Here are 95 books that Hidden Deep fans have personally recommended if you like
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Hello, my name is Stephanie Duley and my passion lies in fantasy. From books and movies to board games and tabletop RPGs, if it’s fantasy, I am usually a big fan. My love of reading started at a young age when my mom would take us to our local library to sign up for the summer reading programs. As an adult, I will gobble up any fantasy novel I can get my hands on. As a published author, I strive to give readers that same feeling and bring a little magic into their world, even if it is only for a few hundred pages.
This was one of the first books I picked up after my reading slump in 2012, and I absolutely couldn’t put it down. The story concept was fascinating; I love it when story worlds have supernatural elements and societies hidden within the “regular world.” The characters are written very well, and you feel as though you are watching a movie while reading with the authors great attention to detail in the scenes she sets.
The world building is great and offers a unique take on the classic fantasy creatures, werewolves, vampires, and fey. You really feel that “found family” book trope in this series, and the ups and downs of book one will have you hooked.
Discover this first installment of the internationally bestselling Mortal Instruments series and “prepare to be hooked” (Entertainment Weekly).
When fifteen-year-old Clary Fray heads out to the Pandemonium Club in New York City, she hardly expects to witness a murder -- much less a murder committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons. Then the body disappears into thin air. It's hard to call the police when the murderers are invisible to everyone else and when there is nothing -- not even a smear of blood -- to show that a boy has died. Or was he…
I have been writing formally since I started my first book in high school. Even then, I was writing with dual POVs. Having multiple perspectives throughout my stories has been essential to all my books. I believe it adds so much more than a single POV can, and I love the process of it. You must decide what each of the characters’ motivations, and defining characteristics are and relate them back to the story. My most recent novel, below, has four POVs, each of which is as important as the others.
The first book in the Zodiac Academy Series is only dual POV, but as the series goes on, more POVs are added. This series made me laugh more than any other book series I have ever read. But it also broke my heart and sewed it back up more times than I can count.
Only having the dual POV for the first book is a great way to get to know the main characters and the world they’ve entered before adding in the others. Adding the extra POVs starting in book two gave more backstory on the characters who I perceived as the villains. It adds so much to the story and allows me to rethink my loyalties and decide who I thought to be the true villain.
The Amazon.com and Wall Street Journal #1 bestselling dark fantasy romance series from authors Caroline Peckham & Susanne Valenti
I’m a Gemini. Impulsive. Curious. Headstrong. A twin. Heir to a throne I know nothing about. And it turns out, I’m Fae.
But of course there’s a catch - all I have to do to claim my birth right is prove that I’m the most powerful supernatural in the whole of Solaria. And sure, technically that’s true as I’m the daughter of the Savage King. But the bit they didn’t put in the brochure was that every single Fae in this…
Hello, my name is Stephanie Duley and my passion lies in fantasy. From books and movies to board games and tabletop RPGs, if it’s fantasy, I am usually a big fan. My love of reading started at a young age when my mom would take us to our local library to sign up for the summer reading programs. As an adult, I will gobble up any fantasy novel I can get my hands on. As a published author, I strive to give readers that same feeling and bring a little magic into their world, even if it is only for a few hundred pages.
This book is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are living in domes to keep them safe from the deadly radiation of the planet. The story follows: Aria is a young woman living in the safety of one of these domes, and her quest to find her mother, whom she lost contact with recently after her mother was sent out to repair damage to a pod in the outer wastelands. She knows she likely won’t survive, but she ventures out into the unknown anyway, finding help from a young man named Perry. Perry is an outsider, one of the few humans left able to survive the planet’s harsh conditions. His people are referred to as uncivilized savages.
This story has a great plot twist, and Aria finds out that the savages might not be the people who live outside the domes but within them. I love a good plot…
WORLDS KEPT THEM APART. DESTINY BROUGHT THEM TOGETHER. Aria has lived her whole life in the protected dome of Reverie. Her entire world confined to its spaces, she's never thought to dream of what lies beyond its doors. So when her mother goes missing, Aria knows her chances of surviving in the outer wasteland long enough to find her are slim. Then Aria meets an outsider named Perry. He's searching for someone too. He's also wild - a savage - but might be her best hope at staying alive. If they can survive, they are each other's best hope for…
Hello, my name is Stephanie Duley and my passion lies in fantasy. From books and movies to board games and tabletop RPGs, if it’s fantasy, I am usually a big fan. My love of reading started at a young age when my mom would take us to our local library to sign up for the summer reading programs. As an adult, I will gobble up any fantasy novel I can get my hands on. As a published author, I strive to give readers that same feeling and bring a little magic into their world, even if it is only for a few hundred pages.
In this book’s setting, firstborns rule, secondborns are government property, and thirdborns are non-existent. This story follows Roselle St. Sismode, a secondborn, and her journey into the next phase of her life as an adult as a soldier in the Fate of Swords military branch during a bloody rebellion. Being the daughter of a high-ranking firstborn mother and father, her privileges earn her the ire of some of the other soldiers in her command post, making her transition less than ideal, and her decision to spare an enemy on the battlefield puts an even larger target on her back. This puts her on a path that she’d never imagined she’d find herself on, working against her command and even her own family to fight for what she believes is right and bring justice to the secondborns of the world.
This story resonated with me on a personal level. Going against…
Firstborns rule society. Secondborns are the property of the government. Thirdborns are not tolerated. Long live the Fates Republic.
On Transition Day, the second child in every family is taken by the government and forced into servitude. Roselle St. Sismode's eighteenth birthday arrives with harsh realizations: she's to become a soldier for the Fate of Swords military arm of the Republic during the bloodiest rebellion in history, and her elite firstborn mother is happy to see her go.
Televised since her early childhood, Roselle's privileged upbringing has earned her the resentment of her secondborn peers. Now her decision to spare…
I am a history professor at Ohio State, where I have taught for most of my career. I have always been fascinated by how people in different regions define their own identities, how other Americans perceive them, and how these ideas change over time. Having lived through several wars (as a civilian), I have observed that social and political conflicts on the homefront can be intense in their own right and that non-military events and military events are often connected. In my work, I have published on gender, race, slavery, family, material culture, legal history, and environmental history, from the Revolution through the Civil War.
Black people, enslaved and free, sued whites in court in Mississippi and Louisiana, and sometimes they won.
Welch researched hundreds of documents in some archives off the beaten path. She discovered a hitherto unknown chapter of African American life which changes our perspective on the legal system.
I felt inspired by the courage and resilience of the litigants.
In the antebellum Natchez district, in the heart of slave country, black people sued white people in all-white courtrooms. They sued to enforce the terms of their contracts, recover unpaid debts, recuperate back wages, and claim damages for assault. They sued in conflicts over property and personal status. And they often won. Based on new research conducted in courthouse basements and storage sheds in rural Mississippi and Louisiana, Kimberly Welch draws on over 1,000 examples of free and enslaved black litigants who used the courts to protect their interests and reconfigure their place in a tense society.
I spent my early childhood in a rural, isolated, multi-generational household. During summers we rarely saw anyone unrelated to us. My twin sister and I spent our days reading, hiding, and naming our menagerie of barn cats (final count: 36). In my career as a lifestyle journalist, I’ve gotten to interview famous eccentrics ranging from Loretta Lynn to David Sedaris. I live in the North Carolina mountains with my husband, our teenage son, and my aforementioned twin sister. This past summer, a black bear walked the 22 steps up to our front porch and stared in the window, raising his huge paws high in exasperation.
Unlike Welty’s works featuring honorable or broadly comic characters, this dense story cycle was never excerpted in anthologies. It’s a trickier cast: consider Jinny Love Stark and Virgie Rainey, who cut through the languor of Depression-era Mississippi with stone-cold intention. Jinny Love plays croquet with her lover to enrage her volatile husband; she encourages her daughter to wear lizards as earrings to offend the propriety of her own controlling mother. Impoverished piano prodigy Virgie flouts her gift merely to watch her teacher go mad. Later, she trims her dead mother’s yard with sewing scissors while neighbors do the real work of laying out the body and receiving mourners. The heat presses forward. What day is it? What hour? This is weird, experimental Welty, and the payoff is sweet.
First published in 1949, THE GOLDEN APPLES is an acutely observed, richly atmospheric portrayal of small town life in Morgana, Mississippi. There's Snowdie, who has to bring up her twin boys alone after her husband, King Maclain, disappears one day, discarding his hat on the banks of the Big Black. There's Loch Morrison, convalescing with malaria, who watches from his bedroom window as wayward Virgie Rainey meets a sailor in the vacant house opposite. Meanwhile, Miss Eckhart the piano teacher, grieving the loss of her most promising pupil, tries her hand at arson.
I live by the Atlantic Ocean, so the thoughts of floods are never far away, especially as the seas are warming through human-caused climate change. I wrote about storms and floods in my novel Float and, more recently, in my new novel listed below. I did a lot of research on flooding for both, and I am constantly amazed by the power of the natural world, particularly one out of balance as it is now. My passion and purpose is to bring the dangers of this imbalance to my readers. Even if you have never been in a flood before, fiction allows you to know what it feels like.
Among many wonderful things about this book, I consider it a climate novel and a climate justice story in particular. Hurricane Katrina wipes out a Black working-class family who are flooded out of their house. I was deeply attached to the narrator, the teen daughter in the story, and I loved her even more for having hope that things could change.
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'A brilliantly pacy adventure story ... Ward writes like a dream' - The Times
'Fresh and urgent' - New York Times
'There's something of Faulkner to Ward's grand diction' - Guardian
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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
Hurricane Katrina is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. He's a hard drinker, largely absent, and it isn't often he worries about the family.
Esch and her three brothers are stockpiling food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets;…
I was never a little boy who played soldier. But when I was 13, I read Barbara Tuchman’sThe Guns of August, and developed a lifelong fascination (unusual for an American) with the First World War. Decades later, having achieved a happy life as a gay man, I started to wonder during the debate over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: What would life have been like for two soldiers in the Great War who fell in love? So, I traveled to the battlefields and cemeteries of France, and to the Imperial War Museum in London, and read anything and everything I could about WW1. And then I wrote Flower of Iowa.
Perhaps the most powerful story surrounding The Bitterweed Path concerns the creation of the novel itself. This tale of cross-class, same-sex love set in late 19th century rural Mississippi – a place and time so well evoked you can feel the heat – was originally published in 1950(!). They say historical novels reflect the time in which they’re written at least as much as the time in which they’re set, and there’s a distinct obliqueness to the writing here. That does not detract from the astonishing eroticism of main character Darrell’s first glance at Roger, the boy he will fall in love with (and vice versa). Nor does it diminish the radical shift, in more than one sense of the term, when Roger’s father also emerges as a mutual love interest for Darrell.
This long out-of-print and newly rediscovered novel tells the story of two boys growing up in the cotton country of Mississippi a generation after the Civil War. Originally published in 1950, the novel's unique contribution lies in its subtle engagement of homosexuality and cross-class love. In The Bitterweed Path , Thomas Hal Phillips vividly recreates rural Mississippi at the turn of the century. In elegant prose, he draws on the Old Testament story of David and Jonathan and writes of the friendship and love between two boys--one a sharecropper's son and the other the son of the landlord--and the complications…
I’ve been fascinated by the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South in the 1950s and 60s for many years. Keen to understand not just events in that timeframe, I also needed to understand how those entrenched and diametrically opposed positions had occurred. What triggered the responses of water cannon, German shepherd dogs, and Billy clubs to seemingly peaceful students marching or seated in a particular section of a café? Over a period of seventeen years, I amassed a private collection of books, magazines, newspapers, over two hundred in all, along with material from various state-run Departments of Archives of History, further amplifying my fascination and providing fodder for my book.
While many books are written after the event or events contained in the book, this book is contemporary to the events it relates to. In this case the birth and growth of the Citizens Councils in the Deep South in the mid-1950s.
The author and then managing editor of the Greenville Democratic Times sets out, in a clear and readily understood way, the mood of the day among the white-collar political and business classes in the months and years immediately following the Brown v Board of Education decision.
It’s a worthy read and a touchstone of the rising political temperatures of those times.
In The South Strikes Back, Hodding Carter III describes the birth of the white Citizens' Council in the Mississippi Delta and its spread throughout the South. Carter begins with a brief historical overview and traces the formation of the Council, its treatment of African Americans, and its impact on white communities, concluding with an analysis of the Council's future in Mississippi.
Through economic boycott, social pressure, and political influence, the Citizens' Council was able to subdue its opponents and dominate the communities in which it operated. Carter considers trends working against the Council-the federal government's efforts to improve voting rights…
I scored my first touchdown at nine and went on to play quarterback at both the collegiate and professional levels. By twenty-six, I was the head coach of a backwoods high school in Arkansas. My debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, is a football-centric thriller and was named one of the “Best Crime Novels” of 2022 by the New York Times. Afterthat book's publication, I’ve had readers reach out and ask about my favorite football novels, so I was thrilled to get the chance to compile them all into one list. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have.
Ace Atkins played defensive end for Auburn. His picture once graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. His dad coached for the 49ers. In other words, Ace knows football, and that fact is on full display in The Innocents. Although the plot doesn’t center around football, this novel features one of the best depictions of a Southern, sleazeball coach you’ll ever find in fiction. Oh, and it’s a part of Ace’s Quinn Colson series. So if you like it, there’s more where that came from!
Quinn Colson returns to Jericho, Mississippi, and gets pulled back into a world of greed and violence in this gritty, darkly comic tale from New York Times bestselling Southern crime master Ace Atkins.
After being voted out of office and returning to the war zone he’d left behind, Quinn Colson is back in Jericho, trying to fix things with his still-married high school girlfriend and retired Hollywood stuntman father. Quinn knows he doesn't owe his hometown a damn thing, but he can't resist the pull of becoming a lawman again and accepts a badge from his former colleague, foul-mouthed acting…
