“The road to recovery is not linear. It’s not straight. It’s a bumpy path, with lots of twists and turns. But you’re on the right track.”
If you adored Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams, chances are it wasn’t just the plot that hooked you – it was the voice. Queenie’s messy dating life, complex friendships, struggles with mental health, and painfully relatable search for identity made the novel feel raw, funny, and uncomfortably real. It’s contemporary fiction at its most honest. So, where do you go next if you’re looking for books like Queenie? We here at What We Reading are pulling together the best books similar to Queenie – novels that explore modern womanhood, flawed female protagonists, mental health, relationships, and the pressure of working out your life in your twenties and thirties. Many of these recommendations also highlight diverse contemporary fiction and books by Black women authors, capturing that same sharp humour and emotional depth that has made Queenie so revered.
Queenie Summary
Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and not slotting neatly into either of them. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself with her white middle-class peers. After a messy breakup from her longtime white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places – including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming her self-worth.
As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?” – all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world attempting to answer for her.
Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo
First up on our list of books like Queenie is Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, a book teeming with life and crackling with energy – a love song to modern Britain and Black womanhood. Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, Black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends, and lovers, across the country and throughout the years.
Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic, and utterly irresistible.
Open Water – Caleb Azumah Nelson
Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists – he a photographer, she a dancer – trying to leave their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.
At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that only views you as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has penned one of the best British debut novels in recent times, perfect if you’re looking for what to read after Queenie.
Luster – Raven Leilani
Edie is just trying to survive. She’s messing up in her dead-end admin job in an 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 looking for her next hook-up. And then she meets Eric, a white middle-aged archivist with a suburban family and a wife who has sort of agreed to an open marriage, and a Black daughter who doesn’t have anyone to show her how to do her hair.
As if navigating the constantly shifting landscape of sexual and racial politics as a young Black woman herself wasn’t hard enough, with nowhere else left to go, Edie finds herself falling headfirst into Eric’s home and family. Similar to Queenie, Luster is razor-sharp and surprisingly tender, exploring what it means to be young today.
Such A Fun Age – Kiley Reid
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains’ toddler one night. A supermarket security guard, seeing a young Black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films the whole thing, and Emira is left humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.
But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix’s desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the videos of Emira unearth someone from Alix’s past, both women soon find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves and one another.
Check Out The Best Books Like Such A Fun Age
The Vanishing Half – Brit Bennett
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern Black community and running away at the age of sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults. Years on, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined.
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, Brit Bennett produces a story similar to Queenie that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. The Vanishing Half explores some of the multiple realms and reasons in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
Check Out The Best Books Like The Vanishing Half
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
At the heart of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families, become agents of England’s incredible transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful albeit tooth-challenged Jamaican half his age, gives Archie a second lease on life and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name.
Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths cofound Iqbal’s efforts to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life and embraces the comedy of daily existence, much like Candice Carty-Williams does in Queenie.
Check Out The Best Books Like White Teeth
On The Come Up – Angie Thomas
Sixteen-year-old Bri wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. Or at least make it out of her neighbourhood one day. As the daughter of an underground rap legend who died before he hit big, Bri’s got big shoes to fill. But now that her mother has unexpedtedly lost her job, food banks and shutoff notices are as much a part of Bri’s life as beats and rhythms. With bills piling up and homelessness staring her family down, Bri no longer just wants to make it – she has to make it.
On the Come Up is Angie Thomas’ homage to hip-hop, the art that sparked her passion for storytelling, and continues to inspire her to this day. It is a story all about following your dreams, even as all the odds appear to be stacked against you; of the struggle to become who you are and not who everyone else expects you to be; and of the desperate realities of poor and working-class Black families.
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
