In Saltburn, the backdrops are as mesmerizing and as essential to the plot as the delicate portrayal of the central relationship between Oliver and Felix. The settings are both tight and enclosed, the campus and the country house. These are my favorite settings for novels—discrete locations with groups defined by their relationship to the space: Benefactor, son, heir, student, guest, imposter. In Saltburn, Oliver’s relationship to the house and to the inhabitants keeps shifting as he stays longer.
Saltburn is overtly in conversation with amazing books that feature similarly shifting relationships and refined settings, including Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. The referential nods in the movie are subtle or satisfying—the dinner table scene, the fountains, the teddy bear in the long gallery with “dead rellies.”
But these books below offer a reading experience similar to watching Saltburn: brief glimpses into an obsessive relationship, lush scenes of rich people behaving terribly, and stress as the claustrophobic tension increases over time. These novels explore lengths outsiders will go to survive in worlds of wealth and excess, capture intense and immediate connections forged in desire, and tease out precarious power dynamics that threaten ruin with one misstep, one unfortunate shift.
The Guest by Emma Cline
Alex is staying with the much older Simon at his summer house for weeks before she makes a mistake that lands her a trip to the train station and a one-way ticket back to New York City, where she’s facing eviction. She is determined to stay until Simon’s Labor Day party, where Alex is convinced they will reconcile, and somehow she does. Alex passes as a member of a group of friends renting a house, slips into a country club, and more to grift her way through the wealthy Long Island community. This grift, however, is trying, and makes for propulsive reading.
Necessary People by Anna Pitoniak
As college students, Stella and Violet’s different backgrounds were easier to ignore. Violet received a scholarship; Stella’s family name and wealth helped secure her spot, as they would anywhere. But after graduation, when they both move to New York City, Stella remains impulsive and untouchable, while Violet focuses on working hard and climbing the ladder at her news station job. Violet is ambitious and frustrated with Stella’s easy success, particularly her transition on camera. Their friendship suffers as Violet’s resentment mounts, and with this imbalance, she and Stella struggle to remain friends. This book, like Saltburn, begins as a story of an obsessive friendship—before taking a dark turn.
Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress
In this novel, Louisa Arceneaux is a scholarship student at the prestigious Wrynn College of Art rooming with Karina Piontek, the daughter of famous art collectors. After a tentative start, Louisa and Karina’s connection deepens through friendship, artwork, and sexual attraction. Then, after an elaborate hoax forces them out of school, Louisa and Karina’s relationship falters and threatens to end completely in the New York City art world. If the nostalgia-filled soundtrack and wardrobe of Saltburn’s mid-aughts setting appealed to you, then this is a must. Angress captures the early 2010s on the elite campus, complete with an ill-conceived Occupy Wall Street protest.
Henry, Henry by Allen Bratton
Hal Lancaster is heir to 1,000 acres, a private estate, and a title. But he is adrift in London in his early twenties, conflicted about his privilege and his family. Hal’s friends, lovers, and nights out highlight both the access and excess of the upper-class—London homes and country estates, endless connections to other rich or famous people, and even Hal’s ability to remain in one of the most expensive cities in the world without direction or cash. When his father insists Hal return home for his latest wedding, the lavish celebrations, like the London parties, ring hollow for Hal. Until Hal winds up in the hospital after a shooting incident, which sparks a consuming romance that prompts Hal to consider the root of his discomfort about his privilege and his distance from his family.
Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton
Louise has three jobs and a rent-stabilized studio she can barely afford when she meets Lavinia. Although the two become fast friends, the relationship is unbalanced. Lavinia is wealthy and flighty, and Louise can’t resist this entry into a world of excess and privilege and parties. As their relationship intensifies, Louise becomes more entwined in Lavinia’s life and loses track of her own friends, family, and jobs. Burton imbues the novel with a low, persistent threat of violence and ruin throughout that is very similar to the dark undertones of the movie.
Tripping Arcadia by Kit Mayquist
After Lena drops out of med school and moves back to her family’s home outside of Boston, she gets a job assisting a wealthy family’s private doctor. Her job mainly involves working out of the family’s Back Bay home and caring for their adult son, Jonathan, but soon Lena begins working the family’s trippy, drug-fueled parties in their mansion in Western Massachusetts home called Arrow’s Edge. These parties, which rival the lush debauchery of Saltburn’s, present Lena with the opportunity to get closer to Audrey, the family’s mysterious and impulsive daughter. They also make Lena reconsider the motives of her employers, suspicious of the physician, and question her role in all of it.
Virtue by Hermoine Hoby
After graduating from Oxford, Luca moves to New York City for a prestigious position at a famous literary magazine that resembles a fictionalized version of The Paris Review. Through the magazine, Luca strikes up an unexpected friendship with a much older couple, Paula and Jason, an artist and a filmmaker. After dinners and days together in New York, Paula and Jason invite Luca to their family’s second home in Maine for the summer. In Maine, Luca becomes further enmeshed in the couple’s complicated relationship until the arrangement comes to a head. This isn’t a thriller, like many of the others on the list. But desire is at the root of the novel, and the allure of Paula, Jason, and their world threatens to upend the life Luca is just beginning to create for himself.
Good Rich People by Eliza Jane Brazier
This thriller follows Lyla, her husband Graham, and his mother Margo, who live in mansions next door to each other in the Hollywood hills. This obscenely rich family indulges in ruining the lives of the tenants, as well as lots and lots of Moet. After she causes the game to end in disaster with the last one, Lyla is up. She is tasked with ruining Demi, the latest renter. But Demi, it turns out, isn’t easily manipulated. As the game evolves—or, maybe, devolves—Lyla and Demi scheme and strive to come out on top.
Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel
After her best friend from home is murdered, art student Zoe Beech studies abroad in Berlin for an escape and a fresh start. Zoe lives with Hailey, another art student at her school who comes from a well-off family and is determined to find commercial success with her art. When Hailey finds a sublet of a famous thriller writer’s apartment, it seems like it’s too good to be true—or it’s a sign that the term abroad will be the transformative experience for their art and their lives that they’re hoping for. Determined to have an experience worth commemorating, Zoe and Hailey host decadent parties, skip classes, and break the apartment rules. But soon it’s unclear whether the author has really left Berlin, and whether she has really left Zoe and Hailey in the apartment alone. The novel unravels slowly and then all at once, leaving you ready to start over again and follow all the signs you might have missed.
The post 9 Novels to Read if You Loved “Saltburn” appeared first on Electric Literature.
