8 Top literature books like Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

If you liked the literature plot in Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright , here is a list of 8 books like this:

Similar categories in Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• literature
• fiction
• contemporary
• novels

"She would like a shallow life, swift and shallow, till some day she can start again. Get through her time fast until then. And when will that be? Then."

-Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos

Similar categories in Jennifer Croft's The Extinction of Irena Rey book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary

"The sun was higher, a white light between the birches that arched and bared their lenticels, shimmering their leaves."

-Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

"Glittering crystalline rainbows extended in every direction, while gentle gold beams swept between the softened trees that sparkled and beckoned and forbade."

-Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

"It was a new moon, but the stars of the northern hemisphere transformed her slim sinuous home, converting the oak strips on the convex walls into quicksilver that momentarily held the frenzied shadow…"

-Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

"It was barely spring in the southern hemisphere, and Buenos Aires was not yet soft, or sumptuous, or purple.* *I wasn't sure what this meant at first, but when I asked this author to explain it, she …"

-Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey

Similar categories in Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• literature
• australia
• fiction
• contemporary
• novels

Similar categories in Melissa Lucashenko's Edenglassie book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• literature
• indigenous
• fiction
• contemporary
• australia

Similar categories in Shankari Chandran's Safe Haven book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• fiction
• australia
• contemporary

Similar categories in Colin Barrett's Wild Houses book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• novels
• fiction
• contemporary

"What you are in, Dev, is a holding pattern, only you're not holding out for anything."

-Colin Barrett, Wild Houses

"All boys, all children, are capable of cruelty at the right juncture of opportunity and circumstance, but only a few become committed prodigies of sadism..."

-Colin Barrett, Wild Houses

"In the dream, exactly as he had in real life, he sensed the slow, inexorable approach of the shapeless, prospectless days to come, days when there would be no need to get out of bed or brush his teet…"

-Colin Barrett, Wild Houses

"He looked around the empty kitchen. A part of him wanted this of course. A part of him had always wanted this, to be alone, away from even the prospect of any demand upon him to talk, to interact, to…"

-Colin Barrett, Wild Houses

Similar categories in Rita Bullwinkel's Headshot book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• novels
• fiction
• contemporary

"The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular."

-Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot

"Tanya Maw's sister is two years older, the perfect age gap for wisdom transmission."

-Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot

"It can be intoxicating to play a sport that requires one to look in their opponent's eyes."

-Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot

"It's a warmth that she'll feel again very few times in her life. It's almost like love, but it has a surer, less desperate edge to it."

-Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot

Similar categories in Sarah Perry's Enlightenment book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary

"Thomas [Hart] lived where he'd been born, and where (so he often thought without rancor) he'd very likely die; and if he lived alone he was not lonely, that being a condition not of solitude but of l…"

-Sarah Perry, Enlightenment

"So I told her this: that it's true I've only rarely been happy, and perhaps more often been sad. But I have been content. I have lived. I have felt everything available to me: I've been faithless, de…"

-Sarah Perry, Enlightenment

"I wish I could say, James, that we forgave each other in the end. I wish I could say: she put her head on my shoulder and I welcomed it and we laughed and said all was well. But in fact we were quiet…"

-Sarah Perry, Enlightenment

"...in the ordinary way we love because we're loved, and give more or less what we're given. But to love without return is more strange and more wonderful, and not the humiliating thing I'd once taken…"

-Sarah Perry, Enlightenment

Similar categories in Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• fiction

"Family life, like playing chess, involved always thinking several steps ahead."

-Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History

"Literature... Now, that's a religion I can believe in. That is perhaps my God."

-Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History

"... she'd been a fool, enamored of a figment, had created the soul of a man who never existed -"

-Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History

"All-U-Can Hi-way 4-Sale Thru. This American English thrilled him - its energy, its freedom, its carelessness."

-Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History

Similar categories in Samantha Harvey's Orbital book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• novels
• fiction
• contemporary

"Maybe we're the new dinosaurs and need to watch out."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

"The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It's always now, it's never now."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

"Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

"That's all this great human endeavor of space exploration really is, he thinks, an animal migration, a bid for survival. A looping song sent into the open, a territorial animal song."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Similar categories in Hwang Sok-yong's Mater 2-10 book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• literature
• politics
• fiction
• contemporary

Similar categories in Hisham Matar's My Friends book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• literature
• politics
• fiction
• contemporary
• novels

"A vast distance exists between a protester and his slogan; the entire history of politics exists in that gap."

-Hisham Matar, My Friends

"For a writer, exile is prison, a severing from the source, and so, courageous or not, he dies in front of our eyes."

-Hisham Matar, My Friends

"She was older and all the more beautiful, had the weary tiredness of one who, in surrendering to her life, was ennobled by it."

-Hisham Matar, My Friends

"I walked off feeling an emptiness well up inside me. It seemed, for all the emptiness that it was, a presence. It made me want to run away, dive deeper into myself, into that cold desolation, to the …"

-Hisham Matar, My Friends

Similar categories in Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• magical realism
• literature
• politics
• indigenous
• fiction
• contemporary
• 21st century
• australia
• novels

Similar categories in Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• fiction

Similar categories in Bruce Pascoe's Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

Similar categories in Anne Michaels's Held book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literature
• literary fiction
• fiction

"Who can say what happens when we are remembered?"

-Anne Michaels, Held

"Do we really need our own misery to teach us to be kind?"

-Anne Michaels, Held

"We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?"

-Anne Michaels, Held

"Would he know the moment of his death or would it be like night falling."

-Anne Michaels, Held

Similar categories in Sanya Rushdi's Hospital book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• australia
• fiction
• contemporary

Similar categories in Chigozie Obioma's The Road to the Country book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• fiction

"It has always seemed to him that the world was full of things; that even in one’s loneliest moments, there was often a crowd. But the things one loved remained invisible, hidden amongst the multitude…"

-Chigozie Obioma, The Road to the Country

Similar categories in Aysegül Savas's The Anthropologists book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• literature
• fiction
• contemporary
• novels

Similar categories in Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake book and Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy

• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary

"Charisma does not originate inside the person called "charismatic." It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist."

-Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake

"Plus, Lucien said, a lot of them had come from other social milieus and had tattoos from earlier lives, since people who change affinities are the same kinds of people who are attracted to the perman…"

-Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake

"My biker and these tramps, as people who organize their life around some subculture or other: People can sometimes pretend so thoroughly that they forget they are pretending. At which point, it could…"

-Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake

"I could sense him gathering a false hindsight that afternoon in the Place des Vosges, shaping a retrospective narrative, the thing a person tells himself about fate, about how everything had seemed f…"

-Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake