Books like Faces in the Water
Istina Mavet, a young woman committed to mental hospitals in New Zealand, records the wards, the treatments and the women around her.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Faces in the Water
Owls Do Cry
The four Withers children grow up poor in a small New Zealand town, playing on the rubbish dump, and are scattered by death and by the asylum.
Bodies of Light
Maggie Sullivan, taken into care as a small child in Melbourne, moves through foster homes and institutions into an adult life lived under other names.
Nobody Is Ever Missing
Elyria walks out of her marriage in New York without a word and flies to New Zealand on a one-way ticket, hitchhiking across the country and narrating her unraveling in long, breathless sentences.
An Angel at My Table
Janet Frame's autobiography, from a poor childhood in Oamaru through eight years in mental hospitals to her escape into writing and to Europe.
Girl, Interrupted
Kaysen's memoir of the two years she spent at eighteen in McLean Hospital for a borderline diagnosis, told in chips of narrative cut in and out of the case file.
Night Watch
In 1874, twelve-year-old ConaLee and her mother, who has stopped speaking after years of abuse, are brought to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia by the violent man ConaLee has been made to call Papa, while the fate of her real father, a Union sharpshooter, remains a mystery.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Chief Bromden, a huge Native American patient who pretends to be deaf and mute, watches Randle McMurphy, a charismatic new arrival, take on the ward's tyrannical Nurse Ratched.
The Passenger
In 1980, Bobby Western, a salvage diver in New Orleans, dives on a crashed private jet and finds that one passenger is missing, and soon men in suits come asking questions, while he is haunted by his brilliant dead sister.
The Bell Jar
A young woman's descent into depression in 1950s New York, told with razor wit and suffocating clarity.
The Hours
Three women in three eras live through a single day linked by Mrs Dalloway: Virginia Woolf writing it in 1923, Laura Brown reading it in 1949 Los Angeles, and Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway, giving a party in 1990s New York.
Small Things Like These
A coal merchant in 1980s Ireland discovers that the local convent has been hiding something terrible, and must decide whether to speak up or stay silent.
The Bone People
Kerewin Holmes, a reclusive artist living alone in a tower on the South Island coast, finds a mute boy, Simon, in her house one night, and comes to know him and his Māori foster father, Joe.