Authors sometimes make plain the various delivery systems of stories in their works. These appear as letters, excerpts, quotes, footnotes, collections of other tales, and much more. When this happens, a lovely sense of the story-ness of reading occurs. Examples spread across the development of fiction, when frame stories such as One Thousand and One Nights unfurled tale after tale within its own storyline or when Laurence Sterne interrupted his romping plot in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman to actually draw it on the page. Here are five more examples. 

An avid correspondent herself, Jane Austen incorporated many letters in her novels, from Lady Susan to Pride and Prejudice. Given that gossip and news are central to the movement of her plots and to the reactions of her characters, the letter form provided Austen a way to create a sense of verisimilitude and immediacy, develop the storyline, and infuse the character’s voice even more completely into the moment. While not an epistolary novel, Persuasion (Belknap) contains one of Austen’s most famous letters, the ardent declaration, hurriedly penned in a moment of overwhelming emotion, of Captain Wentworth to Anne Elliot, professing his love and offering his heart. How the two characters arrived at that point unfolds in a tightly controlled series of scenes that begin with great hurt, develop through acknowledgment and recognition, and finally come to rest in an abiding connection. Enjoy the annotated edition for even more layers of story and text. Read-Alike: Readers who enjoy Austen for the romance elements will find that Lisa Kleypas’s “Wallflowers” series traces similar story arcs and explores much of the same emotional territory. 

Fourth Wing (Red Tower), the first book in the “Empyrean” series by Rebecca Yarros, is perhaps best known for the intense enemies-to-lovers romance between Violet Sorrengail and Xaden Riorson that unfolds at a brutal war college and involves dragon bonds, magical powers, and deadly lessons. However, hovering underneath the romance and school-life story is a series of folk tales that Violet was read by her father, a leading historian and scribe. These fantastical stories of the murderous venin, who ride and control deadly wyverns, recount their quest for power. What Xaden knows, and Violet slowly learns, is that the fables are not fiction, and the book of tales is a warning. As the series unfolds, Violet and Xaden’s swoony relationship becomes bedrock to the developing wider story, but the books Violet needs in order to save the world become central too. Supported by excerpts across a range of material, the novel unfolds on multiple textual planes. Read-Alike: Silver Elite by Dani Francis is a dystopian romance with a smarter-than-the-room heroine, military high stakes, and a friends-to-enemies-to-lovers story arc with a twist.

Building a tapestry of tales out of the threads of One Thousand and One Nights, Chelsea Abdullah centers her astoundingly lavish debut, The Stardust Thief (Orbit), on the very idea of stories. Everyone in the book is telling one—their own, someone else’s, a fable from long ago, a legend once overheard, a plot only just beginning to be understood. In this landscape stand a band of adventurers who become bound to each other, including the Midnight Merchant, a seller of magical relics always accompanied by her dear friend, a jinn bodyguard. As stories spin out, legends become fact and tales are told and twist. Readers explore an astounding labyrinth of a novel too, unfolding within all the other stories being told, where physical worlds melt into magical creations and new realms bloom out of an endless sea of sand. Read-Alike: Suggest “The Daevabad Trilogy” by S. A. Chakraborty to those seeking more intricate worldbuilding, tales, and complicated, unfolding quests.

Homebound (Scribner) by Portia Elan expands its poignant and meditative story across epochs and begins with one of the earliest forms of interactive fiction, a text-based video game. The story of the game spins out across time, gathering characters as it does so, each recounting their direct or tenuous connection to it. The game unfolds its tale and characters even as the outer layer of story spins on, directly influenced by the game’s fiction. Readers experience the text game too, as part of the novel is the game itself. This Möbius strip of a novel centers, quietly and deeply, on stories, the way characters inhabit their spaces, the way readers understand plot, the role of fiction in a life, and the long shelf-life a story can have. Read-Alike: The “Monk & Robot” duology by Becky Chambers, while much shorter, also reads as a meditation and contains the same sense of a world deeply embedded with truths and lessons.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Bloomsbury) by Susanna Clarke intriguingly layers story onto story through the lavish use of footnotes. Appended at the bottom of its pages is a second story, running through the first like a bounding leveret. It is, in part, the history of magic, with characters that have bearing on the full-page story above. That tale, of two rival magicians who seek to learn and control a slippery power that they both realize very late has an agenda all its own, is an alternative history set in the Napoleonic era, evoking Charles Dickens at his most experimental and Jane Austen in an extraordinarily arch mood. With wars interrupted by magical rain, dangerous fairy balls, transporting mirrors, and more, Clarke’s book is a triumph. Read-Alike: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern is also a delight, and about stories and magic. Morgenstern’s style is as close to Clarke’s as readers are likely to find, and both well know how to conjure.