77 books like I'd Know You Anywhere

I remember summers growing up when we were out of the house seeking freedom from parents as we streamed toward our teenage years, so I can identify with this story’s start. We’d follow deer trails through brush and trees to spots up in the hills we’d claimed as our own. This book begins with a prologue made vivid with three children and Tana French’s gorgeous prose.

The children go up and over a rock wall and into “A summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silk skin blue…your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat…” “…long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways…” and the haunted last sentence, “These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer.”

This is the only fiction on a list otherwise full of nonfiction, but it more than deserves a place on this list. There are so many things to love about this book—its audacious opening line, the lush writing, the twisted relationships—but what I think history lovers might appreciate most is how deeply entwined the characters get with the history of Antiquities.

After all, the main group of characters in this dark academia only come together because they’re all studying Greek and Latin. In fact, the plot hinges on their obsession with Antiquity—but I won’t get too much more into that. I just recommend picking the book up and going along for the ride. 

I love all of Rebecca Makkai’s work, but this novel, published earlier this year, absolutely blew me away.

Makkai is adept at keeping the pages turning, but it wasn’t just the story of podcaster Bodie Kane and the murder of her high school classmate that drew me in as much as the atmosphere. The novel is set in a New England winter, and Makkai does a fantastic job of using the darkness and isolation of the season to create thematic resonance.

I’ve only been to New England a few times and don’t know it well at all, but this novel makes me feel like I’ve been there.

If I’d written this list a year ago, I probably couldn’t have found a way to include Megan Abbott, even though she’s one of my favorite writers.

Though setting is important to her work, it’s rarely given the place-based specificity we find in her newest novel, Beware the Woman, set in the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I’ve vacationed in the UP and it truly is a wild place, the perfect background for this story of a pregnant woman spending an increasingly creepy week with the husband and father-in-law she’s not sure she can trust.

The woods that crowd around the family’s remote home seem threatening at first, but then come to offer the promise of escape from a domestic environment with its own set of perils. As in all these novels, setting is more than a scenic backdrop. It’s the world the reader lives in, and a crucial element… show more.

The photographs compiled in this book were all captured by Enrique Metinides, my favorite Mexican photographer.

Enrique worked as a crime photographer for over 50 years, capturing murders, crashes, and all kinds of catastrophes for Mexico’s infamous tabloids. This photo book is a great testament of Mexico’s palpable surrealism, where death is just one more component of the chaotic landscape.

Even though Metinides worked for the sensationalist press, none of the images in this book could be called that. His photos emanate an enormous respect for the victims and for tragedy itself.

The beauty of his shots do not romanticize the “real-life horror” that we are looking at. Rather, they remind us that sometimes, when in the presence of the devastating forces of life, there’s nothing else to do but be a humble spectator. 

Notes on an Execution gutted me as a reader. I became the sociopath on death row with only 12 hours to live.

I listened to the women in my life talk about me, from my mother who didn’t understand why I brought her dead animals instead of flowers to my wife who trusted me beyond reason to my brother’s family in whom I had finally found a home until that detective snatched it away from me, leaving me with nothing.

If you want to get into the mind of someone wired differently, this book will take you there until the end.

Horror-themed summer camp for Black queer girls? Yes, I don’t mind if I do!

Reading Ellis’ book is like returning to the summer going into my junior year of high school and the angst and drama of summer camp, only with the addition of woods and crappy cabins where the danger is very real and at least one camp counselor has an agenda that involves her genetic legacy of being the daughter of a convicted serial killer.

Temple, our angry (peer) counselor, is on a mission to find her mother’s corpse, even though she doesn’t buy that her dad actually killed her. The novel gives me a real Friday the 13th vibe, mixed with a tangled family history that rivals Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches series. I can't refuse a complicated family mess, and this has it… a lot!

Read this book while you’re taking a break from a solo hike… show more.

Supernatural Thrillers: Every Dead Thing by John Connolly is the first novel in Connolly’s Charlie Parker series (it contains Parker’s origin story). If you like your thrillers with a blood-curdling slice of the supernatural, run, don’t walk, to the nearest bookstore and pick up this novel. Haunted by his dead wife and daughter, Parker is an ex-cop turned private detective. And the cases Parker works—Good Lord!—best sleep with the lights on. Though John Connolly’s an Irish lad, his Parker novels take place along the East Coast (Parker lives in Portland, Maine). You’ll realize how literary and poetic Connolly’s prose is as the hairs on the back of your neck begin to rise and you refuse to investigate that sound you just heard coming from the basement.

A huge departure from the previous books on this list, this book is a full-on thrill ride with one of the coolest narrative devices I’ve ever seen: A woman on death row narrates her supposed cross-country killing spree to a horror author who’s interested in adapting her life story.

She’s a fascinating woman, telling her story in a way that constantly challenged me to figure out what parts of her on-the-run narrative are real. She’s surprisingly sympathetic, even when she’s doing awful things.

I devoured this book in one sitting and haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Be prepared. If you want a good cry, this book is for you, as it has one of the saddest endings of any novel I have read.

The Green Mile is the riveting and tragic story of John Coffee, a giant, gentle inmate with supernatural powers, condemned to death for the rape and murder of twin nine-year-old girls.

Coffee is a simple and kind man with a deathly fear of the dark. Your heart will break. Mine did.