What Laufey reads: 9 books for lover girls, from Alice Hoffman to RF Kuang

Set around a literal and symbolic descent, RF Kuang’s novel draws on classical frameworks to examine ambition, power and ethical compromise in contemporary terms. The narrative follows characters whose intellectual pursuits are inseparable from personal cost, allowing questions of authority and self-justification to unfold gradually rather than as a thesis. Classical reference points are present but never idealised, serving instead as structures that expose modern anxieties around success and legitimacy. The book’s tension comes from internal reckoning rather than spectacle, a balance that often surfaces in conversations about what Laufey reads.

Arthur Less, a struggling novelist approaching 50, accepts a string of international literary invitations, from awards ceremonies to residencies, largely to avoid his former partner’s wedding. His travels move through cities and events that repeatedly remind him of his stalled career and unresolved attachments, including public humiliations, professional comparisons and quiet moments of self-doubt. The episodic structure allows insecurity and loneliness to surface through what Arthur avoids saying or acknowledging, rather than direct confession. Emotional weight builds through accumulated observation and missed connections, giving the novel its restraint and understated momentum.

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist follows Santiago, a shepherd who leaves Spain after dreaming of treasure buried near the Egyptian pyramids. His journey takes him through North Africa, where he works for a crystal merchant, travels with a caravan across the desert and encounters an Englishman studying alchemy. Along the way, Santiago meets a woman named Fatima and an alchemist who guides him toward understanding the purpose behind his search. The story unfolds as a sequence of encounters that move him steadily toward the realisation of where the treasure lies.

Set in a remote English village in the aftermath of the First World War, Xenobe Purvis’s novel follows a group of adolescent girls whose close bonds become the focus of communal suspicion. As social order fractures under grief, superstition and unresolved violence, ritualised fear fills the vacuum left by authority and certainty. The narrative closely tracks how collective judgment is formed and enforced, particularly against young women whose behaviour falls outside expectations. Rather than offering moral clarity, the novel examines how accusation operates as a social tool, creating momentum that individuals struggle to resist once it takes hold.

Set within an elite creative writing programme, the novel follows Samantha, an outsider who becomes entangled with a tight-knit group of wealthy students who call one another Bunny. What begins as social exclusion turns into uneasy fascination as Samantha is drawn into their rituals, parties and shared language. The narrative gradually departs from realism, using surreal and often unsettling episodes to examine how intimacy, imitation and belonging can dissolve personal boundaries. As satire gives way to psychological instability, the novel traces how identity can be shaped, consumed and performed within closed social systems, a tension that often surfaces in discussions of what Laufey reads.

Patricia Highsmith’s classic is as much about longing as it is about crime. Tom Ripley, a young man in 1950s New York, is sent to Italy to persuade a wealthy acquaintance to return home. Consumed by envy of the man’s lifestyle, he gradually assumes his identity through deception and murder. Highsmith emphasises longing and imitation over crime, presenting Ripley’s internal logic as precise, unsettling and never fully explained. Moral ambiguity shapes the narrative, showing how desire, ambition and social aspiration can drive calculated manipulation. The tension builds quietly, through Ripley’s careful manoeuvring, rather than through overt action.

Coco Mellors explores grief, addiction and family intimacy without compressing them into a single perspective. Set in a working‑class community in Northern England, Blue Sisters follows the intertwined lives of two sisters navigating grief, addiction and the pressures of family loyalty. Mellors moves between multiple perspectives, allowing each character’s desires, resentments and vulnerabilities to emerge without simplification. Tensions accumulate gradually, and contradictions are left unresolved, highlighting the long‑term effects of emotional neglect and miscommunication. The novel’s slow, deliberate pacing foregrounds relational damage over plot resolution, offering a contemporary approach to emotional realism that resonates with readers attentive to nuance and interiority.

Hannah Kent’s debut novel reconstructs the final months of a woman condemned to death in 19th-century Iceland, told through restrained prose and shifting points of view. The book has personal significance for Laufey. She has shared that the story connects directly to her family history, as one of the central figures is a young pastor who is both her ancestor and shares her father’s name. She has described the novel as a visual and emotional journey through Iceland and her heritage, noting its ability to make the landscape and history feel immediate and lived-in. The connection grounds the novel’s themes of isolation, memory and belonging in something tangible rather than abstract.

What Laufey reads, as suggested by this list, is not about comfort alone but about proximity to feeling, with books that allow readers to sit with ambiguity. More book recommendations are on The Laufey Book Club.

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