What did you love about The Favourite?
The Handmaid's Tale
The Handmaid's Tale shows women forced to compete for survival under male power with the same brutal stakes.
Dangerous Liaisons
Dangerous Liaisons is all aristocrats treating seduction as warfare, everyone scheming and no one safe from betrayal.
Orlando
Orlando treats history with the same irreverent energy, refusing to make the past polite or distant or safe.
5 books like The Favourite
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel — Mantel's Booker Prize winner about Thomas Cromwell's rise in Henry VIII's court is the definitive no…
- Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos — The 1782 epistolary novel that The Favourite's tone descends from — aristocrats weaponizing seductio…
- The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton — Catton's Booker-winning novel set in 1860s New Zealand has The Favourite's structural ambition — an …
- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood — Atwood's dystopia shares The Favourite's central insight: that women's power in patriarchal systems …
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf — Woolf's mock-biography of a person who lives for four centuries and changes sex halfway through shar…
Picked for the feeling of The Favourite, not its genre. Each one is explained below. One movie isn’t much to go on: rate four more and the books are picked for you.
Why these books
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.
Read it with your book club →
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.
Read it with your book club →
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.
Read it with your book club →
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.
Read it with your book club →
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.
Read it with your book club →Is The Favourite based on a book?
The Favourite isn’t based on a book — it’s an original screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara.
What should I read if I loved The Favourite?
Start with Wolf Hall, Dangerous Liaisons and The Luminaries. 5 books on this page were picked for the feeling of The Favourite, not its genre, with a reason for each.
Which book is most like The Favourite?
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. 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.
These are for everyone who loved The Favourite. Want books picked for you?
Someone who loved The Favourite and A Fistful of Dollars reads different books from someone who loved The Favourite and Dune: Part Two. One movie isn’t much to go on. Rate four more — The Favourite already counts — and the books are picked for you.
Rate four more moviesOr read it with your book club and talk about it while you’re still reading.