90 books like Edge of the Breach

H.G. Wells delivers an astonishing tale of space invaders from Mars, with breathtaking scenes of monstrously huge three-legged walking machines terrorizing the populace of London and its surrounds. For sheer imagery, few science fiction stories before or since have come close to its gripping, real-world feel.

The story is told by an unnamed protagonist who goes on an odyssey in ravaged London as towering alien war machines chase, kill, or capture fleeing citizens in chaotic scenes of panic and fear. That fear sent chills along my spine on rereading this classic recently.

Notable were touching humanistic scenes with Dr. Ogilvy, an astronomer who leads an ill-fated attempt at truce-making, and a defeated soldier whose counterattack with artillery failed horribly.

As an editor, I don’t really get much time to read for fun. The ASoIF series had come highly recommended to me, and I was captivated. The cast is large, but I found it easy to keep track of who was who and part of what house. It also helped that there is a “dramatis personae” in the back of the book, which I referred to a few times.

I loved the idea of Ned Stark as a protagonist - not your young adventurer, but a father who gets wrapped up in a mystery. Being presented with different points of view and then figuring out how they all would come together was very engaging. As an author who likes to utilize big casts, this was a great help in influencing how I structure my own writing.

When The Expanse series hit television, a literary ripple spread through my reading circles; “Oh, if you think the TV show is good, you gotta read the books!” From the opening scene of Julie Mao hiding in a locker of a spaceship as her friends are tossed out the airlock by pirates, this book throws the reader into a fully formed universe of our solar system in the near future. 

As an author, I am very hardened to weak MacGuffins, the central plot device around which the narrative turns. When I unraveled the MacGuffin of Leviathan Wakes, I wanted to fall down and chant, “I am not worthy!” It really was genius. It permanently raised my standards as an author.

I read this book on its release, and it blew me away. I’d always been a SciFi fan, but this was the first time I’d read an ‘alternative history’ book with science fiction leanings. It took a historical event, like WWII, and threw an invasion into it.

I love ‘what if’ scenarios. Most first contact books look at aliens arriving on a united Earth, but what if extraterrestrials arrived at a point where the world was most divided? It was my first time reading a book with multiple character perspectives. What did this invasion look like from an Allied or Axis perspective? How did it differ from the soldier to the civilian? This was a form of writing that became heavily influential to my writing.

John is a teenager who is starting to work in his family’s business, which is a mortuary. He is concerned about how much he enjoys being around death, and worries that he might be a sociopath. His concerns take a back seat when a murdering demon comes to town and John’s the only one who seems to know what is happening. A surprisingly warm and engaging book, given the subject matter. It’s also been made into a film.

Maxim Jakubowski is a staple in the crime, thriller, and writing world. Also known as an editor. But this book was a wonderful revelation. A female assassin–which I’m very partial to–and a somewhat perverse love story.

What I like about the main protagonist, Cornelia, is how different she is from anyone portrayed as ‘normal’ in the book. It does buy into my view that someone who is a killer can’t be wired the same way as someone who isn’t. There’s a bleak message in this book, which I’m not going to lie about and I love it. Dark, dark, and more dark. Brilliant!

Everyone loves a bastard, and Pinkie, the hero of Brighton Rock, is such an awful bastard. He doesn’t like his friends, hates his girlfriend, and is driven by a pathetically brittle ego that can never be satisfied. But it’s the fact he’s so hopelessly trapped in the prison of his own angry, petty horizons that makes me love him. I love a doomed character.

When an author can make you know, it’s all going to end badly and still make you hope it won’t? That’s magic. I love it when I’m reading books that I can feel playing with my emotions but I’m enjoying it so much I don’t care. Pinkie is a bastard, and he sort of knows it, when it comes to the crunch, and he goes out like a coward, I can’t help but wish he’d managed to pull it off.

Portals, portals everywhere in this story. You get a portal, I get portal, even he gets one. Okay, not really, the MC does start using them a fair bit later on, but wow, this story gripped me.

That said, it might not be for everyone. The world is imaginative and vibrant, but the MC is slightly sociopathic. If you can ignore that, though, then you are definitely in for a ride. I know I was.

Okay, it’s not told by a liar, but it is a fascinating nonfiction deep dive into psychopaths, how many there are, what makes someone a psychopath, the impact it can have on coming across one, and so much more. This is a subject that I can’t seem to get enough of–perhaps because I’m a really bad liar! I couldn’t put it down, and after reading the book, I bought the audiobook version, too. 

Psychopaths realize pretty early on in their lives that they aren’t like other people and have to find ways to pretend to be. It’s not that they’re bad people. It’s just that they think differently from most of the population, so they learn early on to disguise that by studying and mimicking everyone else. Their ‘otherness’ fascinates me, I suppose not least because I’m quite an intuitive, emotional person.

The previous four books on my list have been pretty dark. “Heavy,” I guess, is relative. I find a lot of humor in them and, ultimately, that’s why I either have re-read them or plan to. This one isn’t as heavy on the violence as the previous ones. Often cited as a good example of dry British humor, written by a former bus driver, it’s the story of two fence-builders who travel the English and Scottish countryside in a caravan erecting fences. However, it seems like every time they’re on a job, they end up accidentally murdering someone. Rather than getting bogged down by things like remorse or guilt, they are much more interested in covering it up and saving their backs. One of them is obsessed with heavy metal and his hair. It’s a very weird and satisfying book.