If the interleaved letters Monica writes to the Ministry of Population drew you in—those private dispatches that reveal what she can’t say to David—then you’ll love how Flowers for Algernon unfolds entirely through Charlie’s journal entries. Like David trying to tell Monica he loves her while Teddy quietly observes, Charlie’s progress reports turn inner longing into a heartbreaking, firsthand record. You get that same ache of a mind reaching for connection, and the slow, devastating realization of what it means to be loved—and to be seen.

If you connected with the confined, almost hushed world of Monica, Henry, David, and Teddy—those fraught afternoons in the house and garden where a single conversation can change everything—Never Let Me Go offers that same intimate hush. As Kathy reflects on her small circle of friends, the emotional stakes feel as close and tender as David waiting for a word of affection. It’s a story where the ordinary rhythms of daily life carry immense weight, and love is whispered between the lines.

If David’s longing for Monica’s love—and the unsettling revelation of his artificial nature—lingered with you, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? pushes those questions further. Where David reaches for genuine affection and Teddy quietly measures the room, Rick Deckard hunts androids with the Voight-Kampff test, trying to pin empathy to a needle reading. Both stories press on the same nerve: when a being feels love and fear as vividly as we do, what could possibly make it less real?

If David’s guileless attempts to please Monica—and Teddy’s watchful companionship—broke your heart, Klara and the Sun lets you inhabit a similarly gentle, outsider gaze. Klara, an Artificial Friend, studies human rituals of love with the same hopeful intensity David brings to the household scenes and the garden. You’ll find that same delicate tension between innocence and insight, as an artificial child tries to understand what devotion costs—and what it means to be loved back.

If the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Population—and the chilling wait for a license to have a “real” child—stuck with you, The Children of Men will resonate. Where Monica’s letters reveal a society rationing love through policy, James imagines a world where infertility has turned intimacy and parenthood into matters of power and grief. It shares that same subdued dread you felt in David’s home: ordinary rooms shadowed by a system that decides who gets to be a family.