“What are Sheila Heti’s Best Books?” We looked at all of Heti’s authored bibliography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!

We took all of the books written by Sheila Heti and looked at their Goodreads, Amazon, and LibraryThing scores, ranking them against one another to see which books came out on top. The books are ranked in our list below based on which titles have the highest overall score between all 3 review sites in comparison with all of the other books by the same author. The process isn’t super scientific and in reality, most books aren’t “better” than other books as much as they are just different. That being said, we do enjoy seeing where our favorites landed, and if you aren’t familiar with the author at all, the rankings can help you see what books might be best to start with.

The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

The Top Book’s Of Sheila Heti

8 ) How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 7
• Amazon: 8
• LibraryThing: 6

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Middle Stories and Ticknor comes a bold interrogation into the possibility of a beautiful life. How Should a Person Be? is a novel of many identities: an autobiography of the mind, a postmodern self-help book, and a fictionalized portrait of the artist as a young woman — of two such artists, in fact. For reasons multiple and mysterious, Sheila finds herself in a quandary of self-doubt, questioning how a person should be in the world. Inspired by her friend Margaux, a painter, and her seemingly untortured ability to live and create, Sheila casts Margaux as material, embarking on a series of recordings in which nothing is too personal, too ugly, or too banal to be turned into art. Along the way, Sheila confronts a cast of painters who are equally blocked in an age in which the blow job is the ultimate art form. She begins questioning her desire to be Important, her quest to be both a leader and a pupil, and her unwillingness to sacrifice herself. Searching, uncompromising and yet mordantly funny, How Should a Person Be? is a brilliant portrait of art-making and friendship from the psychic underground of Canada’s most fiercely original writer.

6 ) The Middle Stories

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 5
• Amazon: 7
• LibraryThing: 4

Wildly acclaimed in Canada, this book, published there by Anansi, marks the debut of a remarkable young writer, first published by McSweeney’s when she was twenty-three and living at home with her dad and brother. The Middle Stories is a strikingly original collection of stories, fables, and short brutalities that are alternately heartwarming, cruel, and hilarious.

6 ) The Chairs Are Where the People Go – authored with Misha Glouberman

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 4
• Amazon: 4
• LibraryThing: 8

Should neighborhoods change? Is wearing a suit a good way to quit smoking? Why do people think that if you do one thing, you’re against something else? Is monogamy a trick? Why isn’t making the city more fun for you and your friends a super-noble political goal? Why does a computer last only three years? How often should you see your parents? How should we behave at parties? Is marriage getting easier? What can spam tell us about the world?

5 ) Ticknor: A Novel

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 8
• Amazon: 2
• LibraryThing: 5

On a cold, rainy night, an aging bachelor named George Ticknor prepares to visit his childhood friend Prescott, a successful man who is now one of the leading intellectual lights of their generation. With a hastily baked pie in his hands, and a lifetime of guilt and insecurity weighing upon his soul, he sets out for the Prescotts’ dinner party–a party at which he’d just as soon never arrive. Distantly inspired by the real-life friendship between the great historian William Hickling Prescott and his biographer, Ticknor is a witty, fantastical study of resentment; and a biting history of a one-sided friendship.

4 ) All Our Happy Days Are Stupid

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 6
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 7

Two couples, each with a twelve-year-old child, travel to Paris; within a few moments of discovering each other in a crowd, one of their children disappears. A day later, one of the mothers disappears, too. The story that follows is a wonderfully strange, beautifully composed examination of happiness and desperation, complete with a man in a bear suit, a teen pop star, and eight really excellent songs. Sheila Heti’s debut play was first commissioned in 2001, for a feminist theater company that never ended up staging it. Its turbulent creation became the backdrop of Heti’s last novel, How Should a Person Be?, which was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and the New Yorker–and now the play itself can be revealed at last. With new introductions by Sheila Heti and director Jordan Tannahill, All Our Happy Days Are Stupid offers a novel’s worth of wisdom and humor, of wild hope and dreamlike confrontations, and page after page of unforgettable lines. Seen until now only by a lucky few, its publication is a cause for celebration.

3 ) We Need a Horse

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 2
• Amazon: 6
• LibraryThing: 3

A speckled horse wonders why he was made a horse. Can the sassy sheep, who claims to be a good tennis player, help him find understanding? And wait a minute: How can that sheep even play tennis if she doesn’t have hands? Perhaps the bright light holds answers. Or the talking apple. Or the singing grass. We Need a Horse, the first children’s book from author Sheila Heti and painter Clare Rojas, asks big questions with a gentle hand. We Need a Horse is a timeless book for quiet moods, and makes especially good reading for anyone who likes to ask “Why?”

2 ) Motherhood

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 3
• Amazon: 2
• LibraryThing: 2

From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”—Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home. Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.

1 ) Women in Clothes

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 1
• Amazon: 4
• LibraryThing: 1

Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations. Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us. Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women’s style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed.

Sheila Heti’s Best Books

Sheila Heti Review Website Bibliography Rankings