Reading List

Authors Like Bella Mackie

Grace Bernard is in prison for the one murder she did not commit. The other six she describes in detail, calmly, between observations about self-care and other people's handbags. That is How to Kill Your Family (2021), which sold around 739,000 copies in Britain in its first three years and turned a journalist into a novelist somewhat by accident. Mackie had been a commissioning editor at The Guardian and deputy editor at Vice News, and her first book, Jog On (2018), was a memoir about running and the anxiety she has written about publicly. Her second novel, What a Way to Go, came from The Borough Press on 12 September 2024, and a further two-book deal takes her to 2027. Netflix is adapting the first one as an eight-part series with Anya Taylor-Joy as Grace, from Sid Gentle Films, the company behind Killing Eve. The trick of the book is a narrator who is snobbish, funny, entirely without remorse and completely reliable about everything except herself, aimed at a class of rich Londoner the reader is invited to enjoy watching die. The ten writers below are sorted by which part of that you want more of: the narrator, the murders, or the class comedy.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Dark comedy and crime · London · 739,000 copies sold · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Bella Mackie, the closest match is Oyinkan Braithwaite: My Sister, the Serial Killer is short, funny, and narrated by someone whose loyalty to a murderer is treated as a domestic inconvenience. For the antiheroine voice at full strength, read Gillian Flynn or Ottessa Moshfegh. For the British revenge comedy without the corpses, read Jane Fallon. Patricia Highsmith and Muriel Spark were doing the charming-murderer novel decades earlier and much colder. And Tana French is the argument against all of it.

Every book by Bella Mackie →

10 authors like Bella Mackie

01
The same joke, in Lagos · Closest match

Oyinkan Braithwaite

Nigerian-British · My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018)

Korede is a nurse in Lagos who keeps being called out with bleach and rubber gloves because her beautiful younger sister Ayoola has killed another boyfriend. The novel runs to about two hundred short chapters' worth of pages, is very funny, and takes the sisters' relationship — and their father's legacy — far more seriously than the bodies. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the mystery and thriller category.

The closest thing to Mackie's tone anywhere, and it got there first. Both books are narrated by a woman who has decided that murder is a manageable family problem, both are short, sardonic and structurally tidy, and both use comedy to make you sit with something genuinely nasty about how the rich or the beautiful get away with things. Braithwaite is the more disciplined writer and her ending costs her characters more. Read it in one sitting, which is how it is built.

— Lisanne
02
The antiheroine, fully armed

Gillian Flynn

American · Sharp Objects (2006), Gone Girl (2012)

Gone Girl sold in the millions and rearranged the thriller around a woman who is not the victim she is being reported as. Flynn wrote the screenplay for David Fincher's 2014 film herself. Sharp Objects, about a reporter returning to her Missouri home town and to her mother, became an HBO series with Amy Adams in 2018. She spent a decade as a television critic at Entertainment Weekly before being made redundant, which is when she finished her second novel.

The writer who made Grace Bernard publishable. Flynn established that a mainstream audience would follow a female narrator who is cruel, calculating and correct about the people around her, and that the pleasure is precisely in not being asked to like her. Mackie is lighter and funnier; Flynn is nastier and better at the trapdoor. If the part of How to Kill Your Family you enjoyed was the voice rather than the body count, start with Gone Girl and then read Sharp Objects, which is the better book.

— Lisanne
03
The unlikeable narrator as literature

Ottessa Moshfegh

American · Eileen (2015), My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

Eileen is narrated by a young woman working in a boys' prison in Massachusetts in 1964 who describes her own body and her father's drinking with unsettling flatness; it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 and filmed in 2023. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a beautiful, rich, orphaned New Yorker who decides to sleep through a year on prescription medication, set in the run-up to September 2001. Lapvona (2022) moves to a brutal invented medieval village and lost her a good many readers.

What Mackie's narrator looks like when the writer refuses to make her fun. Both build a book on a young woman with money, contempt and no interest in being liked, and both are really writing about class and inheritance rather than about crime or sleep. Moshfegh will not let you off with a joke, and there is no revenge plot to reassure you that the target deserved it. Read her if you suspect the appeal of Grace Bernard was the rudeness rather than the murders.

— Lisanne
04
The British revenge comedy

Jane Fallon

British · Getting Rid of Matthew (2007), Worst Idea Ever (2020)

Fallon produced television for years — This Life, Teachers — before writing novels about ordinary British women running elaborate campaigns against people who have wronged them: the mistress who finally gets the husband and immediately wants rid of him, the friend who sets up a fake social media account to help and watches it go wrong. The plots are engineered like farce, the settings are recognisably suburban, and nobody dies.

Mackie's machinery, with the bodies removed and the English politeness left in. Fallon writes the same reader-as-accomplice contract — here is a plan, here is why she is entitled to it, watch it slip — and she is very good on the specific class detail of who apologises to whom in Britain. She is the right recommendation for someone who loved the scheming in How to Kill Your Family and found the corpses unnecessary.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jane Fallon →

05
The same class, in the dock

Sarah Vaughan

British · Anatomy of a Scandal (2018), Reputation (2022)

Vaughan covered Westminster for The Guardian and writes courtroom novels about the English governing class: a junior minister accused of rape by a colleague, his barrister, and a wife who has decided what she believes. Anatomy of a Scandal became a Netflix series in 2022 with Sienna Miller and Michelle Dockery. Reputation follows an MP through online abuse and a death in her house. The Oxford drinking-club material in the first book is drawn from a world she reported on directly.

The same targets, taken seriously. Mackie kills the sort of people Vaughan puts on trial — the inherited money, the club, the certainty that the rules are for other people — and where Mackie's solution is a comic fantasy of retribution, Vaughan makes you watch a legal system deal with it badly. Read her if what you actually enjoyed about How to Kill Your Family was the anger at the Artemis family rather than the method.

— Lisanne
06
Older than the genre · The charming murderer

Patricia Highsmith

American · Strangers on a Train (1950), The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)

Highsmith invented the modern version of this book: Tom Ripley kills a rich young man in Italy, takes his clothes, his signature and his life, and is followed sympathetically through four more novels without ever being punished. Hitchcock filmed Strangers on a Train in 1951 and Anthony Minghella filmed Ripley in 1999. Her diaries and notebooks, published in 2021, record antisemitic and racist views at length, and have made a good many readers re-examine what her coldness on the page was made of.

The origin of the pleasure Mackie is trading on. Highsmith worked out that a reader will follow a killer anywhere provided the prose is calm and the victims are people the reader already resents, and she did it without a single joke to release the pressure. Grace Bernard is a Ripley with better one-liners and a grievance the reader is invited to share. Read The Talented Mr Ripley to see how much of the machinery is seventy years old.

— Lisanne
Every book by Patricia Highsmith →
07
Older than the genre · And funnier

Muriel Spark

Scottish · The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Driver's Seat (1970)

Spark wrote twenty-two short novels in which appalling things happen in a very light tone, often announced long before they occur: Miss Brodie's betrayal is disclosed halfway through, and The Driver's Seat tells you in chapter three that Lise will be found dead the next morning and then follows her shopping. She converted to Catholicism in 1954, moved to Italy, and was made a dame in 1993. She died in 2006.

The best writer on this list, and the clearest demonstration of what the form can do. Spark is doing exactly what Mackie does — a comic surface, a cold interior, a narrator who knows more than she is saying — in a hundred and forty pages and without a single wasted sentence. She is also stranger and less consoling: nobody in Spark gets the revenge they have earned. Read The Driver's Seat if you want to be genuinely unsettled by the same technique.

— Lisanne
08
The voice, without the killing

Dolly Alderton

British · Everything I Know About Love (2018), Good Material (2023)

Alderton wrote a dating column for The Sunday Times Style and then a memoir about female friendship in her twenties in London, which the BBC adapted in 2022. Ghosts (2020) is a novel about a food writer being ghosted while her father develops dementia; Good Material is narrated by a thirty-five-year-old comedian who has just been dumped and cannot work out why, and hands the last section to the woman who left him.

The same London, the same generation of media people, none of the blood. Alderton and Mackie both write a very specific slice of the city — the flat shares, the rich boyfriend's family, the exact restaurant — with a comic timing that comes out of column writing. Alderton is warmer by a wide margin and interested in repair rather than revenge. She is the right next book if you liked being in Grace's company more than you liked what Grace did.

— Lisanne

Every book by Dolly Alderton →

Authors like Dolly Alderton →

09
The British literary version

Kate Atkinson

British · Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), Case Histories (2004), Life After Life (2013)

Atkinson won the Whitbread Book of the Year for her first novel and then, ten years later, began the Jackson Brodie books, literary crime novels in which several unrelated tragedies turn out to be connected and the detective is largely useless. Life After Life gives Ursula Todd the twentieth century over and over, dying and restarting. She writes very funny sentences about very grim events, which is a rarer combination than it sounds.

What happens when the comic-crime register is handled by someone with thirty years of practice. Atkinson shares Mackie's willingness to make you laugh in the middle of a death and her interest in families that damage each other structurally rather than dramatically, but her plots interlock in ways that reward a second reading. Start with Case Histories: it is the closest to a crime novel and the least like anything else in the genre.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kate Atkinson →

10
The argument against her

Tana French

Irish · In the Woods (2007), Broken Harbour (2012), The Hunter (2024)

French was an actor before she wrote the Dublin Murder Squad novels, each narrated by a different detective who is damaged in a way the case will exploit. In the Woods won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Barry awards for best first novel in 2008. Broken Harbour is set on an abandoned ghost estate after the Irish crash; The Searcher and The Hunter move to the west of Ireland and a retired Chicago policeman who wants to be left alone.

The case against the whole comic-murder contract. French writes killings that cannot be enjoyed: somebody is dead, a family is ruined for good, the detective is worse afterwards, and no ending gives the reader the satisfaction Mackie's does. Reading Broken Harbour after How to Kill Your Family is genuinely uncomfortable, because it makes visible how much work Mackie's tone is doing to keep six murders weightless. Whether that is a criticism or a description of the joke is the argument worth having.

— Lisanne

Every book by Tana French →

Where to start if you loved Bella Mackie

If you want the closest match, read Oyinkan Braithwaite.

My Sister, the Serial Killer. Bleach, rubber gloves, and a sister who keeps doing it.

If you want the antiheroine, read Gillian Flynn.

Gone Girl. The book that proved readers would follow a woman like Grace anywhere.

If you want the scheming without the corpses, read Jane Fallon.

Getting Rid of Matthew. A revenge plan, engineered like farce, entirely bloodless.

If you want the original, read Patricia Highsmith.

The Talented Mr Ripley. A charming murderer nobody punishes, seventy years early.

If you want the argument against it, read Tana French.

Broken Harbour. A killing that stays heavy, on an estate nobody finished building.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Bella Mackie

Who should I read if I love Bella Mackie?

Oyinkan Braithwaite is the closest — the same short, funny, entirely unrepentant narration, in Lagos. Gillian Flynn and Ottessa Moshfegh are the two writers who did most to make an unlikeable female narrator commercially normal. Jane Fallon writes the same British revenge scheming without the killings, and Sarah Vaughan puts the same class of people in a courtroom instead. Patricia Highsmith and Muriel Spark were doing the charming-murderer novel decades earlier and colder, and Kate Atkinson does the literary version. Dolly Alderton is the one for the London voice rather than the crimes, and Tana French is the argument against the whole premise.

Is How to Kill Your Family being made into a series?

Yes, by Netflix, in eight episodes, with Anya Taylor-Joy as Grace Bernard. It comes from Sid Gentle Films, the company behind Killing Eve, with Taylor-Joy also executive producing through her company LadyKiller and Mackie as a co-executive producer. Clive Owen, Orlando Norman and David Shields have been announced in the cast. The project was unveiled at the Edinburgh TV Festival in August 2024 and has not yet aired as of September 2026.

Which Bella Mackie book should I start with?

How to Kill Your Family (2021), because everything about her that people talk about is in it. What a Way to Go, published by The Borough Press on 12 September 2024, is the follow-up: another very wealthy family, another suspicious death, and a wider cast than the first book. Jog On (2018) is a different thing entirely, a memoir about running and anxiety, and worth reading only if you want the person rather than the novelist.

Is Bella Mackie writing another book?

Yes. She signed a further two-book deal with The Borough Press, the HarperCollins imprint that publishes her, which takes her through to 2027. No title or date for the next novel has been announced as of September 2026.

Is How to Kill Your Family a comedy or a thriller?

A comedy with a body count, which is why it divides readers. There is no detective, no real suspense about who did it, and no attempt to make Grace sympathetic in the usual way; the pleasure is her voice and the targets she picks. Reviewers who dislike it tend to object that the murders are consequence-free, and that objection is fair — the book is built to make them weightless. If that spoils it for you, Tana French is the writer to read next.

What did Bella Mackie do before she wrote novels?

Journalism. She was a commissioning editor at The Guardian and deputy editor at Vice News, and has written for Vogue, GQ, Stylist and others; she has been a columnist at British Vogue. Her first book, Jog On (2018), came out of that period and is a memoir rather than fiction. She lives in London, and the media and moneyed corners of the city that turn up in her novels are ones she has worked in.

How many copies has How to Kill Your Family sold?

Around 739,000 in the United Kingdom by August 2024, worth about £4.8 million, according to Nielsen BookScan figures reported by The Bookseller. That is before the Netflix series, which usually adds substantially, and before international editions are counted. It was a word-of-mouth and social media success rather than a prize-list one.

What order should I read Bella Mackie's books in?

Publication order, and there are only three. Jog On (2018) is non-fiction and stands apart. How to Kill Your Family (2021) and What a Way to Go (2024) are separate novels with no shared characters, so either can be read first, but the first is the one that made her name and the one the series is based on.

Sources

List last reviewed 9 September 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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“I often think she understands her better than I do.”

— Bella Mackie, on Anya Taylor-Joy playing Grace, Netflix.

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