Books Like My Year of Rest and Relaxation: 9 Novels for Fans of Unlikeable Women

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh has one of the great pitches in contemporary fiction: a beautiful, wealthy young woman in pre-9/11 Manhattan decides to solve her life by sleeping through an entire year, aided by the worst psychiatrist ever committed to paper. The narrator is rude about her dead parents, vicious about her only friend Reva, and completely uninterested in your sympathy, and somehow the book is both very funny and quietly gutting. Moshfegh writes grief and privilege as things that curdle into the same numbness.

Readers who love it are usually chasing a particular voice: deadpan, misanthropic, honest about the ugly thoughts most fiction politely edits out. The novels below all have it. Some share the millennial malaise and dead-end jobs, some go darker or stranger, but every narrator here would rather alienate you than lie to you, which is exactly why you end up on their side.

What to read after My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

The natural next dose of Moshfegh. Eileen Dunlop is a resentful young woman in a bleak 1960s Massachusetts town, caring for her alcoholic father and working at a boys' prison, until a glamorous new colleague named Rebecca offers a way out that turns criminal. Grubbier and more gothic than My Year of Rest and Relaxation, with the same refusal to make its heroine palatable. If you liked the voice, here it is with a crime attached.

Find Eileen at Ever After Books

The New Me by Halle Butler

Millie is a 30-year-old temp receptionist in Chicago who fantasises about the permanent job that will finally fix her, while sabotaging herself in small, horribly recognisable ways. Butler's comedy is even drier than Moshfegh's, and the office scenes, told partly from the perspectives of colleagues who dislike Millie, are exquisitely cringeworthy. Short, mean and weirdly moving about how self-improvement culture feeds on despair.

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Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Keiko has worked in the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years and is perfectly content, which is precisely what horrifies everyone around her. Murata inverts the Moshfegh formula: instead of a narrator opting out of society, here is one who has found her niche and must defend it against a world demanding marriage and careers. The same flat, alien-anthropologist voice, but aimed at conformity rather than at the self.

Find Convenience Store Woman at Ever After Books

Severance by Ling Ma

Candace Chen keeps showing up to her Manhattan publishing job even as a fungal plague turns people into zombies of routine, repeating the same cherished tasks until they die. Ma splits the story between office satire and apocalypse road trip, and the joke lands the same way Moshfegh's does: modern work was already sleepwalking, the plague just made it literal. Melancholy, funny and sneakily profound about immigrant nostalgia.

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Boy Parts by Eliza Clark

Irina is a Newcastle photographer who scouts ordinary men off the street for explicit portraits, and whose narration is a masterclass in charm concealing something much worse. Clark takes the unlikeable-woman novel further into transgression than Moshfegh does, with a narrator who is actively dangerous rather than merely checked out. Not for the squeamish, but if you enjoyed being complicit with a monstrous voice, this is the strongest stuff on the shelf.

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Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Rachel, a calorie-obsessed Los Angeles talent agency assistant, has her rigid routines demolished by Miriam, a devout frozen-yoghurt server who feeds her, and the novel becomes a frank, filthy, tender story about appetite in every sense. Broder shares Moshfegh's willingness to write the body without euphemism, but where My Year of Rest and Relaxation numbs itself, Milk Fed is about waking hunger up. Startlingly warm underneath the provocation.

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Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

An eighteen-year-old pregnant pizza delivery driver in suburban Los Angeles, grieving her father and avoiding her kind boyfriend, becomes fixated on a frazzled stay-at-home mother who orders pickle-covered pizzas. It has Moshfegh's deadpan drift and avoidance, but with a younger, sadder voice and a genuine sweetness the narrator keeps trying to outrun. A quick read that lingers well past its page count.

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Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

An artist turned stay-at-home mother becomes convinced she is transforming into a dog, and the novel refuses to tell you she is wrong. Yoder writes domestic alienation as body horror and liberation at once, with the same blend of comedy and menace Moshfegh trades in. If the sleep year read to you as a woman refusing the life assigned to her, Nightbitch is that refusal with teeth.

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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The ancestor of every book on this list. Esther Greenwood's glamorous magazine summer in New York slides into detachment and breakdown, narrated in a voice so wry and precise it still reads as contemporary seventy years on. Plath did first what Moshfegh gets praised for now: making despair funny without making it small. Read it after My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the family resemblance is unmistakable.

Find The Bell Jar at Ever After Books

Keep the streak going

If you want a pick matched to your precise level of misanthropy, ask What Should I Read Next?, pile these onto your TBR list, or browse our Fiction shelves for more narrators who would absolutely cancel plans with you.