12 Best novels books like The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

Cover of The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

The Book of Form and Emptiness

By: Ruth Ozeki

4.03

Format: 548 pages, Hardcover

A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the …

"Those are your divisions, the false dichotomies and the hegemonic hierarchies of materialist colonizers. We, too, have been the slaves of your desires, unwitting tools, forging the destruction of the planet, and things will change whether you like it or not. In the end days of the Anthropocene (your word, your hubris, not ours), Matter is making a comeback. We are taking back our bodies, reclaiming our material selves. In a neo-materialist world, Every Thing Matters."

-Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

"Those are your divisions, the false dichotomies and the hegemonic hierarchies of materialist colonizers. We, too, have been the slaves of your desires, unwitting tools, forging the destruction of the planet, and things will change whether you like it or not. In the end days of the Anthropocene (your word, your hubris, not ours), Matter is making a comeback. We are taking back our bodies, reclaiming our material selves. In a neo-materialist world, Every Thing Matters."

-Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

If you liked the novels plot in The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki , here is a list of 12 books like this:

Cover of Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

1. Small Things Like These

By: Claire Keegan

4.18

Format: 128 pages, Hardcover

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal me… read more

Similar categories in Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • audiobook
"Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people."

-Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

"for people were bound, he knew, to reveal not only themselves, but what they knew, in conversation"

-Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

"And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary."

-Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

"When he reached the yard gate and found the padlock seized with frost, he felt the strain of being alive and wished he had stayed in bed, but he made himself carry on and crossed to a neighbour’s hou…"

-Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

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 Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

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

3. 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 Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"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 James by Percival Everett

4. James

By: Percival Everett

4.54

Format: 303 pages, Hardcover

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , both harrowing and f… read more

Similar categories in Percival Everett's James book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • audiobook
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • novels
Cover of The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

5. The Book of Form and Emptiness

By: Ruth Ozeki

4.03

Format: 548 pages, Hardcover

A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the … read more

Similar categories in Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • magical realism
  • coming of age
  • mental health
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • fantasy
  • books about books
  • audiobook
"Those are your divisions, the false dichotomies and the hegemonic hierarchies of materialist colonizers. We, too, have been the slaves of your desires, unwitting tools, forging the destruction of the…"

-Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

Cover of The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

6. The Island of Missing Trees

By: Elif Shafak

4.15

Format: 354 pages, Hardcover

A rich, magical new book on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the B… read more

Similar categories in Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • magical realism
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • fantasy
  • audiobook
"She was no part of anything. In her unbroken loneliness, she was complete. Never had she felt so exposed, yet si powerful."

-Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

"So I guess it is in my genes, this melancholy I can never quite shake off. Carved with an invisible knife into my arborescent skin."

-Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

"You don't share a language, you think, and then you realise, grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts."

-Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

"To immigrants and exiles everywhere, the uprooted, the re-rooted, the rootless, And to the trees we left behind, rooted in our memories ..."

-Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

Cover of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

7. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

By: Shehan Karunatilaka

3.92

Format: 386 pages, Hardcover

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida—war photographer, gambler, and closet queen—has woken up dead in what … read more

Similar categories in Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • magical realism
  • fiction
  • fantasy
  • audiobook
"Even suicide requires perseverance."

-Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

"Why should a Creator watch over you? Wasn't creating you enough?"

-Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

"You were simply a handsome man who enjoyed beautiful boys. Nothing more, nothing less and no one's business."

-Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

"Despair always begins as a snack that you nibble on when bored and then becomes a meal that you have thrice a day."

-Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Cover of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

8. 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 Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"...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 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

9. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

By: Gabrielle Zevin

4.15

Format: 401 pages, Hardcover

In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative p… read more

Similar categories in Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • coming of age
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • audiobook
"Friendship,"

-Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

"How I will miss the horses."

-Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

"You try again. You fail better."

-Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

"There are no ghosts, but up here"

-Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Cover of Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

10. Yellowface

By: R.F. Kuang

3.77

Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says… read more

Similar categories in R.F. Kuang's Yellowface book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • books about books
  • audiobook
"The truth is fluid, there is always another way to spin the story."

-R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

"They tell authors never to look at Goodreads, but nobody follows that advice—none of us can resist the urge to know how our work is being received."

-R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

"Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hu…"

-R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

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 Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • 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 Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

12. The Marriage Portrait

By: Maggie O'Farrell

4.01

Format: 355 pages, Hardcover

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here. The author of award-winning Hamnet… read more

Similar categories in Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • audiobook
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • novels
"May I keep this?"

-Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

"Was there no hope? the tigress seemed to be asking her. Will I always remain here? Will I never return home?"

-Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

"The animal was orange, burnished gold, fire made flesh; she was power and anger, she was vicious and exquisite;"

-Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

"Is it possible for a woman to be so unsettled in spirit that a child will have no hope of taking root within her?"

-Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait

Cover of Black Butterflies by Priscilla  Morris

13. Black Butterflies

By: Priscilla Morris

4.25

Format: 256 pages, Kindle Edition

Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect barricades, splitting the diverse city i… read more

Similar categories in Priscilla Morris's Black Butterflies book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
Cover of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

14. Demon Copperhead

By: Barbara Kingsolver

4.50

Format: 560 pages, Hardcover

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." Set in t… read more

Similar categories in Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • coming of age
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing."

-Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

"I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together."

-Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

"Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal."

-Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

"life is a wild, impetuous ride. There could be good shit up ahead, don’t rule it out."

-Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

Cover of Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

15. Soldier Sailor

By: Claire Kilroy

4.10

Format: 256 pages, ebook

Well, Sailor. Here we are once more, you and me in one another's arms. The Earth rotates beneath us… read more

Similar categories in Claire Kilroy's Soldier Sailor book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"I laughed and then we were doing that thing again, our thing: laughing into one another's eyes. All that time I had thought I was jollying you along when all that time you were jollying along me."

-Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

"I tell my husband about my childhood and he tells me about his but it isn't the same. We can never know each other as we were then. But I know you. I will see the child you were in the man you will b…"

-Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

"Hated cling film. Hated it more than I hated kinetic sand. Defeated by something that lacked a third dimension. While I'd been off tinkering on the cerebral plane, the smart money has been mastering …"

-Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

"I knelt down to pick up the hatchling to . . . . what? Give it back to its mother? Here is your dying chick? Just before I made contact with it, she dive-bombed me. The mother actually dive-bombed me…"

-Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

Cover of Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

16. Brotherless Night

By: V.V. Ganeshananthan

4.46

Format: 348 pages, Hardcover

In this searing novel, a courageous young woman tries to protect her dream of becoming a doctor as … read more

Similar categories in V.V. Ganeshananthan's Brotherless Night book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • audiobook
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • novels
Cover of The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

17. The Sentence

By: Louise Erdrich

3.95

Format: 387 pages, Hardcover

The Sentence asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small in… read more

Similar categories in Louise Erdrich's The Sentence book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • magical realism
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • fantasy
  • books about books
  • audiobook
"I'd taken a pink eraser to my childhood and blurred the pain."

-Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

"A newborn baby has a powerful effect on character. But so does a toddler. A child. A preteen. A teenager. A mother changes with every stage. Some stages are within a mother's skill set. Some stages a…"

-Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

Cover of The Trees by Percival Everett

18. The Trees

By: Percival Everett

4.06

Format: 309 pages, Paperback

When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive in Money, Mississippi… read more

Similar categories in Percival Everett's The Trees book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • audiobook
"Unknown Male is a name,"

-Percival Everett, The Trees

"Goddamnit, I hate murder more than just about anything,"

-Percival Everett, The Trees

"You should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings"

-Percival Everett, The Trees

"People should know, understand that not all Thursdays are the same."

-Percival Everett, The Trees

Cover of Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin

19. Wandering Souls

By: Cecile Pin

4.15

Format: 240 pages, Hardcover

A luminous, boldly imagined debut novel about three Vietnamese siblings who seek refuge in the UK, … read more

Similar categories in Cecile Pin's Wandering Souls book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • audiobook
  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We tell ourselves stories in order to heal."

-Cecile Pin, Wandering Souls

"I didn't know that my culture had fashioned the shape of my mourning; I didn't know that my grief could be improper."

-Cecile Pin, Wandering Souls

Cover of The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini

20. The Bread the Devil Knead

By: Lisa Allen-Agostini

4.03

Format: 277 pages, ebook

Alethea Lopez is about to turn 40. Fashionable, feisty and fiercely independent, she manages a bout… read more

Similar categories in Lisa Allen-Agostini's The Bread the Devil Knead book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"And what is love? I human, I have feelings. I with the man. Of course I love him. Yet, the way he love me does make me hate myself."

-Lisa Allen-Agostini, The Bread the Devil Knead

"Is not that I vain. I does think of it as an investment. If you had a nice car, ent you would take care of it? Depreciation is a hell of a thing."

-Lisa Allen-Agostini, The Bread the Devil Knead

"Tell the truth, I was fed up with the house, fed up with the licks. Fed up with Leo and him blaming me for everything. But you ever find yourself down in a canal? It hard to climb out by yourself."

-Lisa Allen-Agostini, The Bread the Devil Knead

"But people does get on like if you, as a woman who have no man, you not good enough, like you's not a real woman. So if is either stay with a asshole or have no man at all, I rather stay with a assho…"

-Lisa Allen-Agostini, The Bread the Devil Knead

Cover of Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

21. Sorrow and Bliss

By: Meg Mason

4.09

Format: 352 pages, Paperback

This novel is about a woman called Martha. She knows there is something wrong with her but she does… read more

Similar categories in Meg Mason's Sorrow and Bliss book and Ruth Ozeki's The Book of Form and Emptiness

  • literary fiction
  • mental health
  • fiction
  • contemporary
  • novels
  • audiobook
"We hugged each other like two people who had no practical experience of embracing, had only taught themselves the theory from a poorly worded manual."

-Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

"I have been unbearable but I have never been unloved. I have felt alone but I have never been alone and I've been forgiven for the unforgiveable things I have done."

-Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

"I have never understood why people think of champagne as celebratory rather than medicinal. (...) Surely the only time one needs one's blood effervesced is when life is utterly flat."

-Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

"After Barbara’s Contentious Divorce, Everyone Felt Genuinely Hurt, Including Justifiably Kin Left Melancholically Noting Or Perhaps Questioning Rumours Suggesting That, Unannounced, Vincent’d Wed an …"

-Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

21 Top fiction books like The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

Transform Your Habits

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan

4.18

Transform Your Habits

Prophet Song

Paul Lynch

4.10

Transform Your Habits

The Wren, the Wren

Anne Enright

3.55

Transform Your Habits

James

Percival Everett

4.54

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21 Top fiction books like Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Transform Your Habits

I Who Have Never Known Men

Ros Schwartz , Jacqueline Harpman

4.22

Transform Your Habits

Trust

Hernan Diaz

3.83

Transform Your Habits

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan

4.18

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Prophet Song

Paul Lynch

4.10

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