Authors Like Bruce Holsinger

Celeste Ng

American · Everything I Never Told You (2014), Little Fires Everywhere (2017), Our Missing Hearts (2022)

Little Fires Everywhere is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb planned down to the permitted paint colours, where a tenant and her daughter arrive and a custody fight over a Chinese-American baby splits the town. It became a Hulu series in 2020 with Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Everything I Never Told You opens with a dead teenager and works backwards through what her parents wanted from her. Our Missing Hearts moves into a near-future America where children are removed from politically suspect parents.

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Ian McEwan

British · Saturday (2005), Machines Like Me (2019)

McEwan has built a career on the single event that exposes a household: the balloon accident that opens Enduring Love, the car crash and the intruder in Saturday, the misread letter in Atonement. Machines Like Me puts an early synthetic human into an alternative 1982 London and lets him make a moral judgement his owners cannot accept. He won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam, and Joe Wright's film of Atonement reached the Academy Awards in 2008.

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Rumaan Alam

American · Leave the World Behind (2020), Entitlement (2024)

A white family rents an expensive house on Long Island for a week. The Black couple who own it arrive at the door in the night saying there has been a blackout in the city, and the novel stays inside the house while something enormous and unexplained happens outside it. It was a National Book Award finalist and became a Netflix film in 2023 with Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali, produced by Barack and Michelle Obama's company. Entitlement follows a young woman working for a billionaire's foundation.

Kazuo Ishiguro

British · Never Let Me Go (2005), Klara and the Sun (2021)

Klara and the Sun is narrated by an artificial friend bought from a shop window to keep a sick child company, who understands almost everything about the family except the thing that matters most. Never Let Me Go is told by children raised as organ donors in an English boarding school, in the same restrained voice that never raises itself. Ishiguro received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.

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Jodi Picoult

American · My Sister's Keeper (2004), Small Great Things (2016)

Picoult has written around thirty novels, each built on a contested question — a child conceived to donate to her dying sister, a Black nurse forbidden to treat a white supremacist couple's baby, a school shooting — researched in detail and told through several narrators who each get a fair hearing. My Sister's Keeper was filmed in 2009. She has also written about the fight over which books are permitted in American school libraries, including her own.

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Tom Perrotta

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

Perrotta writes American suburbs from inside their committees and playgrounds: a high school election, a group of bored parents at a paddling pool, a town in which two per cent of the world's population has vanished without explanation. 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.

Liane Moriarty

Australian · Big Little Lies (2014), Nine Perfect Strangers (2018), Here One Moment (2024)

Big Little Lies opens with a death at a school trivia night and then reconstructs the year of playground politics behind it, with the parents' gossip printed as testimony between chapters; the HBO adaptation ran from 2017 with Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon. Nine Perfect Strangers puts strangers in a wellness retreat run by someone with a plan, and Here One Moment begins with a woman on a delayed flight telling each passenger how and when they will die.

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Naomi Alderman

British · The Power (2016), The Future (2023)

The Power imagines teenage girls developing the ability to deliver an electric shock and follows what happens to the world over a decade; it won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017 and became a Prime Video series in 2023. The Future is about a small group of technology billionaires with bunkers and the people planning to take their companies from them. She also co-created the running app Zombies, Run! and was mentored by Margaret Atwood.

Umberto Eco

Italian · The Name of the Rose (1980), Foucault's Pendulum (1988)

Eco was a professor of semiotics at Bologna who wrote a murder mystery set in a fourteenth-century Italian abbey, complete with disputes about Franciscan poverty, a labyrinthine library and a lost book of Aristotle. It sold in the tens of millions and was filmed in 1986 with Sean Connery. Foucault's Pendulum is about three editors who invent a conspiracy theory and are believed. He kept writing academic work throughout and died in 2016.

Don DeLillo

American · White Noise (1985), Underworld (1997), The Silence (2020)

White Noise gives a midwestern academic family an airborne toxic event, an evacuation, a drug that removes the fear of death, and no resolution to any of it; it won the National Book Award and Noah Baumbach filmed it in 2022. The Silence is a hundred pages in which every screen in the world stops working during a Super Bowl party and the characters keep talking. He has been writing about technology, disaster and American self-deception since the early 1970s.

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