10 Addictive Books To Read Next if You've Finished 'Yesteryear'
Devoured 'Yesteryear' and desperate for your next book? These best-selling reads are sure to fill that void.
A good book ought to whip up spirited debate in your book club (or group chat). The more controversial, the frothier.
This seems to be the case with Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel about a tradwife influencer who wakes up in the 1850s and – surprise! – has to walk her talk. Whether Burke's novel was a source of schadenfreude or chagrin for you, finishing a good novel can leave you feeling like: "What now?"
So, to help fill the void, here are 10 books like Yesteryear to add to your list.
1. ’Trad Wife' by Sarah Langan
A disgraced journalist arrives at Black Swan Farm to expose Mia Wright, tradwife influencer du jour, as a fake. The journalist’s achievements upon arrival are: losing hours of time, losing sleep, losing a bunch of her hair, and losing any confidence that she’s the sane person in the house.
2. 'Yellowface' by R.F. Kuang
A writer steals her dead friend's manuscript about Chinese labourers in the First World War and spends the rest of the novel justifying it to you, personally. She publishes it under an ambiguous name, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. She is, of course, not Chinese.
3. ’The Once and Future Me' by Melissa Pace
Virginia, 1954. A woman wakes on a bus arriving at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital with amnesia and is told she's a housewife committed for violent delusions. This wise-cracking housewife can pick locks, knows how to fight and – well, we won’t spoil it.
4. ’Nightbitch' by Rachel Yoder
A stay-at-home mother becomes convinced she’s turning into a dog. Comparisons with Kafka are unavoidable, but self-loathing is absent. The book is a study of a woman’s anger – already a frightening concept – curdling so viciously that it’s only logical: she’s a bitch.
5. 'Bunny' by Mona Awad
A student at an elite MFA programme becomes obsessed with four rich girls who call each other "Bunny" and speak in their own private language. She hates them, yet she’s desperate to get in with them, angling for an invitation to their mysterious weekly Smut Salon. She has no idea what she's really asking for.
6. 'Kindred' by Octavia E. Butler
Dana, a Black writer in 1976 Los Angeles, is repeatedly yanked back to a Maryland plantation in the 1810s, where her twentieth-century assumptions are at once worthless and actively dangerous. The book asks the question that ends every conversation about the "old days": Who would you have been in them?
7. 'The Stepford Wives' by Ira Levin
A woman moves to a commuter town where all the wives are impossibly serene, impeccably kept, and entirely without inner lives or agency. More than fifty years later, not a word of it has dated – an evolution from satire to bleak horror. Arguably the clearest and most damning indictment of men's role in the patriarchy ever written by a man.
8. 'The Guest' by Emma Cline
Cut loose by the rich older man she'd been summering with, a young woman with nowhere to go spends a week conning her way into Hamptons guest houses. Nobody asks who she is; a pretty girl is assumed to belong to someone. You will need to remember to breathe while reading.
9. ‘The Ministry of Time' by Kaliane Bradley
A civil servant is assigned to live with Commander Graham Gore, a real officer who died on the doomed 1847 Franklin expedition, plucked out of time and deposited in present-day London. It’s the Yesteryear premise in reverse: a historical figure adrift in modernity.
10. 'Educated' by Tara Westover
The only true story on this list. Westover grew up in rural Idaho, in a survivalist family that kept her out of school until she taught herself enough to get into university. It roams the same territory as Yesteryear: faith, isolation, homeschooling and the very long road out.
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