Loved How to Be Both by for its interlocking structure and intellectual daring? Let Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by unravel you next.
Curated by NextBookAfter Editors. This read-alike match weighs tone, themes, pacing, character dynamics, and emotional payoff rather than genre alone. See how recommendations are chosen.
Buy on AmazonWhy It's Your Next Read
- Fragmented anxiety-prose demands your active excavation
- Self-deprecating wit elevates neuroses into philosophy
- Mortality dread meets absurdist comedy w/o melodrama
- Religious iconography rewards your Easter-egg hunting
If you savored Ali Smith's architectural audacity—that interlocking structure demanding you untangle perception itself—Emily R. Austin offers a different puzzle: anxiety as narrative form, where everyday absurdity spirals into existential vertigo. Her fragmented, self-sabotaging protagonist navigates grief and identity with the same intellectual playfulness Smith wields, but here the duality lives inside one queer consciousness unraveling in real time, sharp and unapologetically vulnerable.
Austin's prose carries Smith's elliptical wit without the pretension, turning Catholic guilt and mortality dread into darkly funny philosophical rabbit holes. Like Smith embedding Renaissance art into contemporary ache, Austin laces religious iconography through modern panic—rewarding those who crave thematic breadcrumbs.
This is what happens when existential terror meets queer tenderness and refuses to look away.
What Readers Are Saying
"unparalleled...had me in the most warm, comforting, validating chokehold." — kat, Goodreads
"This book is a new all-time FAVOURITE... Gilda's voice was so sharp and memorable, now carved into my brain forever." — maddie, Goodreads
"filled with good humor...I could not stop laughing throughout the book." — Carolyn Walsh, Goodreads
Supermassive Book Hole is your personal media universe — books, movies, games, and albums on one beautiful shelf, with notes, and a feed of what your friends are into.
SHELVE THIS BOOK
