Books like The Days of Abandonment

The Vegetarian by Han Kang follows a South Korean housewife who stops eating meat after a series of violent dreams and watches as her refusal triggers escalating responses from her husband, her brother-in-law, and her father. Like The Days of Abandonment, this is a novel about a woman whose break with convention reveals the violence that was always latent in her domestic arrangements.

Both Ferrante and Kang write about the female body as a site of both rebellion and punishment, and both refuse to pathologize their protagonists even as those protagonists behave in ways that alarm the people around them. Kang's prose is more spare and surreal than Ferrante's feverish realism, but both authors achieve a similar effect: making the reader feel trapped inside a consciousness that is coming apart at the seams.

The three-part structure of The Vegetarian, each section narrated from a different perspective, gives the reader a view of the protagonist that she cannot have of herself, much as Ferrante's first-person narration reveals blind spots the narrator cannot acknowledge.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh follows a young, beautiful, wealthy woman in pre-9/11 Manhattan who decides to sleep for an entire year with the help of a reckless psychiatrist and an alarming cocktail of medications. Like The Days of Abandonment, the novel charts a woman's deliberate withdrawal from the life she is supposed to want, narrated in a voice that is simultaneously detached and desperate.

Moshfegh's prose is colder and more darkly comic than Ferrante's, but both authors share an ability to make self-destruction feel like a rational response to unbearable circumstances. The unnamed narrators of both novels are not sympathetic in any conventional sense; they are selfish, cruel to the people who care about them, and honest about desires that polite society would prefer they keep hidden.

Both books also use physical space brilliantly: the apartment in each becomes a cage and a refuge simultaneously, a place where the protagonist can fall apart without witnesses. Readers who valued Ferrante's refusal to make abandonment look dignified will find the same unvarnished quality here.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara follows four college friends in New York over several decades, with the narrative increasingly focused on Jude, a man whose traumatic past makes ordinary life a daily act of endurance. The connection to The Days of Abandonment is tonal rather than thematic: both novels refuse to protect the reader from the full intensity of their protagonists' pain, and both trust that emotional extremity, rendered precisely enough, can reveal truths that more moderate fiction cannot reach.

Yanagihara's novel is much longer and more expansive than Ferrante's, but both books share an almost clinical interest in how the mind processes suffering. The prose styles differ, with Yanagihara writing in longer, more accumulative sentences, but both authors build their effects through repetition and intensification rather than surprise.

Where Ferrante's protagonist is undone by abandonment, Jude is undone by what happened before the novel even begins, but both books ask the same question: how much pain can a person absorb before their identity dissolves?

Normal People by Sally Rooney follows Connell and Marianne from their final year of secondary school in a small Irish town through their years at Trinity College Dublin. Like The Days of Abandonment, the novel is built on close psychological observation of how power shifts within intimate relationships, and both books treat romantic attachment as something that can nourish and destroy in equal measure.

Rooney's prose is more restrained than Ferrante's, stripped of adjectives and ornamentation, but both authors achieve a similar transparency: the reader can see through the characters' rationalizations to the fears and desires underneath. Class consciousness runs through both novels too.

Ferrante writes about a woman whose education lifted her out of poverty only to leave her vulnerable in new ways, and Rooney tracks similar dynamics between Connell's working-class background and Marianne's inherited wealth. Both novels also share an interest in how bodies communicate what words cannot: sex, violence, and physical proximity carry as much narrative weight as dialogue.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart follows a young boy growing up in 1980s Glasgow with a mother sinking into alcoholism and poverty following her husband's abandonment. The connection to The Days of Abandonment is the unflinching way both novels depict a parent's unraveling as witnessed by the people who depend on them, and both refuse to soften the damage that desperation inflicts on those closest to it.

Stuart's prose has a different texture than Ferrante's, more lyrical and more rooted in the physical details of a specific working-class environment, but both authors share the ability to write about degradation without condescension. Where Ferrante narrates from inside the dissolving consciousness, Stuart narrates from beside it, through the eyes of a child who loves his mother too much to judge her and too clearly to pretend she is not destroying herself.

Both novels are also deeply interested in the relationship between poverty and emotional collapse, showing how material deprivation narrows a person's options until breakdown becomes almost inevitable.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston follows Janie Crawford through three marriages and several decades of life in early twentieth-century Florida. Like The Days of Abandonment, the novel centers on a woman who must reconstruct herself after the structures she built her identity around collapse.

Hurston writes in a voice that blends standard English with Black vernacular, creating a texture quite different from Ferrante's precise Italian-in-translation prose, but both authors give their female protagonists a full interior life that includes anger, desire, and ambition alongside tenderness. Both novels also refuse the idea that a woman's story is fundamentally about finding or keeping a man; instead, both treat romantic relationships as one arena among many where women negotiate autonomy and selfhood.

The Florida settings are as specifically rendered as Ferrante's Turin, with heat and landscape functioning as emotional correlatives. Both books reward readers who want fiction that treats women's self-determination as a serious subject rather than a genre convention.

Severance by Ling Ma follows Candace Chen, a millennial working in book production in Manhattan, through the early days of a fungal pandemic that slowly empties the city. Like The Days of Abandonment, the novel uses a crisis, one personal, the other global, to strip away the routines and relationships that give life its apparent meaning, revealing what remains underneath.

Both Ferrante and Ma write about women who discover that the identities they constructed through work, marriage, and social performance were more fragile than they appeared. Ma's tone is drier and more satirical than Ferrante's, with a deadpan quality that makes the apocalyptic scenarios feel almost mundane, but both authors share the insight that numbness and grief can look very similar from the outside.

The corporate satire in Severance adds a dimension that Ferrante's more intimate novel does not include, but both books are fundamentally about what happens when the world you assumed was permanent turns out to be temporary.