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.

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.