novel, full of characters and atmosphere, with the murder case as its spine. It was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize, spent 216 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and was filmed by Clint Eastwood in 1997.
Read it if you want atmosphere and characters as much as a crime story.
Unbroken
Laura Hillenbrand · 2010
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption follows Louis Zamperini, who ran the 5,000 metres at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. As a bombardier in the war, his plane crashed in the Pacific; he survived weeks adrift on a raft and was then held in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.
Hillenbrand tells it as a survival story in several acts, from the running track to the open ocean and the camps, with a clear antagonist in the guard known as the Bird. Angelina Jolie directed the 2014 film adaptation.
Read it if you want a war-time survival story with a single, extraordinary protagonist.
The Lost City of Z
David Grann · 2009
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon follows the British explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon in 1925 with his son while searching for a lost city. Grann pieces together Fawcett’s expeditions and the many people who later went looking for him.
Grann also makes his own journey into the Amazon and finds new evidence about Fawcett’s likely fate, so the book runs as two quests, one in the past and one in the present. James Gray directed a film adaptation that premiered in 2016.
Read it if you want an adventure story about obsession, exploration and a mystery that was never solved.
American Prometheus
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin · 2005
This biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer follows the physicist from his New York childhood to his leadership of the Los Alamos laboratory that built the atomic bomb, and to his later public humiliation, when his security clearance was revoked in the anti-communist climate of the 1950s.
It is long and detailed, but it has a dramatic arc of rise and fall, ending in a security hearing. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was the basis of Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer (2023).
Read it if you want a full-scale biography with the shape of a tragedy.
Read my full recommendation →Hell’s Angels
Hunter S. Thompson · 1966
Hunter S. Thompson spent around a year riding with the Hells Angels motorcycle club in California in the mid-1960s, and this book is his account of it. He describes the members, their runs and their reputation, and contrasts the sensational press coverage of the time with what he saw.
Thompson writes as a participant, with scenes, dialogue and his own voice to the fore, and the story ends with him being beaten by several of the bikers. It suits readers interested in the immersive, first-person side of the form.
Read it if you want early Hunter S. Thompson and journalism written from inside the story.
Read my full recommendation →Tell Me Who I Am
Alex and Marcus Lewis with Joanna Hodgkin · 2013
In 1982, at the age of 18, Alex Lewis lost his memory in a motorcycle accident. When he woke from a coma, the only person he recognised was his identical twin, Marcus, who helped him relearn daily life and gave him an account of their childhood. That account left out a family secret, which the brothers confront in the book.
Told by both twins, it is a story about memory, trust and what siblings owe each other, with a revelation at its core. It formed the basis of the 2019 Netflix documentary Tell Me Who I Am, directed by Ed Perkins. It deals with childhood sexual abuse.
Read it if you want a true story about memory and family secrets, and can handle difficult material.
Read my full recommendation →Our Women on the Ground
Zahra Hankir (editor) · 2019
This anthology, edited by Zahra Hankir with a foreword by Christiane Amanpour, collects essays by nineteen Arab women journalists reporting from across the Arab world. They write about covering conflict close to home, harassment on Cairo’s streets, travelling without a male relative in Yemen, and the access they gained to women in Syrian clinics.
Rather than one long narrative, it offers many short first-person stories from reporters in the field. It suits readers who prefer shorter pieces and want to see how gender shapes the work of telling true stories.
Read it if you want short, first-person reporting stories from women in the Arab world.
Read my full recommendation →Which book should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a first narrative non-fiction book — Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (2017)
- For a classic of the form — In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
- For a modern investigation — Bad Blood by John Carreyrou (2018)
- For history told as a mystery — Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (2018)
- For adventure and survival — Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (1997)
- For a memoir — Educated by Tara Westover (2018)
Where to go next
Author guides on the shelf: Jason Fagone · Brendan i Koerner · Sonia Nazario · Michael Paterniti · Adam Leith Gollner · Liza Mundy · Margalit Fox · Sophy Roberts
Frequently asked questions
What does ‘non-fiction that reads like fiction’ mean?
It describes narrative non-fiction: true stories written with the techniques of fiction, such as scenes, dialogue, characters and suspense. The content comes from reporting and research, but the book is shaped like a story.
Which book is considered the first non-fiction novel?
Truman Capote called In Cold Blood (1966) a ‘non-fiction novel’, and it is often cited as a founding text of the form, although other writers had experimented with the approach before him.
What is a good first narrative non-fiction book?
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann is a common starting point: it is structured like a mystery, covers a little-known chapter of American history, and was filmed by Martin Scorsese in 2023.
Which of these books have been adapted for screen?
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), In Cold Blood (1967), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), Unbroken (2014), The Lost City of Z (2016), The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (HBO, 2017) and American Prometheus, the basis of Oppenheimer (2023). Say Nothing became a TV series in 2024, and Tell Me Who I Am a 2019 Netflix documentary.
Are there memoirs that read like novels?
Educated by Tara Westover is the best-known example on this list. Tell Me Who I Am, by twins Alex and Marcus Lewis with Joanna Hodgkin, is also a memoir with a strong narrative pull.
Which authors are known for narrative non-fiction?
David Grann, Erik Larson, Jon Krakauer, Patrick Radden Keefe and Laura Hillenbrand are among the best-known contemporary writers in the form. Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson were influential earlier figures.
Pick the book that answers the question you are asking right now. The rest of the list will still be here when you are ready for the next one.
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