Good Behaviour

by Gallix/François

Like Keane, Ishiguro is fascinated by how rigid social codes become a prison rather than a protection—his butler Stevens is trapped by the same suffocating decorum that binds Aroon. Both novels use restrained, elegant prose to reveal the emotional devastation lurking beneath impeccable surfaces, and both protagonists are ultimately undone by their inability to break free from the rules that have defined them.

by Katherine Sutcliffe

This is my surprise pick for you—it's a contemporary Argentine novel that operates in a completely different register, yet shares Keane's interest in how family secrets corrode from within. Where Good Behaviour uses elegant irony, Schweblin uses fragmented, dreamlike narration to create unease, but both explore how the things families refuse to say aloud become more powerful than any spoken truth.

by David Gilmour

Published in 1958, this novel shares Keane's elegiac tone about aristocratic decline—both authors watch their characters navigate a world where old hierarchies are crumbling. Lampedusa's Prince Salina has the same weary intelligence as Keane's characters, and both books treat the death of an entire social order with a kind of mournful grace rather than melodrama.

by George Gissing

Waters captures that same suffocating atmosphere of post-war gentility—her characters are similarly trapped by what they're supposed to be rather than who they are. Where Keane uses Anglo-Irish country house decay, Waters uses 1920s suburban London, but both explore how desire and jealousy explode beneath the surface of "proper" domestic life with devastating consequences.

by Ford Madox Ford

Ford's tetralogy (I'm recommending the first volume) is obsessed with the same question that haunts Keane: how do people survive when the social codes they've built their lives around become meaningless? Both authors write about the English/Anglo-Irish gentry with a mixture of affection and sharp critique, and both understand that good behaviour is often just another form of self-destruction.