87 books like Invictus

Magical doors that appear out of nowhere, a fantastical book that may not be fiction, some truly sketchy villains, a quest, and an intrepid heroine.

The author had me at fantastical book, but what I love about this novel is the world and character building, that feeling of opening the cover and being somewhere that has nothing to do with ordinary life.

And yet, there is mystery. And romance. A lost father. A daring daughter. You’ll want to race through it, but slow down at the same time, just to savor the ride.

I believe you can choose to be kick-ass. Delilah “Lila” Bard eventually chooses to be kick-ass. Eventually, on the surface, this book is about Kell. But Lila has the true character arc. I love that Lila walks the edge: hero or anti-hero?

My own life has been defined by the choices I make. I wasn’t given a lot of opportunities. I didn’t have a lot of luck. I had to make my own luck. Lila makes her own ‘luck’. She turns surviving into an opportunity to thrive because of the choices she makes. She screws up several times, risking her life and others. Even at the end, I’m not sure if she’s a hero. She’s real and attempting to evolve out of a dim past into a bright future in her own unique way. I relate to that. 

Jane, Unlimited is a marvelously constructed book that focuses on Jane, a girl grieving her aunt and making umbrellas, who gets an invitation to a mysterious island mansion. I am here for all mysterious island mansion books. This estate is named Tu Reviens–"You come back” in French. That is, of course, a clue to the premise. There are a couple of possible love interests, but it’s not a love triangle and I don’t think it would annoy the people who are dead set against triangles.

Mirror in the Sky is about what happens to a girl who’s just trying to navigate through high school and family situations when a planet incredibly similar to Earth is discovered–and news spreads that people may have doubles on the new planet, called Terra Nova. (The main character’s name is Tara, so there’s a play on words, and a riff on the theme, here.) Mirror in the Sky is more about reactions on Earth to news of the new planet and less a sci-fi adventure.

Readers wanting hard sci-fi–tentacled aliens with ray guns–may be disappointed, but readers who want a contemporary with another world as a backdrop might take a look.

I must mention this book because it was one of the first alternate histories I read as a teen, and I remember how it caused me to dream about “what ifs.”

Although traveling back to 6th-century Rome didn’t sound like a lot of fun, I loved reading about the main character's ingenuity and how he uses his modern know-how to survive in the literal dog-eat-dog world of the past. It was a good roadmap in imagination about tackling a sudden change in fortune, and the writing was personable and fun to read.

When I wrote my first book—an exploration of Caesar’s leadership—I read a lot about the guy. This was the book I came back to most often as a guidepost. It helped me get past the biases I brought into my project and understand better the essence of who Caesar really was. There are a lot of books about Caesar, and rightly so; he is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic personalities of all time. For me, a great book is one that leaves me feeling like I could travel in time, sit down with the subject, and know what to expect from them. That’s a rare feat, especially for someone like Caesar. But he felt almost…familiar after reading this book. 

This book is a literary novel set in part on the Moon. That’s not a sentence you’ll read often, which is a big part of why I love this novel—it’s not what I expected, even though there’s a big hint in the title.

Like many readers, my introduction to Emily St. John Mandel was her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. In that story, the most interesting characters aren’t concerned with simple survival…if they are going to fight to live, they want a culture worth fighting for. When I picked this book up, I deliberately chose not to read the story summary and was completely caught off guard by how the novel unfolded. Typically, stories questioning time and our perception of reality do so by sending the protagonist on a dangerous quest looking for answers.

Like all my favorite novels, the scope is intimate and vast in this one. The story… show more.

I love a good re-imagined fairytale, and Tidbeck delivers...except it's more like she took all the fairy tales, smashed them, and reassembled them in a mosaic that's both familiar and alien at the same time.

Dora and Thistle are two among many children trapped in the Garden, servants to the fairy-like overlords who, when those children grow up, will eat them. Dora and Thistle escape, but so does one of the wicked overlords....

The prose is gorgeous, and the story is all the things fairytales should be: magical, terrifying, fantastic, with journeys and helpers and—well. I won't tell you if the ending is happy or not. Read to the end and find out. 

Back to romance! This is a time travel story about a woman who is keeping something vital from her family.

She’s the middle child and suffers from that insecurity of not quite having found her place. She is seriously depressed. But the moon, an eclipse, timing, the house she’s in… all play a part in this excellent tale that brings the medieval times front and center.

The author really delivers a knock-out punch to the gut and hope really is lost until this hero comes to his senses. But when he does… well, suffice it to say, you won’t be disappointed. 

My new book features a solitary time traveler in a key supporting role, so I feel well-equipped to say that Man in the Empty Suit is the pièce de resistance of absurdly trippy time travel stories.

A time traveler celebrates his birthday every year at an abandoned hotel in the year 2100 or so, with all his fellow time-traveling past and future selves in attendance – nobody else is ever invited. This year, however, he discovers the murdered corpse of next year’s instance of himself.

This makes him the lead detective in the case of his own murder, which ideally he’d like to prevent; and the only suspects are either younger versions of himself, although you’d expect him to remember committing the crime, or elder versions of himself, who somehow managed to survive the murder of their younger self – for the time being, anyway.

Twisty and mind-bendy goodness.