Looking for the books that are inspired by true stories? Here, we bring you the list of five best books based on true stories.
Let’s explore:
The Christie Affair, by Nina de Gramont
Just hours following her husband’s announcement that he was leaving her and marrying his mistress, Christie left her dog and her daughter at home and disappeared without explanation. Though she was found safe in a hotel after being missing for 11 days, little is known of what happened to Christie in the interim. It’s the one mystery she refused to solve to public satisfaction.
What drives someone to murder? What will someone do in the name of love? What kind of crime can someone never forgive? Nina de Gramont’s brilliant, unforgettable novel explores these questions and more.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Glass Castle is a wonderful memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant and charismatic father captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive.
Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a family. The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York.
Sister Mother Warrior by Vanessa Riley
On the surface, a historical novel depicting the role of women in the Haitian revolution would seem to have little in common with Viola Davis’s blockbuster The Woman King. But these works share a common DNA. Both are fictionalizations of the lives of female legends of the Kingdom of Dahomey. While the movie is a larger-than-life heroic depiction of women warriors who fought against French colonizers in the country now known as Benin, the novel is a meticulously researched and more intimate portrait of a pivotal time in history when a Dahomey soldier became one of two key female figures in the Haitian fight for freedom.
Take My Hand, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Some of America’s ugliest and most contested episodes involve the intersection of healthcare and the legal system. When sex and race are intertwined, the conflict grows all the more heated. Perkins-Valdez based her novel on a true case of involuntary sterilization that revives issues that still swirl around the idea of reproductive freedom today.
New birth control methods have brought greater freedom, but they’ve also made marginalized women, many of whom are Black or brown, vulnerable to targeting by people who want to change America’s racial makeup.
Never Anyone But You, by Rupert Thomson
Lucie and Suzanne are stepsisters in love, a complicated and uncouth scenario in the early-to-mid 1900s. The pair move to progressive Paris to reinvent themselves, where they become surrealist artists and change their names. Now going by Claude Cahun, Lucie is recognized for her gender-bending photography and Suzanne’s alter-ego Marcel Moore narrates their life spent cohabitating and collaborating. This fictionalized retelling of the real couple’s relationship is populated with other famous figures of the lost generation and plays out their resistance against antisemitism.
Navkiran Dhaliwal is a seasoned content writer with 10+ years of experience. When she's not writing, she can be found cooking up a storm or spending time with her dog, Rain.