Fans pick 100 books like God's Smuggler

This is the Dutch Underground at its finest. The “why” people would risk their lives and resist the German persecution of the Jews came through loud and clear here.

Based on a true story, Corrie Ten Boom ran an underground cell out of her home in Harlem with the support of her family. Her religion sustained her through tremendous losses and suffering but enabled her to find peace for herself and others post-war.

While the book Unbroken is fantastic and also about the Louis Zamperini story, to me, Devil At My Heels is even better.  This book tells the amazing true story of Louis, it also talks a lot about where he was spiritually growing up and includes his conversion to Christ story. I adore this story on so many levels. Louis Zamperini was defiantly an unlikely candidate to become a spiritual giant, but God knew what he had placed inside of him. He went from juvenile delinquent to Olympian, to being a soldier, to being shot down in the Pacific Ocean, to being a POW, to being a drunk womanizer whose marriage was falling apart. Few people understand that it was because God used his conversion that brought Reverend Billy Graham into the public spotlight. His story again reminded me that a life well lived for the gospel carries a legacy.

This is an amazing story of a life well lived for the gospel. It is amazing how God can take the ones that people would have never thought possible to do the impossible for his kingdom. This story is so amazing that could have only happened by the hand of God and it keeps you passionately engaged thinking about how God uses his children.

This is one of my favorite books as a young child and has continued to be one of my favorite books. Based on a true story, it is about the capture of a young girl on the brink of love and womanhood. Her fight, spunk, and ability to sew are truly what help her and her family escape. I have always loved this book. I love it for its humanity and truth. I love it for its ability to take the reader and see that even in the worst circumstances, one can still find themselves and learn how to overcome.  

In the fall of 1879, when John Muir arrived among Alaska’s Chilkat Tlingits, he charmed them with his stories but also unwittingly acted as an agent of Manifest Destiny and opened the floodgates of the Klondike Gold Rush. This is an important story of first contact and fresh perspectives, thoroughly researched and compellingly told. There’s no other book like it.

Part of what I love about this novel is that its basic premise–an English pastor is sent to a distant planet to preach the Christian gospel to aliens–sounds so absurd that it’s hard to imagine it feeling real. But Faber does a wonderful job of taking the glamor out of space travel and foreign worlds.

The atmosphere of this novel is all empty cafeterias and unpleasant humidity–I love the banality of it all! In its portrait of a loving but strained marriage (with the husband getting excited over aliens and the wife struggling to hold it together on a dying Earth), the novel is dryly funny while also being genuinely moving.

Elisabeth Elliot’s approach to faith and to missiology was heavily influenced by 19th-century Irish missionary Amy Wilson Carmichael. Carmichael moved to India in her twenties and spent the rest of her life there, working to rescue children from exploitation and abuse. She also wrote poetry, biography, meditations on missiology, and books about her experiences.

Elliot was introduced to Carmichael’s writing by the headmistress of her high school, and over the next several years, she devoured everything of Carmichael’s that she could get her hands on, even writing to Carmichael to thank her for her work. Carmichael died at age 83, when Elliot was 25. More than three decades later, Elliot traveled to India to research and write this book, the story of the woman she called her spiritual mother. 

Barbara Kingsolver’s magnum opus follows a Georgia missionary family’s self-destruction in the dark jungles of the Belgian Congo. The story is narrated by the mother and four daughters as the father, Nathan Price, leads his family to a remote village where they live squalid lives.

In a series of misadventures, he is resolute and foolish, attempting to lead the natives to Christ. Through poverty, culture clashes, and even death, the American women learn to depend on the villagers as Nathan blindly attempts to shove them into an Americanized form of Christianity. Kingsolver’s epic is an engrossing study of how destructive blind, stubborn, prejudiced faith can become. It is, at times, heartbreaking and painfully realistic. 

Kingsolver is not afraid to question Christians' motives and show the dark side of Christianity. Yet, she is also respectful of the faith and especially respectful of the African villagers. After reading this story, I found… show more.

The story of a brilliant, driven young scholar who seeks both to rebel against and to please his demanding father, of a leading intellectual skeptic who becomes a Christian, and of a missionary who faces unimaginable adventure, hardship, and triumph in the mysterious country of Burma (modern Myanmar) is an unforgettable tale of tragedy, loss, heartbreak, faith, and victory, complete with the interwoven stories of the three very different but equally extraordinary women who would share Adoniram Judson’s life.

Meeting four such remarkable people in the pages of one book is an extraordinary experience, and seeing God at work through some of the darkest events of history to seek out a people for Himself will give you hope for the darkest days. 

I know I said in my introduction that there are too many books from the missionary perspective and not enough from a Chinese point of view, but I’m going to make an exception here with the only novel, too, in the group. In this 1985 title, the extraordinary John Hersey captures the urge of American missionaries to proselytize in China, as well as their complicated relationship with Chinese Christians. This sweeping fictional biography of David Treadup, whose character is a composite of the lives of actual missionaries, including Hersey’s father, carries the reader from New York state in the early 1900s to the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s.