59 books like Hideaway

Dante's Divine Comedy is an epic poem in three volumes. It's perhaps the most beautiful poetry the world has ever seen.

Read it in Italian! Even if you can't read Italian, read it in Italian. Read it out loud, and you'll see what I mean. The language is so beautiful. Then read it in translation.

In it, Dante describes three worlds. The inferno is hell. An intermediate world called purgatory represents the hardest efforts that we make to be good people on Earth. The third volume is paradise.

The entire book was a huge influence on my early writing, which launched the life planning movement. My first book was divided into three segments: Childhood (inferno), Adulthood (purgatory), and Maturity (paradise), representing “the hero’s journey.”

The Great Divorce is part allegory, part fantasy, part self-help, part cautionary tale as readers tag along on a bus ride from Hell to Heaven. Through the course of the journey, Lewis uses a fascinating variety of unique characters and strange situations to illustrate how individual perspective and personal choices determine how happy (or miserable) we humans are in this life, as well as what we can expect in the next. 

It is a beautifully gruesome story about love, desire, and greed. Though I found it to be absolutely frightening, I also found it strangely comforting.

As a young gay man in the early 00s, as the AIDS epidemic was slowing down a bit, Barker's depiction of sexuality and openness was quite refreshing. I can only imagine what it must have been like reading this story for the first time as a gay man in the 1980s.

For insights into non-western afterlife theory, the Bardo Thodol offers a collection of texts covering aspects of death, reincarnation, and the ‘space’ in between. The work, which dates back to the 8th century, serves as a ‘guidebook’ on preparing the soul for its continuing journey, including advice on meditation, the six states of consciousness, death rituals, and the pursuit of karma. Over the centuries the Bardo Thodol has inspired numerous interpretations as well as literary works. Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin, who spent time secluded in a Buddhist monastery, describes his film Jacob’s Ladder as a modern take on the ancient text. 

This book spent five years on the New York Times bestseller list. Despite what some see as controversial claims that the author spent ninety minutes in heaven and then came back to life, only five of the eighteen chapters dwell on Piper’s “near-death experience.” The majority of the book chronicles his horrifically painful struggle to survive and then recover the use of his legs which were mangled in an accident. He often begged God to let him die. Instead, God brought people into his life to help him move past self-pity and find a renewed purpose.

Thinking about the hope of heaven kept my mental health positive while going through cancer treatments.

This book includes several near-death experiences of people all over the world who literally died for a moment and saw the afterlife. As a witness to the spiritual realm, they give us vivid descriptions of heaven and what they saw while their physical bodies were dead.

These amazing stories from people of different ages and religions point to the reality of a beautiful place that I can’t wait to experience after I die.

This long-lost early book on near-death experiences was written around the same time as Raymond Moody’s classic Life After Life, but totally independent of any knowledge of that more famous work.

Hampe was a German philosopher, and while the book made a huge splash in Germany it’s practically unknown to the English-speaking world, even though an excellent translation was published in the 1970s (finally now reprinted).

Hampe is a deep thinker though has a very engaging style. Knowing that he had his own NDE makes the book poignant and moving to read. What I find most interesting about it is the very different approach he took compared to Moody.

Rather than looking at the phenomenon as a scientific puzzle and focusing on the possibility that NDEs are evidence for an afterlife, Hampe was interested in their metaphysical implications. 

Technically this might be an adult book, but I read it as a teen and it gripped me completely. It was my first encounter with Connie Willis and I became an unconditional fan. This one is different from the other books on my list as it is a SciFi novel, starting with a medical deep dive into near-death experiences, or, more accurately, the replication of safe near-death experiences in labs… or are they? 

Willis is the queen of urgency, and throughout this unusual novel we are wrenched and rushed and held to the edge of our seat in suspense. The afterlife looms into every corner, every thought, every event, like another character – and best of all, it mostly looks like the sinking Titanic. It’s a wonderful blend of SciFi and historical novel, written like a thriller. I highly recommend it, though, I warn you, this is a monument… show more.

This is the most comprehensive book on Native American afterlife beliefs ever written.

What makes it especially interesting is that the author focuses on myths and legends of afterlife journeys – what he called “Orpheus myths.” He looks at them from many perspectives – historical and cultural – but most importantly experiential.

Writing almost 20 years before the popularization of near-death experiences in the Western world, Hultkrantz identified NDEs as a different type of experience from dreams or shamanic visions – and found that indigenous people did, too.

He also suggested that such experiences contributed to afterlife beliefs – that is, that they weren’t simply culturally created “stories” or hallucinations. Readable and entertaining as well as scholarly, it’s wonderful that this book is back in print after languishing in obscurity for decades!

Near-death experiences on the surface sound like they have no relationship to politics and economics. However, they allow us to make inferences about a “moral imperative” embedded within the structure of reality itself.

Near-death experiences are instances in which a person’s consciousness has remarkable perceptions—even though the person is sometimes clinically dead. In fact, the experiences are often reported to be “realer” than real. This perplexing phenomenon has been studied extensively by the University of Virginia’s Bruce Greyson, MD, and he explains in his book why many of these profound cases are likely not hallucinations. (And he further explained these concepts to me when I interviewed him for my podcast, Where Is My Mind?).

The life-changing messages from near-death experiences teach us that we are all interconnected at a deep and fundamental level. Many near-death-experience survivors even report that they relived their whole life, and they become each person… show more.