10 Of The Best Books Like Fleabag

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“I think you know how to love better than any of us. That’s why you find it all so painful.”

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If you loved Fleabag, you probably know the feeling of finishing the final episode and wondering what on earth you’re meant to watch or read next. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s brilliantly messy comedy gave us a complex heroine, dark humour, dysfunctional relationships, grief, loneliness, and enough terrible choices to keep us both laughing and cringing. Thankfully, there are so many books like Fleabag that capture that same blend of wit, emotional chaos, and brutally honest observations about modern life. From novels about complicated women and messy relationships to darkly funny books that explore grief, sex, loneliness, and self-sabotage, these tales are perfect for anyone still missing Fleabag. Today at What We Reading, we’re rounding up our favourite books to read if you loved Fleabag. Whether you’re looking for novels with Fleabag vibes, books similar to the show, or just a brilliantly funny and flawed female protagonist, there’s something here for you. 

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My Year Of Rest And Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh

Kicking off our list of books like Fleabag is Ottessa Moshfegh’s darkly funny and emotionally detached bestseller, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglow with wealth and possibility; what could possibly be so wrong? 

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad concoction of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers. 

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Check Out Our My Year Of Rest And Relaxation Book Review 

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Sorrow And Bliss – Meg Mason

This novel is about a woman called Martha. She knows there is something wrong with her, but she doesn’t know what it is. Her husband, Patrick, thinks she is fine. He says everyone has something; the thing is just to keep going. Martha told Patrick before they got married that she didn’t want children. He said he didn’t mind either way, because he has loved her since he was fourteen, and making her happy is all that matters, although he doesn’t seem able to do it. 

By the time Martha finds out what is wrong, it doesn’t really matter anymore. It is too late to get the only thing she has ever wanted. Or maybe it will turn out that you can stop loving someone and start again from nothing – if you can find something else to want. 

The Rachel Incident – Caroline O’Donoghue

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it is love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate, and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them. 

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Like Fleabag, The Rachel Incident is aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humour. 

Luster – Raven Leilani

Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in her all-white office, is sleeping with all the wrong men, and has failed at the only thing that meant anything to her: painting. No one seems to care that she doesn’t really know what she’s doing with her life beyond her next hook-up. And then she meets Eric, a white middle-aged archivist with a suburban family, including a wife who has sort of agreed to an open marriage and an adopted black daughter. 

As if navigating the constantly shifting landscape of sexual and racial politics as a young black woman wasn’t already tough enough, with nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling head-first into Eric’s home and family. Similar to Fleabag, Luster is a razor-sharp, provocatively page-turning, and surprisingly tender depiction of what it means to be young now. 

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Check Out Our Luster Book Review 

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The Pisces – Melissa Broder

Lucy has been writing her dissertation about Sappho for thirteen years when she and Jamie break up. After she hits rock bottom in Phoenix, her Los Angeles-based sister insists Lucy housesit for the summer – her only tasks are caring for a beloved diabetic dog and trying to learn to care for herself. Annika’s home is a gorgeous glass cube atop Venice Beach, but Lucy can find no peace from her misery and anxiety. 

But everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer one night while sitting alone on the beach rocks. Similar to Fleabag, whip-smart, neurotically funny, sexy, and above all fearless, The Pisces is built on a premise both siren-like and incredibly real – what happens when you think love will save you but are afraid it may also kill you. 

Conversations With Friends – Sally Rooney

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa’s orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband, Nick. 

As Frances tries to keep her life in check, relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances’ intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment. 

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Check Out The Best Books Like Conversations With Friends

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Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead – Emily R. Austin

Gilda, a twenty-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church. There, she meets Father Jeff, who mistakenly believes she is there for an interview. Too embarrassed to correct him, Gilda is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist, Grace.

In between trying to memorise lines for Catholic Mass and hiding the fact that she has a new girlfriend, Gilda strikes up an email correspondence with Grace’s old friend. Desperate, she begins impersonating Grace via email. But when the police discover suspicious circumstances surrounding Grace’s death, Gilda may have to finally reveal the truth of her mortifying existence. 

Exciting Times – Naoise Dolan

Ava moved to Hong Kong to find happiness, but so far, it isn’t working out. When Ava befriends Julian, a witty British banker, he offers a shortcut into a lavish life her meagre salary could never allow. Ignoring her feminist leanings and better instincts, Ava finds herself moving into Julian’s apartment. When Julian’s job takes him back to London, she stays put, unsure where their relationship stands. 

Enter Edith. A Hong Kong-born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Edith takes Ava to the theatre and leaves her tulips in the hallway. Ava wants to be her – and wants her. Ava has been carefully pretending Julian is nothing more than an absentee roommate, so when he announces that he’s returning to Hong Kong, she faces a fork in the road. Should she return to the easy compatibility of her life with Julian or take a leap into the unknown with Edith?

Big Swiss – Jen Beagin

Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house is unrenovated, uninsulated, and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss. 

One day, Greta recognises Big Swiss’ voice in town, and they soon become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware that Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…

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Check Out Our Big Swiss Book Review

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The New Me – Halle Butler

Thirty-year-old Millie just can’t pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates wildly between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life.  Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle repeats itself. 

When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she’s envisioning – one that involves nicer clothes, fresh produce, maybe even financial independence – within reach. But with it also comes the paralysing realisation, lurking just beneath the surface, of just how hollow that vision has become. One of the best books like Fleabag, The New Me is a darkly hilarious and devastating descent into the mind of a young woman trapped in the funhouse of modern consumer culture. 

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