Fans pick 100 books like Behind the Bars

Living has all the best ingredients for an epic slow-burn romance: a shocking first encounter, two very different heroines from completely different worlds, a beautiful friendship that unfolds with care and heartwarming tenderness, and a simmering layer of tense attraction that will keep you turning the pages as fast you can to see the burn finally burst into flames. It’s also a story that handles the topics of grief and depression with respect and a poignancy that makes this story difficult to forget. I love romances that focus on the growth of the individual characters as much as the development of their relationship with each other, and Living does a beautiful job at balancing both.

While the conversation around mental health still has a long way to go to be totally free of stigma, men’s mental health is especially in need of being more openly discussed without shame. When I read Some Sort of Happy, I was thrilled and grateful to find it features a hero struggling with anxiety and an OCD diagnosis. There is a lot of room for the romance genre to step up and show that the stereotypical view of what a ‘strong’ man looks like doesn’t line up with reality and that there are so many ways to be valid and worthy of love. Melanie Harlow does an amazing job at that in Some Sort of Happy, and she instantly became one of my favourite authors after I read this book.

After some challenges with reading the dialect, I became so intrigued by this heart-wrenching story of two teenage girls, one Trinidadian and one African-American, who come together unexpectedly in cold Minneapolis. I loved learning about their cultures, and I loved how they grew close despite their differences and supported each other through the crises of lost family and childhood cancer.

The language and pace beguiled me as a reader. The girls' viewpoints of their past and present worlds were engaging. I felt the heroism in each of them, one facing death, one trying to reunite with her family.

No other author captures the joy, longing, confusion, love, and heartbreak of the first few years of adulthood the way Kandi Steiner does. They don’t call her the Queen of Angst for nothing, and in Weightless, she showcases some of her best new adult romance skills to craft a story about stumbling your way into being a grown-up while learning to love yourself as you fall in love with someone else. The heroine of Weightless also struggles with body image issues, and Kandi Steiner doesn’t shy away from exploring the harsh realities of the way society and even the people we trust can reinforce our deepest insecurities. This was one of the first romance novels I read, and it led me to an enduring love for and appreciation of Kandi Steiner’s work.

Legions of regular folks have grown up with parents or caretakers who were emotionally immature or unskilled. These family-of-origin deficits may or may not have met the criteria for outright abuse but caused lasting emotional harm to the kids. I love that this book uses clear language and validates the reality of countless readers.

A guide like this book explains unhelpful familial behavior patterns and explores ways to liberate the reader from automatically repeating dysfunctional history. Book clubs are springing up worldwide about this book. It’s also valuable to me in defining emotionally immature parents not as bad people but as people who lack the insight and skills to provide an emotionally supportive and healthy home.

Changing maladaptive family-of-origin patterns is incredibly hard work, and this gentle guide is a great intro to understanding the past to evolve an emotionally healthier present and future.

Yet more dysfunctional families and tormented sibling relationships, but this book is funny as well as clever, and I loved the fractured relationships between Alice and Hanna, twins who have always been saint and sinner. Now the two women are adults, nothing has turned out as they expected in their lives and they struggle with each other as well as with their domineering mother and critical older brother. Some great family tension and well-written dialogue, and despite the subject matter, this isn’t a book that will leave you down-hearted.

Rosie is one of Australia’s most compelling young writers. Her book came out at the same time as mine, so my wife read it straight after my book. Afterward, she picked up my book and said: “You really are just a middle-class whinger.” Ok, it was said with a smile, but she had a point. Rosie’s parents were so much worse than mine—jaw-droppingly awful—yet it’s brilliant how Rosie shrugs off any urge for self-pity.

I absolutely love this book. The main characters, two teenage girls, who are total opposites, develop a friendship based on peer counseling together. They learn from each other and give each other comfort, advice, and more help on how to resolve their problems. It’s a great insight into what goes on in young adults’ lives. 

The author is a mom and clinician herself and based on clinical best practices has written a lovely rhyming book to help young children deal with boundaries and bullies in a way that is accessible for younger readers. Ideal for school, daycare, and clinical settings. As a parent of an empathic child, I found this book an easy way to introduce the concepts of self-worth and appropriate relationships. If you have a child that is experiencing bullying or needs to set boundaries at school, then this book is an excellent addition to your library.  

I’ve read this book about a dozen times in the past fifteen years, and I find new nuggets of wisdom with each visit. I was first convinced that I could overcome anxiety by reading Dr. Low’s strong conviction that there are no hopeless cases. He breaks down the root causes of mental health issues and describes cognitive-behavioral techniques for overcoming anger, negative judgments against oneself, fears, interpersonal conflicts, and many other ailments. His pithy sayings are easy to remember and have become the backbone of the self-help program Recovery International. Written in the 1950s, the examples and language can be somewhat dated – such as streetcars, elevator operators, and clotheslines – but his great love for his patients and his understanding of the human mind are timeless.