Books Like The Great Gatsby

A scholarship student at a small Vermont college falls in with a clique of wealthy, brilliant classics students who have committed a murder — and he finds out at the start, not the end. Tartt's novel is structured as an inverted mystery: not whodunit but why, and what it costs. It shares Gatsby's obsession with a certain kind of glamour — the way beauty and money and intellect together produce something that looks like enchantment and functions like moral anaesthesia. One of the best American novels of the last forty years.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway were writing at the same moment about the same lost generation, but from different angles. Where Gatsby looks at wealth from the outside, The Sun Also Rises is written from inside the disillusionment — a group of American and British expatriates drinking their way through Paris and Pamplona, trying to outrun whatever the war took from them. Jake Barnes is Fitzgerald's narrators stripped of even the pretence of hope. The prose is tighter, the sadness is quieter, the hangovers are more convincing.

Stevens, an English butler of the old school, takes a driving holiday across the English countryside and slowly, carefully, almost without admitting it to himself, accounts for a life spent in service to a man who didn't deserve it and a code of dignity that left no room for anything else. Ishiguro's novel is the most precise account of self-deception in English fiction — the way we construct narratives about our choices that protect us from what those choices actually were. Gatsby lies to everyone. Stevens lies only to himself.

Written in the second person — you are the unnamed narrator, a fact-checker at a New York magazine, unravelling in the wake of a failed marriage — McInerney's 1984 novel captured cocaine-era Manhattan with the same clear-eyed glamour Fitzgerald brought to Long Island sixty years earlier. The clubs, the money, the beautiful people, the specific feeling of being on the outside of something that looks like the inside. It's shorter than Gatsby and faster, but the hangover is the same.

Clay comes home to Los Angeles from his East Coast college for Christmas and moves through a world of parties, drugs, and beautiful people doing terrible things with the affectless calm of someone who has forgotten how to feel. Ellis was 21 when he wrote this, and the flatness of the prose — no judgment, no sentiment, just reporting — is the whole point. It's Gatsby's green light, but the light has gone out and nobody noticed.

Fitzgerald's second novel, written three years before Gatsby, follows Anthony Patch — a wealthy, handsome, aimless Harvard man — and his beautiful wife Gloria as they wait to inherit a fortune and slowly destroy themselves in the process. It's longer and less disciplined than Gatsby, but it contains some of Fitzgerald's most devastating writing about what money does to people who have always had it. Read it as a companion piece: Gatsby is about wanting everything, this is about having it and losing it anyway.

Szalay's novel — spare, precise, uncomfortable — follows a man across a series of encounters and transactions in post-communist Hungary. It shares Gatsby's interest in the performance of self and the gap between desire and its objects, but stripped of all romanticism. Where Fitzgerald gives you the green light, Szalay gives you the parking lot. Not an easy read, but one that stays with you in the way only honest books do.

Rooney's 2024 novel follows two brothers — a chess prodigy in his twenties, a lawyer in his thirties — grieving their father and falling into relationships that don't quite fit the lives they've built. It's her most ambitious book: richer in feeling, less tidily constructed, more willing to sit in difficulty. The Gatsby connection is indirect but real — both novels are about people reaching for something they can't quite name, and the particular damage that reaching does.