Here are 100 books that Child of My Heart fans have personally recommended if you like
Child of My Heart.
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As a goth chick from the American South, I’m obsessed with stories of old evil from the past finding its way into the present. I even live in a haunted house, a disintegrating Craftsman built in 1901. Our ghosts are very cozy, two cat-loving maiden ladies who were co-presidents of the local temperance society. We’ve given up on keeping liquor in our liquor cabinet; bottles cracking and leaking, glassware broken for no reason. And we’ve gotten so used to seeing and hearing their famous cat, Tom, we barely react anymore—a huge orange tabby tomcat who runs past our feet and jumps on the foot of our bed.
Reading this book made me stop writing my own Southern gothic ghost book in the middle, rethink it completely, and start over again from scratch, and I wasn’t even mad about it. It’s just that good. It’s about thirteen-year-old Jojo and his family—his much-loved and very much dying grandmother, his strong, silent, and protective grandfather, his wild child mother, Leonie, his baby sister, Kayla, who looks to Jojo to keep her safe, and his white father, Michael, who just got out of jail. Everybody has secrets, and everybody sees ghosts. This literary novel won the National Book Award, but I promise you, horror readers, it will scare you silly and break your heart.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2017
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017
SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW STATESMAN, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, TIME AND THE BBC
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
'This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare. A must' Margaret Atwood
'A powerfully…
I’ve always believed in magic, the kind that’s just around the corner, out of view. I loved books and libraries. So, it was no surprise that I became a teacher, and later, a poet and novelist. Now, as the author of four novels, I want my books to capture what I love best from poetry and teaching: beautiful, unexpected language, a touch of wonder, and themes that probe the big questions of life. A library shows up in most of my novels along with a bit of the fantastic.
Wow. The voice in this book takes my breath away. I’ve never read anything else quite like it.
There’s a plot full of adventure, tragedy, and healing, but mostly, there is Rueben Land and his sister Swede, two of the most compelling characters in literature. The story begins with a miracle when Rueben’s father commands his newly stillborn son to breathe.
Questions about miracles, hope, faith, and redemption pepper the story with no easy answers, again asking: What does it mean to be human? That’s a question all great literature grapples with.
When Israel Finch and Tommy Basca, the town bullies, break into the home of school caretaker Jeremiah Land, wielding a baseball bat and looking for trouble, they find more of it than even they expected. For seventeen-year-old Davey is sitting up in bed waiting for them with a Winchester rifle. His younger brother Reuben has seen their father perform miracles, but Jeremiah now seems as powerless to prevent Davey from being arrested for manslaughter, as he has always been to ease Reuben's daily spungy struggle to breathe. Nor does brave and brilliant nine-year-old Swede, obsessed as she is with the…
Susan Beckham Zurenda taught English for 33 years on the college level and at the high school level to AP students. Her debut novel, Bells for Eli(Mercer University Press, March 2020; paperback edition March 2021), has been selected the Gold Medal (first place) winner for Best First Book—Fiction in the 2021 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Awards), a Foreword Indie Book Award finalist, a Winter 2020 Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, a 2020 Notable Indie on Shelf Unbound, a 2020 finalist for American Book Fest Best Book Awards, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for 2021. She has won numerous regional awards for her short fiction. She lives in Spartanburg, SC.
In this exceptional story that I’ve read twice, Elizabeth Strout places a seemingly ordinary, though distant, mother and her shy teenage daughter in the provincial town of Shirley Falls, Maine, to create a stunning awakening in the daughter Amy and foster the admission of a long-hidden secret by Amy’s mother Isabelle. As much as Amy thinks her development is about her sexuality, it is more about forming a relationship with her lonely mother. After Amy learns her mother’s story, she learns her most important moment of identity has not been sexual initiation, but her self-acceptance. The relationship between mother and daughter fosters Amy’s coming of age.
From the Man Booker Prize longlisted author of My Name is Lucy Barton
Isabelle Goodrow has been living in self-imposed exile with her daughter Amy for 15 years. Shamed by her past and her affair with Amy's father she has submerged herself in the routine of her dead-end job and her unrequited love for her boss. But when Amy, frustrated by her quiet and unemotional mother, embarks on an illicit affair with her maths teacher, the disgrace intensifies the shame Isabelle feels about her own past.
Throughout one long, sweltering summer as the events of the small town ebb and…
I read and write to better understand people. Why do we do what we do, feel what we feel, hide what we hide? Any book that illuminates these questions and their answers draws me in. Reading and writing are ways that I can attempt to walk in someone else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes, expanding my own understanding of the world. Perhaps the books on this list will offer you the same opportunity.
Ava Winston likes her life of routine in Lexington, Kentucky. Then a tornado blows it away. Ava is safe in the basement, but when she emerges, only one corner of her home stands. Rather than crumbling under the loss, she feels a load lifted. Maybe something beyond the familiar is calling to her. Ava seizes the opportunity to find the owner of a suitcase that landed on her lawn during the storm. Meanwhile, Juniper urges her to rebuild, Ava’s employer doesn’t want her to quit, and her ex-husband invites her back into his life. Ava must be courageous if she’s…
"A loving coming-of-age story for women in mid-life. Brava!" -Adriana Trigiani, Author of The Good Left Undone
". . . captures the true meaning of resilience-something so many women strive to know in the depths of their inner-self." -Sister Robbie Pentecost, OSF former Executive Director of the New Opportunity School for Women
Ava Winston likes her life of routine in Lexington, Kentucky. Each day, she goes to the place she's worked for twenty years, then returns home. On Sundays, she has dinner with her daughter, Juniper. It's a little boring, but as Ava nears fifty-five, she deserves a bit of…
I am a forty-five-year career educator, sharing my classrooms with students from primary school through graduate programs in creative writing. What I love most in every classroom I enter is sharing the books and stories and poems I love with my students. The best days: when I’m reading one of my favorite parts of the book out loud to the group and I look up and they laugh or gasp, or I look up and see their eyes full of joy. If it’s my own work I’m reading from, all the better!
Ah, these juvenile narrators: they think they know it all. Lucille Odem has it all figured out. She can fix her broken family and heal her parent’s broken hearts—because of course she can. For me, the pleasure of a great young adult narrator is watching as even the smartest of these smarty pants comes to learn that we all have blind spots and that it’s often the things we can’t see or don’t know that are the most important part of the equation. What a sweet book this is.
At the age of seventeen, Lucille Odom finds herself in the middle of an unexpected domestic crisis. As she helps guide her family through its discontent, Lucille discovers in herself a woman rich in wisdom, rich in humor, and rich in love.
As an author, I write both serious nonfiction and literary fiction. As a journalist, I have lifelong associations with The Atlanticand the Washington Monthly.I didn’t plan it, but four of my nonfiction books make an extended argument for the revival of optimism as intellectually respectable. A Moment on the Earth(1995) argued environmental trends other than greenhouse gases actually are positive, The Progress Paradox(2003) asserted material standards will keep rising but that won’t make people any happier, Sonic Boom (2009), published during the despair of the Great Recession, said the global economy would bounce back and It’s Better Than It Looks (2018) found the situation objectivity good on most major issues.
Steinbeck is one of my favorite novelists (Willa Cather, the other) but boy did he run off the rails with this, his final book.
He describes an American society locked in irreversible decline, with everything getting worse and our polity doomed. Sixty years later the United States remains the envy of the world and almost every America today lives better materially, with more freedom and security, than almost everyone of 1961.
The novel is a reminder of the extent to which ideological negativity is ubiquitous in literature.
The Nobel committee claimed that while giving John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature that he had "resumed his place as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased feel for what is authentically American" with The Winter of Our Discontent.The main character of Steinbeck's final book, Ethan Allen Hawley, is a clerk at a grocery shop that his ancestors formerly ran. Ethan's wife is restless now that he is no longer a member of Long Island's aristocratic society, and his teenagers are pining for the enticing material comforts he is unable to supply. Then, one day, in…
I am an author who also penned a novel during the pandemic, with a timeline that stretched into the first six months of the pandemic–against the advice of my agent and the publishing industry at large. I know many authors choose not to write about intense political and social happenings, but that “life will never be the same again” feeling was something I couldn’t avoid. The pandemic threw people together and kept us apart at the same time. I was intensely interested in its incubator effect as well as the silo aspect quarantining had on all of our lives.
The opening of this book knocked me out, and I was hooked.
I usually veer toward literary, slower, familial dramas, but this book combined what I love in literary family dynamics with the frightening premise of an inexplicable disaster occurring in the outside world. The suspicion we were quick to possess about others during the early days of the pandemic is heightened to a new level with two couples pitted against each other, one preoccupied with the welfare and antics of their children.
I loved the construct that had even spouses second-guessing each other. The intensity of the situation brought out the worst and eventually the better sides of all the characters, a phenomenon that resonated as I read this book during the first year of the pandemic, at the same time rioters invaded our nation’s capital.
Ever since we were kids, we associated the summer with voracious reading. We loved competing in those Summer Reading Challenges to see who could read the most while school was out. (Lauren often won; Rachel was a slower but equally enthusiastic reader.) As we grew up, we realized that a specific type of book exists that aligns with the summer mood–like a bikini, but make it literature. Summer reads can be emotional but not too heavy and contain moments of sadness without dragging us into the abyss. (For winter, we recommend the collected works of the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness.)
We both devoured Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s last book, Fleishman Is in Trouble, and the wonderful TV adaptation of the same name. So, when we saw that she was writing another one, we both not only hit the preorder button but reached out to her publisher to get advanced reader copies. The book doesn’t come out until July 9. Still, we’ve both already read it and can confidently say it’s a delightful summer read about a wealthy Jewish family, the Fletchers, grappling with grief, repressed trauma, and the sudden slipping away of their family fortune.
The book grabs you instantly with a violent kidnapping and then jumps forward and back in time to explore the psyches of each of the Fletcher children as they process what has become of their family in the wake of their grandmother’s death. And wait until you discover what the “Long Island Compromise” is.
'Everything I was dreaming it would be - shocking, tender, profound and delicious' EMILY MAITLIS
'Both enjoyable and funny while also substantive and profound' CATHY RENTZENBRINK
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble comes Long Island Compromise, a darkly exhilarating novel about an American family and its inheritance - the safety and wealth that they fought for, and the precarity of their survival that is their legacy.
In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of the nicest part of Long Island. He is brutalised, held for…
Atmosphere can play a critical role in crime fiction, and I always find the most satisfying and memorable stories convey a strong sense of place. My own mysteries are set in the Thousand Islands, where many residents live in island homes built by gilded age titans of industry, and this setting is integral to Death in the Family and the entire Shana Merchant series. For twenty years I’ve been a regular visitor to the area, which extends from Upstate New York to Ontario, Canada. The human dangers in my books may be imagined, but the remote and rugged nature of the region always contributes to my contemporary, Agatha Christie-style plots.
This is an evocative mystery with not one but two atmospheric settings: Long Island’s Suffolk County, and Ireland’s County Clare. When an Irish national is found dead on a Long Island beach, Detective Maggie D’arcy’s planned vacation to Ireland becomes a tense investigation into the mysterious victim’s death, and a fight to keep her young daughter safe both abroad and back at home. I found A Distant Grave to be deeply chilling and impossible to put down.
In the follow up to the critically acclaimed The Mountains Wild, Detective Maggie D'arcy tackles another intricate case that bridges Long Island and Ireland in A Distant Grave.
Long Island homicide detective Maggie D'arcy and her teenage daughter, Lilly, are still recovering from the events of last fall when a strange new case demands Maggie's attention. The body of an unidentified Irish national turns up in a wealthy Long Island beach community and with little to go on but the scars on his back, Maggie once again teams up with Garda detectives in Ireland to find out who the man…
I have always loved historical fiction as a reader, but my passion to write it caught fire during the years I lived in Venice, Italy, when I discovered the curious institution of the ballot boy within the Byzantine complexities of the thousand-year Venetian Republic. Since ballot boys were randomly chosen over a period of six hundred years, choosing my particular Doge and ballot boy required a survey of the entire field before I circled in on Venice, 1368, IMHO the peak brilliance of that maritime empire. It is a peculiarity of history that the names of all 130 doges of Venice are recorded, but none of their ballot boys are mentioned. The challenge was irresistible.
First published in 1980, Gaywyck was the first historical gay gothic romance. Virga, whose day job for forty years was as photo editor, turns his extraordinary eye on turn-of-the-last century New York.
The tangled lives, dark secrets, and mad love – all conventions of the romance genre – are stood on their heads in this reimagining. “I realized genre has no gender,” Virga says, and set about cannily reversing roles and inverting tropes to fashion a puzzle wrapped in an enigma of requited and unrequited love.
Gaywyck stands the test of time and remains a modern classic.
Gaywyck is the first gay Gothic novel. Long out of print, this classic proved that genre knows no gender. Young, innocent Robert Whyte enters a Jane-Eyre world of secrets and deceptions when he is hired to catalog the vast library at Gaywyck, a mysterious ancestral mansion on Long Island, where he falls in love with its handsome and melancholy owner, Donough Gaylord. Robert's unconditional love is challenged by hidden evil lurking in the shadowy past crammed with dark sexual secrets sowing murder, blackmail, and mayhem in the great romantic tradition. As Armisted Maupin urged, “Read the son of a bitch!…
I am the author of the cozy mystery series Samantha Davies Mysteries. Before beginning to write my series, I read hundreds of cozies and loved each one, especially those featuring a small-town setting, an amateur sleuth, and a dog. Since I live in a small upstate New York town, am married to a retired state trooper, and am the mom to a lovable dachshund, what better than to feature all this in a cozy mystery series. So, the Samantha Davies Mystery series was born.
“It’s game on when the longtime organizer of the annual Game Supper is murdered right in front of the diners. Readers who enjoy mysteries set in colorful rural settings will love Game Over at Guild Hall.” —Sue Ann Jaffarian, author of the Odelia Grey and Ghost of Granny Apples mysteries
In rural Vermont, where hunting and trapping are a way of life, nothing is bigger than the annual wild game supper at Guild Hall. Stella can’t wait to sample the exotic dishes prepared by her neighbors, but when the longtime organizer of the supper falls dead, a victim of poisoning,…
