Book recommendations
Eight Booker-nominated books for fans of Wuthering Heights
As Emerald Fennell’s stylised adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic classic opens in cinemas, we’ve picked out eight books featuring obsessive love and devastating revenge, and, of course, plenty of ghosts
Oscar-winning film director Emerald Fennell first read Wuthering Heights when she was 14, saying in an interview at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival, ‘It cracked me open’. Fennell has described Emily Brontë’s book as ‘completely singular. It’s so sexy. It’s so horrible. It’s so devastating.’ The hype around her provocative new adaptation – starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Cathy and Heathcliff – had already reached fever pitch months before its upcoming 13 February 2026 release date, timed for Valentine’s Day.
Fennell’s love of Wuthering Heights is not unique. Many of us read it at a young age and found ourselves enthralled. When asked about the fiction that inspired her career the most, International Booker Prize shortlisted author Maryse Condé, who died in 2024, said, ‘Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, because she touched my heart and mind when I was a child in Guadeloupe thus proving the force and magic of literature.’
Brontë’s book spoke to a young Natasha Brown, too. The Booker Prize longlisted author and International Booker Prize 2026 Chair of judges, has said Wuthering Heights was the novel that made her fall in love with reading, explaining, ‘When I was about 12, I decided to read Wuthering Heights because I couldn’t sleep and it looked really boring. I ended up not sleeping at all that night. I’d found my first “unputdownable” book.’
If you, too, are a Brontë fan, and like ‘unputdownable’ fiction with a foreboding atmosphere and a gothic edge, this list of eight Booker-nominated books is for you.
Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Cathy and Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights
© MovieStillsDBElmet by Fiona Mozley
Daniel and Cathy live apart from others in the house that Daddy built for them with his bare hands. When they were younger, they had gone to school. But they were not like the other children then, and they’re even less like them now. Local men, greedy and watchful, begin to circle like vultures. All the while, the terrible violence in Daddy grows.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012 – and described as a ‘neo-gothic masterpiece’ by the Chicago Review of Books – Fiona Mozley’s gripping debut is about life on the margins in the wilds of Yorkshire. It explores the power and limits of family loyalty.
Mozley was 29 and working part-time in a bookshop when she started Elmet, typing it into her phone while commuting. The story was influenced by her studies for a PhD in late medieval urban decay and eco politics – Elmet was a Celtic kingdom that once covered Yorkshire. Wuthering Heights fans will be drawn to this novel’s themes of isolation, sexuality, violence and possession.
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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Kiran Desai’s spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025. When asked about what inspired her to write the book, Desai said, ‘I wanted to write a present-day romance with an old-fashioned beauty’.
Sonia’s story, especially, will appeal to Wuthering Heights fans. Caught up in a destructive love affair with a revengeful and abusive artist, she struggles to escape his grip, even after the affair has ended. Sonia’s relationship with Sunny is dogged by her failed one with the artist, and she is haunted throughout the novel by both fear and ghosts. Several scenes in the book feel gothic and wild, including those set in the isolated Cloud Cottage, which sits high up in the ‘deodar dark’, misty mountains of Landour.
The judges said, ‘Vast and immersive, the book enfolds a magical realist fable within a social novel within a love story. We loved the way in which no detail, large or small, seems to escape Desai’s attention, every character (in a huge cast) feels fully realised, and the writing moves with consummate fluency between an array of modes: philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny.’
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The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Living isolated and alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel’s life is led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, to Isabel’s doorstep, to stay for the season. In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel’s desperate desire for order transforms into infatuation – leading to a discovery that unravels all she has ever known.
Wuthering Heights fans will find Yael van der Wouden’s tale of twisted desire, complex histories and homes utterly compelling.The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, and the judges said, ‘We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.’
Asked about the inspirations behind her book, van der Wouden explained, ‘The way it happened was like this: I was in the car on the way back from a funeral, looking out over flat Dutch fields, and somewhere between grief and a need to escape the idea bloomed, of a house, a woman and a stranger.’
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Held by Anne Michaels
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast.
1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, Held features a narrative that spans four generations, with moments of connection and consequence that ignite and re-ignite as the century unfolds. Wuthering Heights fans will enjoy the Yorkshire setting and the haunting exploration of love and loss.
Christian House, in a review for the Financial Times, said Anne Michael’s ‘alchemical abilities are undimmed. It is really a novel-in-stories, delivering a series of pivotal junctures in the lives of a string of characters – some obviously linked, others more tenuously. Spanning the 20th century and reaching into the near future, this series of decisive moments presents love, both romantic and familial, as a temporary balm to inevitable loss.’
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The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
On an unusually hot summer afternoon in 1947, Dr Faraday is called urgently to Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline – its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds.
But are the Ayres haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.
Sarah Waters’ chilling and vividly rendered ghost story was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009. Wuthering Heights fans will love its rich, gothic atmosphere and psychological complexity.
In a review for the Observer, Tracy Chevalier said, ‘Waters writes with a firm, confident hand, deftly building an atmosphere that begins in a still, hot summer and gradually darkens and tightens until we are as gripped by the escalating horror as the Ayres are.’
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The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
Mariana Enríquez’s short-story collection, translated by Megan McDowell, populates contemporary urban Argentina with a macabre cast of unruly teenagers, homeless ghosts and hungry women. As terrifying as they are socially conscious, the stories press into the unspoken – fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history – with bracing urgency.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021, the judges said The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is, ‘An extraordinarily intelligent collection of short stories that knowingly uses the tropes of the horror story, the ghost story and even pulp fiction to think about Argentina’s painful past. In the process, it fashions a “Magical Realism Version 2.0” from a subtly feminist perspective. Smart, political, unputdownable.’
Wuthering Heights fans will no doubt be drawn to this unflinching collection where, as Hamilton Cain writing for Oprah Daily said, the ‘borders between the everyday and the inexplicable blur, and converge’.
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Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood
Great Granny Webster, as she sits silent and impassive in her hard, high-backed chair, is the embodiment of everything that is ‘correct’ in the traditions of her aristocratic family. But the insidious impacts of this terrible old woman are far-reaching.
Caroline Blackwood’s brief but wickedly funny story, with a monstrous, iron-willed dowager at its heart, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977. Fans of Wuthering Heights will enjoy the gothic atmosphere of a novel that is part macabre fairy tale, part family portrait.
In an article about the novel and its author for the Booker Prizes website, Lucy Scholes says, ‘Without being overly self-conscious in its artlessness, it reads like the guileless confession of a simple innocent embroiled in a tangled net of ravaged and ruined lives…
‘Given its brevity, it’s an astonishingly nimble portrait of four generations of women… Blackwood’s fictional women are all trapped by something, whether it’s duty, convention, motherhood, mental illness, or the men in their lives.’
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Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur
From disembodied heads emerging from toilet bowls to foxes that bleed pure gold, Bora Chung’s short story collection, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021, packs a visceral punch, conjuring up mental images that can be hard to shift.
The judges said, ‘While the stories in Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung blend elements of horror, fantasy and the surreal, each is viscerally rooted in the real fears and pressures of everyday life. Chung’s genre-defying collection is translated with verve and evident relish by Anton Hur, who shifts effortlessly from playful to harrowing.’
Fans of Wuthering Heights’ dark, turbulent atmosphere and supernatural elements will enjoy an unsettling collection that touches on themes including patriarchy, isolation and betrayal. In ‘Home Sweet Home’, Chung uses a haunted house to comment on capitalism, while ‘Reunion’, set in Poland, uses a ghostly sighting to address generational trauma.
Chung has said the book’s 10 stories can be ‘categorised somewhere between horror and speculative fiction… most of them are like fairy tales but with a little bit of a modern Korean twist.’
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