Read-alike guide
Books Like Addie LaRue: 8 Novels About Being Forgotten, Living Too Long and Loving Anyway
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is three books at once: a curse about being forgotten, three hundred years of history seen by someone who never ages, and a love story that has to happen inside a bargain’s rules. Few novels do all three. Each book below does at least one, and says which.
Book One · The Train Between Worlds
The Train Between Worlds
Lost on an endless train where realities blur, memories surface, and every choice reveals who you truly are.
Addie is remembered by no one. The narrator of Book One of this series has the opposite problem: he remembers nothing. He wakes on a train with no name, no past and a ticket that reads Destination: Unknown. Every carriage pulls a little further from reality, and every door aboard costs one true memory of the person you would go back for. A girl called Lumi appears and disappears, speaks in riddles, and seems to know him better than he knows himself, and the quiet mystery slowly becomes a love story.
What it shares with Schwab is the question underneath: if memory is what makes a person, who are you once it is gone, and can someone love you anyway? What it does not have is history. There are no centuries, no Paris salons and no long game with a devil; the whole book happens aboard one train, and it is stranger and more unsettling than Addie’s world.
Where the line begins — a complete story in itself
Short answer
The best books like Addie LaRue depend on which part you loved. For being forgotten, read The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North, whose heroine is erased from memory the moment she leaves the room. For a very long life, How to Stop Time and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. For love that time gets in the way of, The Time Traveler’s Wife. For the bargain and the bittersweet romance, The Night Circus. For more Schwab, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (2025). The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Life After Life round it out. No spoilers anywhere on the page.
What to expect from The Train Between Worlds
Where it lines up with Addie LaRue, and where it does not:
- Same as Addie LaRue
- Memory and identity as the heart of the story. A price paid in memory. A love story with someone who seems to know you.
- Different
- No centuries and no bargain with a god. The narrator has lost his past rather than his place in other people’s. Surreal rather than historical.
- Tone
- Surreal and dreamlike, more unsettling than sad.
- Content notes
- Memory loss, dissociation, psychological disorientation.
- Reading order
- Book One of three, and fully standalone.
- Formats
- Kindle. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited.
What makes a book feel like Addie LaRue?
V. E. Schwab’s novel (Tor, 2020) begins in France in 1714, when a young woman called Addie bargains with a dark god to escape a marriage. She gets more than she asked for: she will not age, and everyone she meets will forget her the moment she is out of sight. The book moves between three centuries of Addie learning to live like that and New York in 2014, where a bookseller called Henry Strauss somehow remembers her. When readers ask for “something like it”, they usually mean one of four things:
- Being forgotten. The loneliness of leaving no mark on anyone, and the cleverness it takes to live that way.
- A very long life. History seen by one person who outlasts everyone around them.
- Love against time. A romance where the obstacle is not another person but the rules of the world.
- The bargain. A deal made young, whose terms the person only understands later.
Almost no book does all four, so the picks below are tagged with the part each one gives back, and each has an honest “skip if”.
Books like Addie LaRue
In the order we would hand them to you. Page counts are for first editions where we could confirm them.
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The Sudden Appearance of Hope
Closest match Being forgottenThe one book that shares Addie’s curse almost exactly. When Hope Arden is sixteen, people start forgetting her: her parents, her friends, anyone who looks away for more than a minute or two. She cannot hold a job or a relationship, so she becomes a thief, because a thief nobody can remember is never caught. Then a life-improvement app called Perfection is linked to a friend’s suicide, and Hope sets out to find the people behind it.
If what stayed with you in Schwab’s book was the practical loneliness of being unrememberable, the hotel rooms and the small daily tricks, this is the deepest exploration of it in print. It is colder and more contemporary than Addie LaRue, a thriller about surveillance and self-improvement rather than a romance, and North (who also wrote Harry August, below) is more interested in ideas than in feelings. The New York Times called it “a haunting meditation on loneliness”. It won the World Fantasy Award in 2017.
- How it ends
- The thriller plot resolves; the ending is quieter than the chase that leads to it, and some readers find it flat.
- Contains
- A suicide linked to the app; Theft and violence in the thriller plot
- Skip if
- Skip it if the love story was the point; Hope is alone for almost the whole book.
Checked against: Hachette (Redhook): publication, page count, review quotes, NPR review via WUSF: premise and the Perfection app, Worlds Without End: 2017 World Fantasy Award
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How to Stop Time
Strong match A very long lifeTom Hazard was born in 1581 and ages about one year for every fifteen. He looks forty and has lived four centuries; he has met Shakespeare and Captain Cook. Now he teaches history at a London school, under the protection of a secret society whose one rule is that he must never fall in love. The novel moves between present-day London and the long past, including the woman he loved in the 1590s and the daughter he has been searching for ever since.
This is the closest match on the page for Addie’s three centuries: one person carrying history around inside them, outliving everyone, and trying to decide whether a new love is worth the cost. It is lighter and more consoling than Schwab, and Haig likes to state his lessons; the Guardian called it “a high-concept romance” with “a rare ability to make the far-fetched seem believable”. It is a good next book if you want the long life without the darkness of Addie’s bargain.
- How it ends
- It ends with the society dealt with and the rule broken; the most hopeful ending on this page.
- Contains
- A witch trial and a hanging in the 1590s strand; A daughter missing for centuries
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want Schwab’s gothic edge; Haig is gentle and sometimes sentimental.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, premise, Matt Haig: the book
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The Time Traveler’s Wife
Strong match Love against timeHenry DeTamble, a Chicago librarian, has a genetic condition that throws him through time without warning or clothes. Clare Abshire, an artist, meets him at the Newberry Library in 1991 and already knows him: he has been visiting her since she was a child. He has never met her. The novel alternates between them and follows a marriage in which one partner keeps vanishing into the past and the other is left to wait.
If Addie and Henry Strauss were what you loved, a couple who meet out of order and fight the rules of their world to stay together, this is the classic version. Its romance is bigger and more domestic than Schwab’s, and it is just as interested in what it costs to be the one who stays. It was Niffenegger’s debut, from a small San Francisco press, and went on to sell millions of copies; it has been filmed (2009), made into an HBO series (2022) and a stage musical. Critics praised its feeling and complained about its melodrama, and both are fair.
- How it ends
- It ends in Clare’s old age, with a long wait; it is the saddest ending on this page.
- Contains
- An adult man visiting a girl through her childhood, and a relationship that begins when she is eighteen; Repeated miscarriages; A death foretold
- Skip if
- Skip it if the childhood visits will spoil it for you; the book never fully resolves how uncomfortable they are.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, structure, adaptations, reception
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The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Strong match Centuries of memoryHarry August is born in 1919 in a railway-station washroom in Berwick-upon-Tweed and dies in a Newcastle hospital in 1989. Then he is born again, in the same place, in 1919, remembering everything. He is one of a small number of people who live their lives over and over, and a secret society of them, the Cronus Club, looks after its members in childhood. Then other members of the club bring him news: the world is ending, and the end is coming sooner with each life.
Like Addie, Harry carries centuries of memory that nobody around him shares, and the best parts of the book are about that loneliness and about the one person who understands it, his friend and rival Vincent. It turns into a cerebral thriller across decades, more chess game than love story. The Guardian called it “often quietly profound, emotionally affecting and intellectually dizzying”; Kirkus found Harry’s voice too detached. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
- How it ends
- It ends with the contest between Harry and Vincent settled; a thriller ending, not a romantic one.
- Contains
- Interrogation and torture; War violence across several lives
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want warmth; Harry is cool and observant, and the book is about ideas more than feelings.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, premise, awards, reception
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The Night Circus
Strong match The bargain and the romanceTwo young magicians, Celia and Marco, are bound as children by their teachers to a contest whose rules nobody explains. The venue is Le Cirque des Rêves, a black-and-white circus that opens only at night, and the two of them build it tent by tent, trying to outdo each other, until they fall in love and realise the contest does not end well for either of them.
This is the book for Addie readers who loved the bargain most: an agreement made young, by someone who did not understand its terms, and a love story that has to happen inside rules set by someone older and colder. It shares Schwab’s taste for velvet and candlelight, and for magic that costs. It is slower and more decorative than Addie LaRue, and the circus itself, which the reader walks through in second-person passages, is half the pleasure. Many readers come to Schwab from Morgenstern or the other way round; we have a separate page of books like The Night Circus.
- How it ends
- It ends bittersweet: the contest resolved, the lovers changed, the circus handed on.
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want pace; the plot moves slowly and the atmosphere is the point.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, structure, Locus Award, Kirkus review
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Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
Strong match More SchwabSchwab’s next adult novel after Addie LaRue, and set in the same universe. Three women, in three centuries, become vampires: María, a peasant in sixteenth-century Spain, escaping a marriage; Charlotte, sent to London in the nineteenth century and turned there; and Alice, a Scottish student at Harvard in 2019, who wakes up changed after a one-night stand. Their stories are cut together, and connected by the vampires who made them.
If Schwab’s voice was what you loved, the long view of history and the hunger for a life of one’s own, this is more of it, and darker. Schwab has called it her most autobiographical book: the three women’s stories reflect three stages of her own coming out. Kirkus gave it a starred review and called it a “beautiful meditation on queer identity”; several reviewers found Alice’s present-day strand weaker than the two historical ones. It went to number one on the New York Times hardcover list.
- How it ends
- The three timelines converge in the present; we will not say how.
- Contains
- Vampire violence and killing; An oppressive marriage; Sexual content
- Skip if
- Skip it if you did not want horror; it is a vampire novel, with blood.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, premise, reception, Addie universe
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The Ten Thousand Doors of January
Looser match Stories as magicJanuary Scaller grows up at the turn of the twentieth century in a Vermont mansion, the ward of a wealthy collector, while her father travels the world finding things for him. At seventeen, with her father apparently gone, she finds a book called The Ten Thousand Doors, about doors that lead to other worlds, and the novel alternates her story with its chapters. Slowly the two turn out to be one story.
It shares Addie’s faith that stories and art are how a person survives being erased, and its love story also crosses time and distance. It is warmer and more adventurous than Schwab’s book, and angrier: it takes on the racism, classism and sexism of its period directly. Kirkus called it “a love letter to imagination, adventure, the written word, and the power of many kinds of love”. It was shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards. Read it when you want the same longing with a happier heart.
- How it ends
- It ends in reunion rather than sacrifice.
- Contains
- Period racism, classism and sexism, confronted on the page; A guardian’s control of a teenage girl, including confinement
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want an adult romance at the centre; January is seventeen and the love story is in the background.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication and award shortlists, Kirkus review
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Life After Life
Looser match A life lived many timesUrsula Todd is born in England on a snowy night in February 1910 and dies before she can take a breath. Then she is born again, the same night, and lives a little longer. Over and over, through the Spanish flu, the Blitz and a life in Berlin, she lives versions of the twentieth century, half-remembering what went wrong last time.
This is the literary version of Addie’s long view: one woman, a lot of history, and the question of what a single life adds up to. It has no curse, no bargain and no romance at its centre; what it shares is the sense of a person who knows more than everyone around her and cannot explain it. It won the Costa Novel Award, and Janet Maslin in the New York Times said its mind games are “purposeful rather than emptily playful”. It is long and asks patience; the Blitz chapters are the best thing in it.
- How it ends
- It ends on a version of the opening scene and refuses to say which life counts.
- Contains
- A rape and an abusive marriage in one life; A child’s death; The Blitz in detail
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want romance or magic; it is a family novel about history with one impossible rule.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, awards, reception, Kirkus review
Quick picker: which one should you read next?
Match the part of Addie LaRue you loved to the book that gives it back.
| If you loved… | Try |
|---|---|
| Being forgotten by everyone | The Sudden Appearance of Hope |
| Three centuries in one life | How to Stop Time, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August |
| Addie and Henry | The Time Traveler’s Wife |
| The bargain, and love inside its rules | The Night Circus |
| Schwab’s voice | Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil |
| Stories as a way to survive | The Ten Thousand Doors of January |
| The long view, more literary | Life After Life |
Shortest: How to Stop Time (352 pp). Longest: The Time Traveler’s Wife (546 pp).
Why The Midnight Library is not on this list
Almost every list of books like Addie LaRue includes Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, because both came out in 2020 and both have a woman and an impossible premise. They are different books. Nora Seed’s library is a place she goes while it is decided whether she lives, after an overdose, and every life she tries is a way of asking whether hers is worth going back to. There is no curse, no centuries, and no love story at its heart. If that is what you want, our page of books like The Midnight Library is built for it. If you want Haig in an Addie mood, How to Stop Time, above, is the one.
And if what you loved most was the dreamlike texture of Schwab’s book rather than its plot, try our list of dreamlike books.
Where this page’s facts come from
- Wikipedia: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue — Publication, premise, the 1714 and 2014 timelines.
- Kirkus: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue — The contemporary review.
- Wikipedia: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil — Schwab’s 2025 novel and its link to the Addie universe.
FAQ
What is the closest book to Addie LaRue?
Did V. E. Schwab write another book like Addie LaRue?
Is there a sequel to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue?
Are there books like Addie LaRue with a happy ending?
The Ten Thousand Doors of January and How to Stop Time end the most hopefully on this page. The Time Traveler’s Wife is the one to avoid if you want to finish without crying.