100 books like The Girl With All the Gifts

A friend insisted I borrow The Hot Zone from him. I explained I wasn't fond of nonfiction books, but he told me to trust him and that the book read like a real-life thriller. I gave it a try and couldn't put the story down.

I read this 25 years before Covid. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I remember thinking, "Oh my God, the Hot Zone has gone global." With every turn of the page, I kept telling myself, "This can't be real." Not only was it all true, but it was exciting. And terrifying. That icky feeling stuck with me.

When I write, I do my best to use the five senses to create the perfect atmosphere.

It doesn’t hurt to be a goddess—even a minor goddess—that is, unless you are condemned to live alone on an enchanted island for eternity. I love the magic and herbology woven into Circe's character. (I love anything that has to do with harnessing nature’s powerful, innate wisdom.)

Circe’s suffering at the hands of gods and men is as intense as if she were a human woman. Yet she is immortal. Is there no end to it? Thankfully, even a goddess can grow. 

This book is a fantastic collection of short stories about the Zombie Apocalypse. Some of the stories broach the subject of corruption, which enabled a local epidemic to spread globally.

I first read this book in 2006 with an “imagine if…..” frame of mind, but I watched world events unfold in 2020 from the perspective of “life imitating art.” I loved the author’s conversational style of storytelling and the believable characters he described. There are no hardcore action heroes, just regular people.

An angel and a demon work together to stop the antichrist from destroying the world. Simple enough. But things get off to a rocky start when they spend the first eleven years monitoring the wrong child.

I initially read this book on vacation, and while I don’t remember much about the trip itself, I remember the book! An otherwise-normal pre-teen with the power to shape reality takes this story to appropriate (and absurd) extremes, but at its core, it’s a narrative about good and evil, human nature, and free will—and it approaches these themes with sincerity, nuance, and care.

Come for the laughs, stay for the laughs…and for the profound reflection on humanity.

Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” absolutely belongs on this list—not because the children appear to be strange or unsettling, but because they are hauntingly, terrifyingly normal.

With cheerily objective prose, Jackson captures a gathering of friends and families on a single morning where the children play and laugh until it’s time to participate in the community’s horrifying annual tradition. I don’t want to spoil the story by saying more, but I promise, this is a must-read for more than shock value. Nature versus nurture, indeed. 

Legends are made of powerful stuff, and nothing has greater power than a total flip in perspective. I still recall the gut-punch end to this book, though it’s been decades since I read it. 

Robert Neville is a vampire hunter by day and a tormented man by night. As seemingly the only living human in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Robert faces depression, isolation, alcoholism, and his undead neighbor, Ben Cortman, who appears outside Robert’s front door each night chanting, "Come out, Neville."

But when Robert is finally captured, and the truth of his situation is revealed, he gets a good look at the world through the eyes of the undead and is forced to ask himself, who am I? What have I become? 

The recent Octavia Butler renaissance means that the book needs no introduction. It remains a prescient, gripping, ominous, yet inspiring narrative that transports us into a future ravaged by climate change and neo-fascism.

The book is ruthlessly brutal in its account of what a collapse trajectory would look like in a future “United States” (existing in name and memory only). It anticipated a Trump-like figure coming to power well before this was remotely considered by mainstream American political scientists.

While dark, the book is also inspiring in that it shows how the breakdown of our current world could seed the emergence of new movements of mutual aid, solidarity, and earth-based spiritualities. 

The world of The Hunger Games is eerily similar to our own, making readers think about “just war” and the spectacle of violence through the eyes of a 16-year-old girl. While Katniss Everdeen is a teenager, I still pick up this book (more than) annually, and each time I revisit it, I come away with new insight into the real world.

Katniss is strong, caring, and resilient in the face of all the challenges of her environment. As an adult, I can learn from her strengths and even from her flaws. She inspires me to watch the world around me with a careful eye, to understand how the powers that be shape my experiences, and ultimately, to always watch out for my fellow human beings.

At a whopping 1,152 pages, Stephen King’s The Stand was just too much to capture in a single movie.

That’s why, in 1994, CBS adapted it across four, ninety-minute episodes of a limited run “mini-series” (a fancy way of saying “a really long movie”). In all fairness, it had a great cast and was better than it had any right to be, and was far more enjoyable than CBS’s 2020 attempt at a do-over.

But even with a total six-hour runtime, it couldn’t capture all the story, heart, and nuance that made the book so incredible. It’s a feat to read, one I did to pass the time when bored in school, and one I will surely do again in the future.

Call me weird. I’m not a fan of series books. Unless, that is, they’re written by Nicholas Sansbury Smith. The problem with a book series for me is that I get bored of the same idea book after book after…zzzzzz. But when someone writing a book series is constantly bringing new ideas to the table, it keeps me reading. Couple that with characters we care about, and a heavy focus on moving the plot forward, and I’ll finish a book in no time and be eager to read the next one. This, my friends, is the first book in one of those series.