5 great books that slipped through your TikTok recommendations

BookTok can be fun, but its focus on popular stories, authors, and tropes can sometimes overlook books of proper substance

The past few years have seen the rise of TikTok, a social media platform that features short videos. It became so popular, especially among young people, that more established brands like Facebook and YouTube have introduced their own variants to try and catch up. 

Popularity on TikTok can even translate to success on a broader scale. Songs that go viral as the background to popular TikTok videos have even returned to the Billboard charts, sometimes decades after their initial release. But it’s not just music. A popular subsection of the community is ‘BookTok’, where enthusiastic readers come together to talk about their favourite books, authors, and tropes – familiar plot or character elements, like enemies-to-lovers character arcs. 

But, for all its positives, BookTok can be narrow. Its general focus is on lighter, more trendy books. Here are five books that have fantastic prose, compelling plots that don’t rely too heavily on tropes, and detailed character writing but may be overlooked by TikTok: 

Italian author Elena Ferrante, the 2016 Man Booker International Prize winner, is the famous writer of the Neapolitan Quartet novels - My Brilliant Friend, The Story of A New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child. Her 2005 book, The Days of Abandonment, tells the story of a mother’s abandonment and depression and remains one of her most raw, passionate, and fervent books. 

It can be a tough read, though. Olga is left by her husband of 15 years and has to care for her two children and dog amid the heartbreak. As the book goes on, she drifts into a pit of depression as she realises her role as the forsaken wife. The book’s raw and emotional depiction of Olga’s mental health often feels like reading pages of a diary that should not be seen by anyone. 

Despite this, it is a stirring book and, by the end, finds some hope that the pain we experience will eventually pass.  

You may have heard of Sally Rooney as the writer of much-discussed books like Normal People and Conversations with Friends or as the clever mind behind the shows with the same names. 

Rooney debuted in 2017 with Conversations and made her mark on the literary world with immediate critical and audience acclaim. 

Her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, was released in 2021 under the glaring weight of heavy expectations. Despite the pressure, the book was her most philosophical and political work to date. The book follows a best-selling author named Alice and her conversations with her university friend Eileen about turning 30 and their sexual dalliances. Large chunks of the story are told through back-and-forth emails between Alice and Eileen as they discuss various socio-economic issues, politics, the impact of right-wing thinking on capitalism and more. 

The book winds through many weighty ideas and can be a dense read, but, like Ferrante, Rooney delves into the psyches of her characters, painting vibrant pictures of their inner lives. The deftly sketched details make it easy to follow the main ideas and how Alice and Eileen change throughout their discussions. In the end, readers are left with a lot to think about and can also track the journeys of the book’s leads. 

Daphne du Maurier is a name that defines modern Gothic literature. Every author today has been touched and inspired by her ornate, ardent paragraphs. She has an innate ability to capture the thousand underlying elements of a plot and portray them in the most perfect manner possible. Her writing shows each groove, each scar and indentation of a scene elegantly. 

Her breakout novel is Rebecca, which follows an unnamed narrator who marries the cold, mysterious widower Maxim de Winter, the owner of the beautiful estate of Manderley. When she arrives at her new home, our narrator discovers that the memory of his first wife, the titular Rebecca, still haunts the halls. At moments, the smell of her perfume and the clack of her heels still linger at Manderley. 

The book is a classic, and many may have already come across its brilliance. But, to them, let this be a reminder to take it off the bookshelf, brush off the dust, and immerse yourself in du Maurier’s masterful domain. The trio of the narrator, Maxim, and the glamorous titular queen of Manderlay will confound readers until the very end. It is a wondrous novel, beautiful but horrifying, with enough mystery and suspense to perplex you and give you a few sleepless nights. A true pleasure.   

Raven Leilani’s first novel Luster made a memorable debut amid the global pandemic in 2020. Leilani, a black author from the Bronx in New York, has a skill with the pen many other writers will envy. In an ornate style, she tells a story of the hard, forbidding life of a floundering young woman who craves stability and tenderness. 

Edie, our narrator, is a quondam painter working at a dead-end publishing job and at risk of unemployment. Struggling with finances, she decides to move in with her white, middle-aged boyfriend Eric, his wife Rebecca (with whom he has an open relationship) and their adopted, mixed-race daughter Akila, who is only 10 years younger than Edie.

Edie is a fascinating and, at times, a confounding character who does not have an ounce of self-pity despite her past and present hardships, all of which she speaks about openly. Though Edie can’t overcome all her problems, she remains intriguing, as is the messy but sweet family dynamic she falls into with Rebecca and Akila.

Luster’s racial and sexual dynamics are particularly charged, but it remains a compelling book, one that I urge you to experience yourself.  

Babel isn’t just one of 2022’s most popular books, it’s also one of the most ingenious, imaginative, and insightful recent releases in the fantasy genre. 

The fantasy genre is often known for the easy-to-read young adult fiction of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians or Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone. But Kuang goes against the grain by delivering an incisive commentary on imperialism, racism, and how people of colour are exploited.

In the world of the novel, every device is fuelled by silver bars enchanted with ‘match-pairs’ – words in two different languages that mean the same thing but lose something in their translation. 

Our main character, Robin Swift is an orphan from China adopted into the British Empire and made to work at the great Oxford Translation Institute, nicknamed Babel, where the brightest children, fluent in Chinese or Arabic, are put to work to translate more matched pairs. 

Though these pairs are a potent power source, they are only used to benefit the rich. The book beautifully tracks how Robin’s initial hopes of bringing people together through translation are dashed by the bleak realisation that such a future is impossible amid the colonial and racial oppression of the English Empire

Babel is an ambitious work that truly deserves all the praise it receives. As RF Kuang’s fourth book after the Poppy War series, it is a tremendous success. 

It isn’t always easy to step outside our usual corners of media comfort, but sometimes the trip is worth it. These five books, each of which goes out of its way to present fresh plots and explore complex characters, are excellent examples of the quality work we can find if we can delve further than our recommended social media feeds.  

This article is part of Stripe, bdnews24.com's special publication focusing on culture and society from a youth perspective.