57 books like A Stolen Life

The Couple Next Door is an addictive page-turner. It’s clever and creative, and nearly every chapter ends with a cliffhanger that practically requires you to keep reading.

Lapena pulls you into the frenzied search for the missing baby while casting doubt onto nearly every character. The use of multiple points of view ratchets up the tension. Entertaining and fast-paced, this is perfect as a beach read. Bonus points as this is a debut novel!

This book is both absolutely gorgeous and deeply disturbing.

The premise is simple: in an FBI interview, a young woman recounts the horrific ordeal she’s survived as a member of a serial killer’s “garden” of kidnapped victims. The reading experience is considerably more complex. Much of the story is told in flashbacks, allowing the reader to explore Maya’s experience in the Garden; that’s then balanced with her FBI interview, filling in blanks and establishing her as an almost-reliable narrator.

The dual timeline—one of my favorite devices to read and write—is handled brilliantly, and Hutchinson successfully achieves a formidable tightrope act, balancing the brutality of torture and murder with an elegant and refined narrative.

Her darkness is graceful—but it’s still darkness. 

I love this book because it asks more questions than it answers.

Picoult’s approach is always about allowing the reader to enter deeply into what her characters are experiencing, and she handles the issue of kidnapping with the same grace and sensitivity she’s used in approaching other difficult and occasionally taboo subjects.

As Delia plans her wedding, she is plagued by flashbacks of a life she can't recall. What happens when you find out you aren’t who you thought you were? How do you make sense of the people you love and trust morphing into something more sinister? How can you reach for what you’ve always wanted when it means losing something else?

You’ll think about all this—and more—for a long time after you’ve closed the book.

I don’t often read YA novels, so I’m grateful to the friend who insisted I read this one.

Imagine picking up a milk carton imprinted with images of missing children—and seeing your own face there. This story is written with a kind of hectic immediacy through the eyes of 15-year-old Janie Johnson, who now must find out who she really is. Confronted, her parents share what they believe to be her story: she is really their grandchild, the child of their long-missing daughter who disappeared into a cult.

 As it turns out, even the story within the story offers another distortion. (The only caveat I’ll add is that this book is a little dated, clearly written before #metoo, and the reader may experience some slight discomfort in that area.)

There is now a series of novels about this protagonist.  

Do children always tell the truth?

With so many perspectives and so many puzzles, this thriller had me excited. The chapters from the child's perspective, in particular, stuck with me. I loved how you understood the story through a child's eyes. The naïve narrative makes the worst things particularly horrific. And all without bloodshed!

I can only heartily recommend this page-turner of my German author colleague, which was even made into a series by Netflix.

Starting in the 1970s, several dozen Japanese civilians – everyday people – were abducted by North Korean commandos and sent to detention centers known as Invitation-Only Zones, where the Kim regime attempted to brainwash and turn them into spies in their service. When that failed, the abductees were turned into teachers instead, to teach North Korean agents how to live undercover in Japanese society. It’s the kind of thing so crazy a lot of people don’t even believe it can be true – Kim Jong-Il only admitted to some of the abductions in 2002, and even then only to thirteen of them – and Boynton tells it meticulously and captivatingly.

This book is an incredible story of the behind-the-scenes efforts to locate and free the 276 young Nigerian [Chibok] schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014, a kidnapping which attracted worldwide media attention. 

It’s a story of 2 tales: first, of the incredible courage and Christian faith of those young girls, which in many cases, sustained them, keeping them alive physically, psychologically, and spiritually as they underwent immense hardships and tortures. Second, it’s a tale of two other heroes, a Nigerian lawyer, Zanna Mustapha, and a Swiss diplomat, Pascal Holiger, who worked tirelessly over many years to free many of the hostages. 

A gripping read about Nigeria, Christian faith, hostage negotiation, terrorism, and redemption.

I first read H.P. Lovecraft when I was in college. His Cthulhu Mythos instantly grabbed my imagination. Lovecraft was a large part of the reason I started writing horror. Even back then, his disdain for foreigners and Black people and anyone else whose ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower, the way his did, was apparent. In recent years, Lovecraft’s racism has become a hot topic. That’s why I like this book: because it urns the usual Lovecraft trope of evil monsters from another dimension on its head by bringing the monsters closer to home, in the form of the horrors of the Jim Crow era. 

This book is haunting, and different from other missing child stories in that the child returns home early in the story.

And Then She Was Gone is about the healing journey of the victim and family, with a captivating mystery at its core. It’s intensely emotional, thought-provoking, and deeply believable. The changing points of view are well done, and each character stands on their own.

The spiritual worldview so beautifully rendered in Black Elk Speaks reflects the landscape of the North American Great Plains.

The Four Winds emanate from the cardinal points of the compass, and above is Father Sky and below is Mother Earth all united in one Great Spirit. The spiritual worldview of the Ojibwa reflects the landscape of the woodlands surrounding the Great Lakes. It’s an animate, shape-shifting world of the Trickster/Culture Hero Nanabushu and Wendigo, the cannibal spirit of the hard and lean winter months.

In this magical-realist novel, Louise Erdrich, a writer of Ojibwa ancestry, weaves together the star-crossed lives of her fictional characters with the fluid human and animal (and animal-human) characters of the traditional Ojibwa worldview. Erdrich thus breathes new life into the Old World of the North Woods and brings that Old World to bear on the New.