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Reading List · Outsiders and MisfitsBooks About Outsiders: Novels and True Stories About People Who Don’t Fit In
Some people never quite fit in: the rule-breakers, the misfits, the loners and those pushed to the edge of society. Books about outsiders follow them, whether they choose to step away from ordinary life or are shut out by family, class, race or convention. Readers come to these stories to recognise themselves, to understand people unlike them, and to see what a society reveals about itself through the people it refuses to accept.
This list mixes novels with memoir and journalism. The fiction ranges from Camus and Kafka to contemporary books from Japan and Scotland; the true stories follow an outlaw motorcycle club, a woman raised outside school, a young man who walked into the Alaskan wilderness and a girl who defied the Taliban. All are written for adult readers.
Fourteen books about Outsiders
The Stranger
Albert Camus · 1942
Meursault, a detached young clerk in French Algeria, attends his mother’s funeral without showing grief, starts a relationship with Marie and is drawn into a neighbour’s feud. On a beach near Algiers he shoots an Arab man. At his trial the prosecution dwells less on the killing than on his apparent lack of feeling at the funeral, and he is sentenced to death.
In the United Kingdom the novel is published as The Outsider, and the title fits: Meursault is condemned as much for refusing to perform the expected emotions as for his crime. It suits readers who want a short, unsettling novel about what society demands of people who do not play along.
Read it if you want the classic short novel about a man who will not pretend to feel what is expected.
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger · 1951
After being expelled from Pencey Prep, a boarding school in Pennsylvania, Holden Caulfield spends a long weekend wandering New York City before going home. He drifts between hotels, bars and old acquaintances, scornful of the "phony" adults around him and struggling with loss and loneliness.
Holden is the archetypal teenage outsider, convinced that everyone else is pretending and unable to find a place for himself. His voice made the novel a touchstone for writing about adolescence and alienation, and it was among the most challenged books in American schools for decades.
Read it if you want the classic novel about feeling out of place as a teenager.
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison · 1952
An unnamed Black narrator tells his story from a hidden underground room lit with electricity stolen from the city. He recalls his expulsion from a Southern college, a job at a New York paint factory, his rise as a speaker for a political group called the Brotherhood in Harlem, and the riot that drives him underground.
His invisibility is social: white and Black characters alike see their own expectations and agendas rather than the man himself. The novel won the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction, making Ellison the first African-American writer to receive it.
Read it if you want a landmark American novel about being unseen by the society around you.
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.
Westover is an outsider twice over: first as a child raised apart from mainstream society, then as a student with no idea of what others took for granted. The memoir explores the cost of leaving the world you came from, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.
Read it if you want a true story about leaving the only world you have known.
Read my full recommendation →Convenience Store Woman
Sayaka Murata · 2016
Keiko Furukura is 36 and has worked part-time in the same Tokyo convenience store for 18 years. The store’s rules and scripts give her a way of fitting in, but family and friends keep pressing her to find a proper career or a husband. When an awkward new colleague, Shiraha, is fired, she proposes a marriage of convenience.
The short novel is a deadpan look at what happens to someone who does not want what she is supposed to want. It won Japan’s Akutagawa Prize in 2016 and appeared in English in 2018, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Read it if you want a short, darkly funny novel about refusing a normal life.
Hell’s Angels
Hunter S. Thompson · 1966
Hunter S. Thompson spent more than a year with the San Francisco and Oakland chapters of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club, drinking in their bars, recording their conversations and travelling to their runs. The relationship ended when several members beat him. The book grew out of a 1965 article for The Nation.
That original article was titled "The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders", and the book is a close-up portrait of men who chose to live outside respectable 1960s America. It also shows how the press turned them into a national threat.
Read it if you want a true story from inside a feared outlaw subculture.
Read my full recommendation →Poor Things
Alasdair Gray · 1992
In Victorian Glasgow, the surgeon Godwin Baxter brings a dead pregnant woman back to life by giving her the brain of her unborn child. The result is Bella, an adult with an infant’s mind, who grows up fast, elopes with Duncan Wedderburn and travels across Europe and beyond. The story is told by Archibald McCandless, then challenged in a letter by Bella herself.
Bella is an outsider to every convention she meets, curious and frank in a society built on propriety. The novel won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1992 and was filmed by Yorgos Lanthimos in 2023.
Read it if you want a playful, strange novel about a woman who never learned the rules.
Read my full recommendation →The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka · 1915
Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who supports his parents and sister, wakes one morning transformed into a giant insect. Confined to his room, he adapts to his new body while his family takes jobs to get by. His sister Grete cares for him at first, but the household’s patience wears thin.
The story is one of the starkest pictures of how being different can cut someone off, even from the people closest to them. Gregor’s family moves from dependence to disgust, and the novella can be read in a single sitting.
Read it if you want a short classic about being shut out by your own family.
Into the Wild
Jon Krakauer · 1996
After graduating from Emory University in 1990, Christopher McCandless gave his savings to charity, abandoned his car and set off across America under the name Alexander Supertramp. In April 1992 he walked into the Alaskan wilderness near Denali and camped in an abandoned bus. He died there, and his body was found by moose hunters.
Krakauer reconstructs the journey of a young man who deliberately turned his back on conventional society. The book leaves readers to decide whether McCandless was brave or reckless, and Sean Penn adapted it as a film in 2007.
Read it if you want a true story about walking away from society altogether.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman · 2017
Eleanor Oliphant is a 29-year-old finance clerk at a Glasgow design company. She has no friends, spends her weekends alone and insists she is fine. When she and a new colleague, Raymond, help an elderly man who collapses in the street, an unlikely friendship begins to open up her life and her past.
Eleanor is socially awkward, blunt and set in her routines, and the novel treats her with humour and sympathy rather than pity. It won the 2017 Costa Debut Novel Award and was named overall Book of the Year at the 2018 British Book Awards.
Read it if you want a warm, contemporary novel about loneliness and connection.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925
Narrated by Nick Carraway, the novel follows his mysterious neighbour Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire who throws lavish parties on Long Island in the hope of winning back Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loved before the war. Old money, new money and careless wealth collide over one summer in the 1920s.
Born James Gatz in North Dakota, Gatsby has money but remains an outsider to the old-money world of East Egg; Daisy’s husband Tom dismisses him as "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere". It suits readers interested in the class lines wealth alone cannot cross.
Read it if you want a short classic about a self-made man who is never quite accepted.
Read my full recommendation →Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse · 1927
Harry Haller is a middle-aged intellectual who feels out of place in respectable middle-class society and drifts towards despair. A pamphlet, the Treatise on the Steppenwolf, seems to describe him exactly. A young woman, Hermine, and a saxophonist, Pablo, draw him into dancing, pleasure and finally the surreal Magic Theatre.
The novel is about a man who cannot belong and does not quite want to. It was revived in the 1960s counterculture, when readers embraced it for its free love and drug use, and it gave its name to the band Steppenwolf.
Read it if you want a philosophical novel about a loner at odds with ordinary life.
I Am Malala
Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb · 2013
Malala Yousafzai describes her childhood in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, where her father ran schools, and the rise of the Pakistani Taliban, who banned girls from going to school. She recounts writing about life under the Taliban for the BBC under a pseudonym, the 2012 attack on her school bus, and her recovery in Birmingham.
This is the story of a girl who refused to accept the rules imposed on her valley and spoke out when silence was safer. In 2014 she shared the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming its youngest laureate.
Read it if you want a true story of a rule-breaker standing up for an education.
Read my full recommendation →Lord of the Flies
William Golding · 1954
A group of British schoolboys survive a plane crash and find themselves alone on an uninhabited island. They try to organise themselves with rules, a leader and a signal fire, but the order breaks down as fear, rivalry and the thrill of the hunt take over, and the island turns violent.
The novel shows how a group creates its outsiders. Piggy is mocked for his asthma, weight and glasses, the quiet Simon is killed by the frenzied boys, and in the end Ralph himself is hunted across the island.
Read it if you want a classic about how groups turn on the ones who do not fit.
Read my full recommendation →Which book should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For the classic starting point — The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
- For a true story — Educated by Tara Westover (2018)
- For a short, funny read — Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (2016)
- For a warm, modern novel — Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017)
- For a life lived outside the rules — Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson (1966)
- For one sitting — The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Is this a list about The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton?
No. S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) is a young adult novel about rival teenage gangs in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This list collects books for adult readers about people who do not fit in, from Camus’s The Stranger to Tara Westover’s Educated.
Is The Outsider by Camus the same book as The Stranger?
Yes. Camus’s 1942 novel L’Étranger is published as The Outsider in the United Kingdom and as The Stranger in the United States.
What is the best novel about an outsider?
The Stranger, The Catcher in the Rye and Invisible Man are three of the best-known classics. For something more recent, Convenience Store Woman and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine are widely read contemporary novels about women who do not fit in.
Which true stories are about people who don’t fit in?
Educated follows a woman raised in a survivalist family who had no schooling before university. Into the Wild reconstructs the life of a young man who left society behind, and Hell’s Angels reports from inside an outlaw motorcycle club.
Which books about outsiders are short?
The Metamorphosis can be read in a single sitting, and The Stranger and Convenience Store Woman are both short novels.
Are there funny books about misfits?
Convenience Store Woman is deadpan and darkly comic, and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine mixes humour with a serious story about loneliness. Poor Things is playful and strange.
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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