What to read next if Sentimental Value is your Oscars pick.

The Oscars are this Sunday. And if you’ve already filled out the party poll with Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value down the line, this recommender 1) applauds you, and 2) has got you covered. For my money, that beautifully acted chamber piece following a famous auteur’s prodigal return was one of the sweet spots of 2025.

To distract you from gnawing your nails in anticipation, here are two books to add to your pile. That’s assuming you love a bourgeois backdrop, the conundrum of famous parents, and—of course—sisters.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri, The Sisters

I know, I know. But I swear this is thoughtfully chosen. The three Mikkola girls drive this propulsive family epic. And like the sisters in Mr. Trier’s latest, Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia are the product of parental neglect in Scandinavia.

This novel explores the unique bond that siblings in unstable families can form, and is especially shrewd on how sisters define themselves in negative space.

To boot, we’ve got an interloping interpreter (à la Elle Fanning) narrating events from a strangely intimate seat at the table. And Evelyn, the charismatic chaos agent of the bunch, is a brilliant actress. Just like Renate Reinsve’s Nora, in the movie.

Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children

Perhaps because we seem to be retreading this political moment, I recently went to revisit this 2006 Booker-longlisted novel, which follows the family of a famous journalist around pre-9/11 New York. Marina, the titular child at the center of this vortex, spends hundreds of pages failing to crawl out from under her father’s intellectual shadow.

Messud is one of our most assured stylists, and this snack of a satire takes a hatchet to the metropolitan cultural elite as well as it maps their inherited neuroses. As Minna Proctor at Bookforum put it back in the day, this “decidedly bourgeois and deliciously yarny” novel “deviously transposes all of the tawdry ambitions of Victorian society to the Upper West Side.”

Though it’s much more acidic than Trier’s project, if you’re compelled by the narcissistic daddy-o and his thwarted spawn, join me in going back to the early aughts.

In the meantime. Good luck this Sunday, Sentimentos!