Fans pick 100 books like Animal Dreams

Continuing with the Gothic theme, I have to mention one of my all-time favorite books. The estate of Manderley is almost another character in this novel, looming large over the story along with the legacy of its dead mistress. And the community poses an immediate threat to the book’s unnamed narrator, the new wife of the estate’s owner, when she comes in as an outsider and gets the cold shoulder from Manderley’s staff. Her desperate attempts to win everybody over lead to some gloriously nail-biting moments.

But what I adore about this novel is how it slowly reveals that the community’s loyalties are not what they seem. Even the significance of rooms and objects in the house–like Rebecca’s writing desk or the sound of the sea from a particular window–changes as the story unfolds.

In 1953, a working-class Jewish couple from Brooklyn was executed for allegedly selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Their two young children were orphaned. E. L. Doctorow’s novel about the Rosenbergs is an excruciating examination of these events from the fictionalized perspective of one of those children. Daniel’s point of view—naïve, angry, traumatized—brilliantly illustrates the absurdity and cruelty of American culture when it turns against those who, for reasons of class, race, or religion, have never been fully included in it. I’ve read it a dozen times and still find myself sobbing at the realization of how all the country’s history, all its dreams and delusions about itself and its destiny, were stacked up against this poor pair of nobodies. Their real crime lay in demanding that the United States live up to its ideals, something it has never been able to do.

I’ve never read a book as quickly as I read this one. Our eponymous lead character is quirky and odd, but the story is written with so much empathy, depth, and humor that I was rooting for her from the start.

I loved how the relationship between Eleanor and Raymond plays out and avoids the predictable ‘boy meets girl’ ending. It doesn’t surprise me that the book is ‘in development’ as a movie, as the story plays out like a film when you read it. Definitely read this one first before you see the film! (It probably won’t take long as I couldn’t put this book down.)

This book made me fall in love with Puglia, the hot, dusty “heel of the boot” with its lemons, olives, and cactus, its boxy farmhouses. Not that the story, bouncing from Paris to New York to a long-gone Rome, doesn’t deliver—the narrator, Alina, talks about a family secret passed from woman to woman, disintegrating memories, a past she must understand before the movers arrive and the house with its mural of a naked woman painted on a patio wall is no longer theirs. Present and past, the known and the unknown combine, and all of it is tied to alluring, sensual Puglia. As a storyteller, Marciano demands your attention, painting the life story of a family whose Italy is unlike the one you think you know.

Few things put me off more in a novel than a protagonist I can’t relate to. With this book, though, it’s precisely the nuance of the unreliability of Charity—the female main character—that conquered me. Her bossy yet loving attitude toward her husband, children, and friends worked like a magnet. I was fascinated by her continuous shifts to and fro the ideal woman and the nightmare of a wife.

In this novel, I admired Stegner’s ability to give depth to his characters—Charity, in particular. Under different circumstances (a different story or writing style), her slap-me-across-the-face attitude might have made me throw the book across the room. Instead, it firmly sits on my bookshelf, ready to be read again in the coming future.

This book is one of my favorite mysteries of all time. It addresses one of the great unsolved mysteries in English history: Did Richard III kill the princes in the tower? Tey’s sleuth, Alan Grant, is a dogged investigator, and, in the hospital with a broken leg, he treats this historical mystery like a contemporary murder. His step-by-step investigation pulled me in and convinced me that Richard Plantagenet has been mistreated by history.

Miss Tey is so convincing that she inspired me to write the (very innocent) ghost of Richard III into one of my own mystery novels after the monarch’s body was found under a Midlands car park in 2012.

Written and set in the 1950s, this is the 4th in the Felse detective series.

Peters is more famous for the Cadfael mysteries, with their wonderful depiction of England at the time of the civil war between Stephen and Maud. However, the Cadfael books need to be read in order and the first is far more successful in the BBC adaptation.

Dated in some ways, and with prose that’s functional rather than beautiful, Peters has a brilliant eye for capturing a period. The clever trail of clues means it’s possible to work out the mystery so the reveal is satisfying and doesn’t cheat the reader.

If you like Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (the 1974 film is dated but still brilliant), you’ll probably enjoy this too.

Vivid, surprising, and psychologically astute, The Wicked Girls stands out among a plethora of books with a similar premise.

There are no easy answers or pat solutions here. This is a book that asks interesting questions and offers a range of answers, through the characters, for readers to ponder. On the police procedural side, Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories treads a similar line, but Marwood’s protagonist is a journalist, which offers a less common ‘way in’ to the investigation along with a less familiar set of challenges.
[If you love Children’s fiction, check out the phenomenal Diana Wynne Jones’ Eight Days of Luke to match this theme (then, if you love it, Charmed Life and Howl’s Moving Castle), plus Jenny Nimmo’s The Rinaldi Ring and Berlie Doherty’s White Peak Farm.]

Yes, I know that Kennedy didn’t really write the book but it was meaningful to me when I was younger as it speaks to moral courage in the political arena–a trait I find often lacking in today’s America.

This book reminds me that people can speak truth to power, can do the right thing, and do so at personal risk. This is a book that more of our US politicians should read or re-read as a reminder.

I loved this book because Brene is the real deal. This book helped me know what qualities I needed to step up and own my full self–as an authentic, real-deal leader. When I didn’t feel confident during my career pause and after my burnout, I didn’t know what to do differently, let alone how to do it.

Through Brene’s storytelling and research, I felt inspired again. I wanted to step into my courageous self because I knew I was capable. Brene helped me get there in this book (and still does with her podcast under the same name!).