Fans pick 81 books like Fugitive Moon

Another darkly comic thriller that is stunningly original and filled with cinema-worthy characters.

The book opens when an African American Marine meets a ghastly end inside a bolted-shut Mercedes that is filled with deadly cobras. Two cops arrive at the scene, but only one survives the ordeal. Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a devout Buddhist, watches his partner die from a cobra bite and vows revenge.

He teams up with an American FBI agent brought in to work the case. They chase a killer through the atmospheric streets of Bangkok, navigating through a world of illicit drugs, colorful prostitutes, and infinite corruption. Sonchai is a complex protagonist, filled with wry humor and a dogged determination that the reader will admire all the way to its intriguing end.

Former US Senator, Augie Sangiamo, runs a political consulting company in Philadelphia, but his candidates are floundering.

When Augie agrees to take some illegal campaign donations from a local oil company, he gets his candidates within striking distance of victory, but this attracts the attention of the D.A., who wants Augie back in prison. However, the wily senator still has a few tricks up his sleeve. 

The dialogue is witty, the story filled with larger-than-life characters, and there’s a clever twist that sees the Philly goombahs pull a fast one on the feds. Ultimately, it’s a heartwarming tale of an old-time pol getting bailed out by his streetwise driver, whose paying Augie back for getting his father a job decades ago, an act that ensured Joey had a happy childhood.

With some similarities to Catch 22, The Jukebox Queen of Malta follows American intelligence officer, Rocco Raven, when he arrives in Malta as part of I-3, “the intelligence inside Intelligence.”

Malta’s a chaotic and desperate place, with bombs falling day and night because the Germans are trying to crush the Maltese into submission. Rocco falls for the ethereal Melita, who delivers jukeboxes to local restaurants. She embodies the spirit of Maltese people, who, astonishingly, put on a brave face as their world crumbles.

It’s a mesmerizing tale of love amidst war, a story about the resiliency of the human spirit. The book is a profoundly moving exploration of the redemptive power of love even when the world is spinning out of control around you.

A laugh-out-loud funny book about an American scam artist looking for marks on the streets of Prague.

Posing as a successful Hollywood screenwriter, Nix swindles female tourists, but ends up stealing from the wrong woman as it attracts the attention of the woman’s fiancé, a local detective, whose soon sets his sight on Nix. When Nix spots a sultry young woman at the train station, he thinks he’s found his next victim, but she leads him on, then cleans him out. 

Thinking the two could be an unbeatable pair together, Nix tracks Monika down, but accidentally kills her pimp. The two team up, and Monika draws Nix deep into her web of lies. The book is filled with clever dialogue and two nihilistic characters, who will shock, fascinate, and entertain.

Psychiatric medications are prescribed more judiciously than when my sister first took them, but still many people find them intolerable.

Bergner first encountered mental illness when his younger brother Bob was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after dancing on a ferry to the rhythm of the ocean. Sadly, his parents believed that dancing was a symptom to be eliminated with higher doses of lithium.

Bergner finds two others to share their experiences: a roller derby star turned peer counselor, who heard voices since childhood; and a lawyer who feels doomed to failure despite his achievements in important cases. All three discontinue medication, two of them successfully.

Interspersed with their stories is a short history of psychiatry with a focus on the limitations of neuroscience and serious missteps in psychopharmacology.

I absolutely love reading this book to my son. No matter how many times we read it, he keeps asking for us to read it again! He went through a phase (pun intended!) where he was obsessed with the moon and wanted to learn all about it.

This book is educational and teaches kids about the moon, but it is still a fun and engaging read with adorable illustrations. 

As explorers carrying cameras, the Gemini and Apollo astronauts (1965-72) were like the pioneer photographers of the 19th century who, with their cameras, responded to the unknowns of the American West. These astronauts, however, were responding to the new and unexplored by photographing their experiences inside their spacecraft and outside in the vacuum of space. During the late 90s the photographer Michael Light gained access to NASA’s Apollo-era photo archive and made the first drum-scanned digital files from perfect copies of the original flight films. Light’s artful editing and juxtaposition of superbly reproduced full-page black and white, and color images creates a cinematic-like journey to the moon and back. In the annals of published space photography, there are very few well-designed books as timeless.

The magical tale, Music for Mister Moon, is about a little girl named Harriet, who likes to be called Hank. She loves nothing more than to play her cello, alone. When her parents suggest how wonderful it would be to play in a big orchestra someday, she retreats into her room playing her cello. When the owl hoots outside her window she loses her temper and throws a teacup. And so begins her imaginative journey that tickles the reader's imagination. On Hank’s adventure with Mr. Moon, they encounter kind and thoughtful animals with a profound understanding of acceptance and giving. Each time I read this book, I can almost hear the music of the cello float out the window, the crash of the teacup, the smell of the smoke that fills the little house. Harriet’s emotional journey comes full circle with a most satisfying ending. A must-read, over and… show more.

I started reading this story and thought at first that it was average. I was going along, wondering what would happen next, and then slam! I had to sit there and say, “What!” Really?” You couldn’t tear me away from it until the final word! It seems that so many authors these days try to replace poignant, dramatic characters and stellar plots with profanity and graphic sex. This writer does the opposite and this book is the absolute best showcase of that type of talent. There was a twist, and then another twist, and then another twist, yet they were all completely believable. That book stayed with me forever and I’ve read it many times since.

I expected to have a bit of a hard time suspending my disbelief in this sweet exploration of a boy’s friendship with the moon. But happily, it wasn’t difficult to identify with the boy’s dream of becoming an astronaut and his commitment to fulfilling their friendship with an in-person visit. For the child who looks up at the moon and dreams of being an astronaut, or the child who must face a struggle to reach a different kind of finish line, this book will be a poetic handbook for the journey.