Reading List

Authors Like Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve's father was a pilot, and in The Pilot's Wife (1998) Kathryn Lyons learns that her husband's plane has gone down in the Atlantic off Malin Head, Ireland, and then that he had been leading a double life. Oprah Winfrey chose the novel for her book club in 1999, while Shreve was teaching creative writing at Amherst College. Born in Boston in 1946, she taught high school, worked as a magazine editor in Kenya, and won an O. Henry Prize in 1976 for her story “Past the Island, Drifting”. The Weight of Water (1997) set a modern marriage against the 1870s murders on Smuttynose Island, and Kathryn Bigelow filmed it in 2000. Shreve died at her home in Newfields, New Hampshire, in March 2018. The ten writers below share her ground: a marriage seen from inside, a secret that surfaces after a death, and a New England shore that keeps the record.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · Marriage and secrets · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Anita Shreve, start with Sue Miller, whose Monogamy (2020) follows a widow in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who learns after her husband's sudden death that he had been having an affair. For a nineteenth-century murder retold around a woman, read Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996); for long marriages in small coastal towns, read Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge (2008). The list also goes back to Hawthorne and Wharton, who wrote New England guilt first.

10 authors like Anita Shreve

01
Secret sin in New England

Nathaniel Hawthorne

American · The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Hawthorne (1804–1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of a judge at the Salem witch trials, and set much of his fiction in Puritan New England. The Scarlet Letter follows Hester Prynne, condemned to wear a scarlet A for adultery, while the father of her child keeps his secret.

The first great American novel about a woman judged for love outside marriage, set in the same New England that Shreve wrote. Both follow a hidden act through its long consequences; Hawthorne writes allegory, Shreve writes the private aftermath.

— Lisanne
02
A marriage under snow

Edith Wharton

American · Ethan Frome (1911), The Age of Innocence (1920)

Wharton was born into a wealthy New York family in 1862 and died in France in 1937. Ethan Frome, set in a Massachusetts village in winter, follows a poor farmer bound to a joyless marriage who falls in love with his wife's young cousin. The Age of Innocence made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, in 1921.

The older New England novel behind Shreve's: cold country, a marriage held together by duty, and a passion that can only end badly. Wharton is harsher and more ironic; readers of Light on Snow and The Stars Are Fire will recognise the weather.

— Lisanne

Every book by Edith Wharton →

03
The marriage, unmasked

Richard Yates

American · Revolutionary Road (1961), Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962)

Yates was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1926 and died in 1992. Revolutionary Road follows Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple in 1955 Connecticut who believe they are too good for the suburbs and plan an escape to Paris. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and was filmed in 2008.

Yates writes from inside the kind of marriage Shreve's wives only understand afterwards: two people performing a happy life in a Connecticut suburb. He is bleaker than Shreve and gives the husband's self-deception as much room as the wife's.

— Lisanne

Every book by Richard Yates →

04
The murder, retold by a woman

Margaret Atwood

Canadian · The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Alias Grace (1996)

Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939. Alias Grace retells the case of Grace Marks, a servant convicted in 1843 of the murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Canada West, now Ontario. It won the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it never settles whether Grace was guilty.

Published a year before The Weight of Water and built the same way: a real nineteenth-century murder, a working woman at its centre, and a later mind trying to read her. Atwood is cooler and more sceptical of every account, including her narrator's.

— Lisanne

Every book by Margaret Atwood →

05
The widow who learns the truth

Sue Miller

American · The Good Mother (1986), While I Was Gone (1999), Monogamy (2020)

Miller was born in Chicago in 1943. Her first novel, The Good Mother, was filmed in 1988, and While I Was Gone was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in 2000, the year after The Pilot's Wife. In Monogamy, Annie, a photographer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, learns after her husband Graham dies suddenly in his sleep that he had been having an affair.

The closest match on this list: Monogamy rereads a long marriage after a death and a discovered betrayal, as The Pilot's Wife does. Miller is quieter and more interested in what the widow does with the knowledge than in how she finds it out.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sue Miller →

06
Marriages on the Maine coast

Elizabeth Strout

American · Olive Kitteridge (2008), My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016)

Strout was born in Portland, Maine, in 1956 and sets much of her fiction in invented small towns in Maine. Olive Kitteridge, a novel in thirteen linked stories about a retired maths teacher and her neighbours, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009. My Name Is Lucy Barton is a short novel about a writer visited in hospital by the mother she has barely seen in years.

Strout writes the same northern New England coast as Shreve and the same long marriages, full of things never said. She has no plot twists; the secrets come out in small scenes, and she suits readers who stay with Shreve for the people rather than the mystery.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elizabeth Strout →

07
The family and the moral question

Jodi Picoult

American · My Sister's Keeper (2004), Nineteen Minutes (2007)

Picoult was born on Long Island in 1966 and lives in New Hampshire. Her novels build a family story around a moral or legal question; Nineteen Minutes is about a school shooting in a small New Hampshire town and what it does to the families there.

Picoult shares Shreve's New Hampshire and many of her readers: a family story built around one shocking event, told from several sides. Picoult argues the moral question out, often in court; Shreve stays with the private aftermath.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jodi Picoult →

08
The wife who steps out

Joanna Trollope

British · The Choir (1988), A Village Affair (1989), The Rector’s Wife (1991)

Joanna Trollope was born in 1943 in her grandfather’s rectory in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, and Anthony Trollope was her fifth-generation uncle. The Choir, her first contemporary novel, is set around a cathedral choir; The Rector’s Wife, about a clergyman’s wife who takes a job to escape the parish, displaced Jeffrey Archer from the top of the hardback bestseller list. Critics labelled her books “Aga sagas”; she has called them “quite subversive, quite bleak”.

The English counterpart: marriages in small communities and wives who step out of their role, written with sympathy and without melodrama. The Rector’s Wife suits readers of Shreve's quieter novels, such as Light on Snow.

— Lisanne
09
The wife at home

Maggie O'Farrell

Northern Irish-born British · Hamnet (2020), The Marriage Portrait (2022)

O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, in 1972 and grew up in Wales and Scotland. Hamnet imagines the household of William Shakespeare, never named in the novel, around the death of his son in 1596, and won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. The Marriage Portrait follows Lucrezia de’ Medici in Renaissance Ferrara.

Hamnet tells a marriage from the side of the wife who stays at home while her husband has a life in another city, the situation Kathryn Lyons discovers too late. O’Farrell writes grief and family in the same close, sensory voice Shreve uses for her coast.

— Lisanne
10
The husband's secret, literally

Liane Moriarty

Australian · The Husband’s Secret (2013), Big Little Lies (2014)

Moriarty was born in Sydney in 1966 and worked in advertising before writing fiction. Big Little Lies follows three mothers at a beachside primary school in the months before a death at a school trivia night, and was adapted by HBO in 2017. Her novels mix school-gate comedy with domestic violence, adultery and grief.

The Husband’s Secret, in which a wife finds a letter her husband meant to be opened only after his death, is The Pilot's Wife in a Sydney suburb. Moriarty is funnier and busier, with several households in play; Shreve keeps to one woman's shock.

— Lisanne

Every book by Liane Moriarty →

Where to start if you loved Anita Shreve

If you loved The Pilot's Wife, read Sue Miller.

Monogamy: a long marriage reread after a sudden death and a discovered affair.

If you loved The Weight of Water, read Margaret Atwood.

Alias Grace: a real 1843 murder case and a servant whose guilt is never settled.

If you loved the New England coast, read Elizabeth Strout.

Olive Kitteridge: linked stories about marriages in a small Maine town.

If you want the classic behind her, read Edith Wharton.

Ethan Frome (1911): a short, freezing novel of duty and forbidden love in rural Massachusetts.

If you want more Anita Shreve, start with The Pilot's Wife.

The Pilot's Wife (1998) first, then The Weight of Water (1997) and Fortune's Rocks (1999). Her last novel, The Stars Are Fire (2017), follows a young mother through the Maine forest fires of 1947.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Anita Shreve

Who writes like Anita Shreve?

Sue Miller and Elizabeth Strout for New England marriages, Jodi Picoult and Liane Moriarty for family secrets around a single event, and Margaret Atwood for a historical murder retold around a woman.

What should I read after The Pilot's Wife?

Sue Miller's Monogamy (2020), in which a widow learns of her husband's affair after his death, and Liane Moriarty's The Husband’s Secret (2013).

Does Anita Shreve have a new book?

No. Shreve died of cancer in March 2018, aged 71, and her last novel was The Stars Are Fire (2017).

Which Anita Shreve book should I read first?

The Pilot's Wife (1998), her Oprah's Book Club pick. For historical fiction, start with The Weight of Water (1997).

Are Anita Shreve's books connected?

Some are. Fortune's Rocks (1999), Sea Glass (2002) and Body Surfing (2007) are set in the same seaside house on the New Hampshire coast, once a convent, with different families from the nineteenth century to the present.

Is Anita Shreve like Jodi Picoult?

Both write family drama around one shocking event, and both made their homes in New Hampshire. Picoult argues the moral question out, often in court; Shreve stays with the private aftermath.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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