12 Top contemporary books like Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood

Cover of Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood

Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

By: Margaret Atwood

3.71

Format: 272 pages, Hardcover

A dazzling collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of …

"Many things get broken in a war."

-Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

"Holiness is a form of monstrosity"

-Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

"Many obscure women have been done to death merely for existing."

-Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

"They're dead now. A thing that happens increasingly: people die."

-Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

If you liked the contemporary plot in Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood , here is a list of 12 books like this:

Cover of Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood

1. Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

By: Margaret Atwood

3.71

Format: 272 pages, Hardcover

A dazzling collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of … read more

Similar categories in Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • canada
  • short story collection
  • literature
  • canadian literature
  • anthologies
  • short stories
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • audiobook
"Many things get broken in a war."

-Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

"Holiness is a form of monstrosity"

-Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

"Many obscure women have been done to death merely for existing."

-Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

"They're dead now. A thing that happens increasingly: people die."

-Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

Cover of Prophet Song by Paul    Lynch

2. Prophet Song

By: Paul Lynch

4.10

Format: 259 pages, Kindle Edition

A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internat… read more

Similar categories in Paul Lynch's Prophet Song book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • literature
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • audiobook
"people are entitled to some small moment of peace."

-Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

"the child absorbing the mother’s trauma and storing it in his body for later use,"

-Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

"... time is at once addition and subtraction, time adds one day to the next and always takes away from what's left..."

-Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

"...knowing how it is so that all boys grow up and pull away from home to unmake the world in the guise of making it, nature decrees it so."

-Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

Cover of Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

3. Old God's Time

By: Sebastian Barry

3.85

Format: 261 pages, Hardcover

From the two-time Booker Prize finalist author, a dazzlingly written novel exploring love, memory, … read more

Similar categories in Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • audiobook
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"Per ell aquest era el sentit de la jubilació, de l'existència: estar-se immòbil, feliç i inútil"

-Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

"Per ell aquest era el sentit de la jubilació, de l'existència: estar-de immòbil, feliç i inútil"

-Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

"No one minds life as long as they are not trying to leave it. Nor death, as long as they are not dying."

-Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

Cover of The Adversary by Michael Crummey

4. The Adversary

By: Michael Crummey

3.85

Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

From the award-winning, critically acclaimed author of The Innocents (“Extraordinary”— Wall Street … read more

Similar categories in Michael Crummey's The Adversary book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • canada
  • literature
  • fiction
  • audiobook
Cover of The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

5. The Librarianist

By: Patrick deWitt

3.41

Format: 352 pages, Hardcover

From bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes the story of Bob Comet, a man who ha… read more

Similar categories in Patrick deWitt's The Librarianist book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • audiobook
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
Cover of The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright

6. The Wren, the Wren

By: Anne Enright

3.55

Format: 278 pages, Hardcover

An incandescent novel about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of… read more

Similar categories in Anne Enright's The Wren, the Wren book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • audiobook
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"It's not that I think about him constantly, he is my way of thinking. His mind is my compass, his eyes my only mirror."

-Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren

"We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can…"

-Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren

"We don't walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can…"

-Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren

Cover of Normal Rules Don't Apply: Stories by Kate Atkinson

7. Normal Rules Don't Apply: Stories

By: Kate Atkinson

3.71

Format: 212 pages, Hardcover

A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author o… read more

Similar categories in Kate Atkinson's Normal Rules Don't Apply: Stories book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • short stories
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • audiobook
"Hello, Boy," Franklin said. He liked dogs, they were uncomplicated. "I'm a girl, actually," the dog said."

-Kate Atkinson, Normal Rules Don't Apply: Stories

Cover of This Other Eden by Paul Harding

8. This Other Eden

By: Paul Harding

3.78

Format: 224 pages, Hardcover

Set at the beginning of the twentieth century and inspired by historical events, This Other Eden te… read more

Similar categories in Paul Harding's This Other Eden book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literature
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • audiobook
Cover of Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

9. Wandering Stars

By: Tommy Orange

3.89

Format: 315 pages, Hardcover

The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize-finalist Tommy Orange’s breakout best seller There … read more

Similar categories in Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • audiobook
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"And in the year 1924 Indian citizenship will have been granted, even though they will mean to dissolve tribes by giving citizenship, dissolve being another word for disappearance, a kind of chemical …"

-Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

Cover of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

10. Birnam Wood

By: Eleanor Catton

3.82

Format: 432 pages, Hardcover

Birnam Wood is on the move . . . Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening gro… read more

Similar categories in Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • audiobook
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"...wondering, not for the first time, when exactly she had become so technologically dependent that her first instinct in every unpredicted circumstance was to outsource her imagination to her phone."

-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

"Not at all,’ he said. ‘I was just going to remark that being a cliche can be very useful. You ought to consider it some time.’ ’Oh yeah?’ ’Yeah,’ he said. ‘It means people underestimate you. They thi…"

-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

"As his rhetoric and reading life matured, he grew intensely scornful of what passed at his high school for 'education' - the mania for testing; the intolerance of real dissent; and the conformist cel…"

-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

"... his future, had either been sold or laid to waste by his parents' generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as…"

-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

Cover of The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

11. The Bee Sting

By: Paul Murray

3.96

Format: 656 pages, Hardcover

From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and … read more

Similar categories in Paul Murray's The Bee Sting book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • literature
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • audiobook
"It is for love. You are doing this for love."

-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

"We all have problems. But often instead of accepting the truth about ourselves, we cover it up. We try to make ourselves the way we think we’re expected to be."

-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

"Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know. When the kids ask, tell them…"

-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

"Maybe that’s how it will go – instead of one definitive cataclysm, a series of ‘anomalies’, each time lasting longer, with the stretches of what you call normal life becoming further and further apar…"

-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

Cover of The Fraud by Zadie Smith

12. The Fraud

By: Zadie Smith

3.30

Format: 464 pages, Hardcover

The extraordinary first historical novel from bestselling author of White Teeth Zadie Smith It i… read more

Similar categories in Zadie Smith's The Fraud book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • audiobook
"Eliza had long understood her cousin to be beyond the reach of editorial intervention."

-Zadie Smith, The Fraud

"What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires …"

-Zadie Smith, The Fraud

"I know this country well. Well enough to understand that justice takes time, and that the freedoms of a minority are rarely self-evident to the majority. What is perfectly selfevident to God is – unf…"

-Zadie Smith, The Fraud

"God preserve me from novel-writing, thought Mrs Touchet. God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness! In a cold dormitory, two hundred miles away, three heartbrok…"

-Zadie Smith, The Fraud

Cover of Victory City by Salman Rushdie

13. Victory City

By: Salman Rushdie

3.80

Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

Hidden in a clay pot. Sealed with wax. Buried at the heart of a ruined palace amidst the ashes of o… read more

Similar categories in Salman Rushdie's Victory City book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literature
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • audiobook
"History is a consequence not only of people's actions, but also of their forgetfulness."

-Salman Rushdie, Victory City

"History is the consequence not only of people’s actions, but also of their forgetfulness."

-Salman Rushdie, Victory City

"fHistory is the consequence not only of people's actions, but also of their forgetfulness."

-Salman Rushdie, Victory City

"In death do triumph and failure humbly meet. We learn far less from victory than from defeat."

-Salman Rushdie, Victory City

Cover of Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

14. Study for Obedience

By: Sarah Bernstein

3.05

Format: 192 pages, Hardcover

A haunting, compressed masterwork from an extraordinary new voice in Canadian fiction. A young w… read more

Similar categories in Sarah Bernstein's Study for Obedience book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • canada
  • literature
  • canadian literature
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • audiobook
"I try always to be good."

-Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

"How, I wondered, might a person, a people, take root, roots and rootlessness, the preservation of what little remains of the past, such were thoughts that blew through me on any given morning, standi…"

-Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

"In taking a side, I thought uneasily, perhaps I ought to take the long view, the survival of the species as a whole. That was my problem, I thought, I was always thinking at the level of the individu…"

-Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

"I had hoped that here in the country I would experience the turn of the seasons differently, with less apprehension, I might come to see the form and plan of the world. Not to frame it within systems…"

-Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

Cover of Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue

15. Learned by Heart

By: Emma Donoghue

3.51

Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

Eliza and Lister have never been this wide-awake in their lives, and the Slope, with its curtains d… read more

Similar categories in Emma Donoghue's Learned by Heart book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • audiobook
Cover of The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

16. The Vaster Wilds

By: Lauren Groff

3.77

Format: 272 pages, Hardcover

A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited g… read more

Similar categories in Lauren Groff's The Vaster Wilds book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • audiobook
"For what is a girl but a vessel made to hold the desires of men."

-Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

"O put the memory away, girl, she told herself sternly. For the sorrow could eat you entire."

-Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

"And humans were not made to be always alone; humans survive only in the company of other humans."

-Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

"Against the resistance of other minds, one's thoughts are pulled out of their comfortable shapes, and true thinking begins."

-Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

Cover of Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2) by Colson Whitehead

17. Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)

By: Colson Whitehead

3.88

Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy … read more

Similar categories in Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2) book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • audiobook
"Misery is a money pit."

-Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)

"Step away entirely or you haven't stepped away at all."

-Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)

"White cops did as they pleased. Crooked white cops? Untouchable."

-Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)

"Simpler than conspiracy was Carney's take: In general, people were terrible."

-Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)

Cover of The Future by Catherine Leroux

18. The Future

By: Catherine Leroux

3.32

Format: 288 pages, Paperback

In an alternate history in which the French never surrendered Detroit, children protect their own k… read more

Similar categories in Catherine Leroux's The Future book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • canada
  • literature
  • fiction
  • audiobook
"It'll come back," Ulysses says again. "This place isn't made for disappearing, it's a place for resurrection."

-Catherine Leroux, The Future

"The exact opposite of the huge car factories she imagines as the city's womb, a uterus that makes automobiles the way others make promises, or laws."

-Catherine Leroux, The Future

Cover of Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay

19. Snow Road Station

By: Elizabeth Hay

3.77

Format: 240 pages, Hardcover

From the Giller Prize-winning author comes a novel, witty and wise, about thwarted ambition, unreal… read more

Similar categories in Elizabeth Hay's Snow Road Station book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • canada
  • canadian literature
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • audiobook
Cover of Zero-Sum: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates

20. Zero-Sum: Stories

By: Joyce Carol Oates

3.46

Format: 272 pages, Hardcover

Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in these arresting stories by one of America’s most acc… read more

Similar categories in Joyce Carol Oates's Zero-Sum: Stories book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • short story collection
  • anthologies
  • short stories
  • fiction
  • contemporary
Cover of All the Colour in the World by C.S. Richardson

21. All the Colour in the World

By: C.S. Richardson

3.74

Format: 208 pages, Hardcover

The story of the restorative power of art in one man's life, set against the sweep of the twentieth… read more

Similar categories in C.S. Richardson's All the Colour in the World book and Margaret Atwood's Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

  • literary fiction
  • canada
  • canadian literature
  • fiction
  • audiobook

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3.71

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4.10

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