Books to Read After Watching The Favourite
Updated 2026-08-29
What should I read if I loved The Favourite?
The best books for The Favourite fans are Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Each captures something specific about what makes the film resonate — not just genre overlap, but the same emotional and thematic DNA.
Lanthimos turned 18th-century court politics into a pitch-black comedy about three women competing for power with weapons that range from wit to sex to actual poison. The Favourite is a period film that refuses to be polite about the past — it's vicious, funny, and deeply modern in its understanding of how power really works. These books share that anarchic energy.
Wolf Hall
Mantel's Booker Prize winner about Thomas Cromwell's rise in Henry VIII's court is the definitive novel about navigating power without being destroyed by it. Like The Favourite, it strips the costumes away and reveals court politics as a survival game played by people whose intelligence is their only protection — and whose protection can become a cage.
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Dangerous Liaisons
The 1782 epistolary novel that The Favourite's tone descends from — aristocrats weaponizing seduction and social manipulation in pre-Revolutionary France. Laclos understood what Lanthimos understands: that the most entertaining villains are the ones who are smarter than everyone around them, and the tragedy is that intelligence doesn't protect against the consequences of using it.
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The Luminaries
Catton's Booker-winning novel set in 1860s New Zealand has The Favourite's structural ambition — an elaborate, formally complex narrative with an enormous cast and a mystery at its center. Like Lanthimos, Catton uses period setting as a lens for examining power, gender, and the stories people tell about themselves to justify what they've done.
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The Handmaid's Tale
Atwood's dystopia shares The Favourite's central insight: that women's power in patriarchal systems is always mediated through proximity to men, and the competition between women isn't petty — it's existential. Both are stories about women whose bodies and fertility are political instruments, told with cold fury and dark humor.
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Orlando
Woolf's mock-biography of a person who lives for four centuries and changes sex halfway through shares The Favourite's gleeful refusal to treat the past with reverence. Like Lanthimos, Woolf uses history as a playground — gender, power, and identity are all fluid, and the fun is in watching how people perform roles that were never natural to anyone.
Get it nowThese picks are for The Favourite fans in general
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