Here are 100 books that Lonely Castle in the Mirror fans have personally recommended if you like
Lonely Castle in the Mirror.
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As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
This book, which appeared in English translation in 2010, is the tender love story of Tokiko, a married woman, and her lover Itakura.
The story is told from the perspective of Taki, the devoted attendant who cares for the house and the family who lives there. In this respect, the reader is dealing with the gaze of a marginal figure, and it is this which makes the book so great: Taki’s gaze is intimate, taking into account everything that happens within the home’s four walls, but is at the same time the cool gaze of an observer on the periphery of all the action.
The book plays out in the pre-war years, but it also depicts the war and the years following. Over the course of this long period, the reader learns that this isn’t just about the love that exists between Tokiko and Itakura. It is also about Taki’s…
The Little House is set in the early years of the Showa era (1926-89), when Japan's situation is becoming increasingly tense but has not yet fully immersed in a wartime footing. On the outskirts of Tokyo, near a station on a private train line, stands a modest European style house with a red, triangular shaped roof. There a woman named Taki has worked as a maidservant in the house and lived with its owners, the Hirai family. Now, near the end of her life, Taki is writing down in a notebook her nostalgic memories of the time spent living in…
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
From the start, the reader can’t help but notice a tower looming in the distance.
The image has something threatening about it, and also deeply significant; the tower will continue to surface over the course of the novel’s unfolding, when certain fateful moments in the plot become clear, as well as the inescapable and hopeless nature of the main character entangled in it.
For me this book is so much more than “just” a crime novel, like it says on the cover. It is an existential masterwork. Slim, though so much is contained within its pages! The reader stays close at the pickpocket’s heels, following him breathlessly through a maze of streets, at the end of which stands the tower, appearing and disappearing in the distance. Nakamura has been compared to Dostoyevsky.
In my opinion, he doesn’t need that ascription. He is Nakamura – through and through. And for anyone…
Nishimura is a seasoned pickpocket, weaving through Tokyo's crowded streets, in search of potential targets. He has no family, no friends, no connections ...But he does have a past, which finally catches up with him when his old partner-in-crime reappears and offers him a job he can't refuse. Suddenly, Nishimura finds himself caught in a web so tangled and intricate that even he might not be able to escape. Taut, atmospheric and cool, The Thief will steal your breath away.
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
Now, I am no friend to graphic novels. As a novelist I prefer a story told in long strokes. For Taniguchi Jiro, however, I make an exception.
When I stumbled across A Journal of My Father, I was initially skeptical. Page after page, however, with an almost cinematic panorama laid out before me, I found myself in complete awe of the fine power of observation that Taniguchi brings to the small things in life. The simple and still finds artistic expression in his work, the every day suddenly seems notable, and anyone who – like me – often finds themselves reaching for a handkerchief, consider yourself warned: this touches you, though without a show of sentimentality.
After the death of his father, a man travels to his hometown and, through various conversations and encounters, pursues memories that have stayed with him since childhood. That doesn’t sound all that exciting. But…
KNOW THY FATHER The book opens with some childhood thoughts of Yoichi Yamashita spurred by a phone call at work informing him of his father’s death. So, he journeys back to his hometown after an absence of well over a decade during which time he has not seen his father. But as the relatives gather for the funeral and the stories start to flow, Yoichi’s childhood starts to resurface. The Spring afternoons playing on the floor of his father’s barber shop, the fire that ravaged the city and his family home, his parents’ divorce and a new ‘mother’. Through confidences…
Stormwalker Series Connections In Time Bain's Story Book 1
By
S.G. Boudreaux,
Finding Family, Discovery, Destiny. This is what nineteen-year-old Bain Brinley is searching for.
In his homeland, far in the mountains, he stepped into what he could only describe as a time-portal and landed in a strange land known as Egypt. Then he falls through another portal during a storm, only…
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
This is a fast-paced story about a young man named Sugehara.
He is a so-called Zainichi Chosenjin who falls in love with a Japanese woman. Through him, the North Korean minority is given a face and a voice, and what the reader learns, namely, that every step he takes is a step against an invisible wall of racism and marginalization, is more evident here than practically anywhere else.
“Go!” you want to scream at him. “Run up against the wall! Knock it down!” The weight of the subject matter goes hand in hand with language that masterfully expresses the hunted but determined nature of the main character and his closest circle.
Not a book that can be put lightly aside after reading. It stays with you for a long time, and its reverberations – of Sugehara’s running, of his footsteps – remain in the ether for a long time, like…
1
author picked
Go
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
14,
15,
16, and
17.
What is this book about?
A Freeman Award Winner for Young Adult Literature
For two teens, falling in love is going to make a world of difference in this beautifully translated, bold, and endearing novel about love, loss, and the pain of racial discrimination.
As a Korean student in a Japanese high school, Sugihara has had to defend himself against all kinds of bullies. But nothing could have prepared him for the heartache he feels when he falls hopelessly in love with a Japanese girl named Sakurai. Immersed in their shared love for classical music and foreign movies, the two gradually grow closer and closer.…
My boys greedily consumed books until middle school when screens began to pull them away. I still brought home piles of books, especially stories that stirred empathy, hoping they would pick them up (especially during enforced no-screen times). My then-5th grader complained that I brought home too many “sad books about kids having a really hard time,” and that’s when I realized I was choosing titles I liked and wanted them to read. The novels I had written thus far were heavy stories for teens, but after this little episode with my boy, I decided to pay attention to what they really wanted to read. And to write one they might like.
If I leave a graphic novel around the house, it will certainly be read.
This one, a memoir about the author’s student trip to Europe in the summer of 7th grade, hits just the right tone for middle schoolers making that break from childhood to teenager. The story takes place in the eighties (and Europe!), and the author has experiences that involve a level of freedom that’s rare for kids these days.
There are also the highs and lows of the first crush, and I love to know that my son has read this, even if he didn’t discuss it with me.
At first, he's right. Stuck with the same girls from his middle school who love to make fun of him, Dan doesn't know why his teacher insisted he come on this trip. But as he travels through France, Germany, Switzerland, and England, a series of first experiences begin to change him - first Fanta, first fondue, first time stealing a bike from German punk rockers . . . and first love.
Funny, heartwarming, and poignant, A First Time for Everything is a feel-good coming-of-age memoir based on New York Times bestselling author and Caldecott Medal winner Dan Santat's awkward school…
I’m a daughter, sister, Mum, wife, and writer. I’ve been writing light-hearted books about the intricacies of family life for 20 years now. When I first began my publishing journey, I was parcelled up with ‘chick lit’, but really, I’ve always written ‘Mum lit’. I love to write about the hilarious side of life, alongside the emotional. As it’s hard enough out there in the world, I want things to turn out happily in my stories. I love to add a sprinkling of travel and a touch of fashion. Sorry, but I just can’t help noticing a well-cut jacket, an embroidered silky skirt, or a carefully chosen accessory!
This story is in the style that Shari is making her own – a critical 24 hours in the intertwined lives of her characters.
It’s a skilful weaving of lightness and big laughs, plus painful, dramatic elements with break-neck plotting. Here, she builds her story round a group of friends and neighbours, who have known and supported each other for so long that they’ve created a ‘family’ owing nothing to genetics.
I love the Glasgow details, like the hospital carpark row with an audience of giggling nurses clutching sausage rolls. I also love the salt-of-the-earth older ladies in Shari’s books – the fiery ‘wummin’ holding lives together with their humour and strength of character.
Pick this up and you will not stop till you turn the last page.
THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLEROne day, five lives, but whose heart will be broken by nightfall?
It started like any other day in the picturesque village of Weirbridge. Tress Walker waved her perfect husband Max off to work, with no idea that she was about to go into labour with their first child. And completely unaware that when she tried to track Max down, he wouldn't be where he was supposed to be. At the same time, Max's best friend Noah Clark said goodbye to his wife, Anya, blissfully oblivious that he would soon discover the woman he adored had been…
Return to Hope Creek is a second-chance rural romance set in Australia.
Stella Simpson's career and engagement are over. She returns to the rural community of Hope Creek to heal, unaware her high school and college sweetheart, Mitchell Scott, has also moved back to town to do some healing of…
The heights of American literature are crowded with coming-of-age tales like Huckleberry Finn and Catcher and the Rye. It’s probably because for us, as Americans, figuring out what it means to be American is something that isn’t as clear as what it means to be from another country with thousands of years of existence behind it. Yet, the stories I was given rarely had people who looked like me (Asian) or lived lives that weren’t solely defined as being “foreign.” These books tell coming-of-age stories in different ways that I wish I had read when I was coming up to broaden my own mind with what was possible.
It’s about a young guy, Takezo” looking for adventure in war and ends up nearly killed, confused, and lost. He finds rebirth in discipline and study with a mysterious monk who starts him on his study of the ways of the sword. He goes on a quest to master the sword and ways of Buddhist truth, a quest where we watch this village kid become “Musashi.”
Its fight scenes are among the best I’ve ever read. And while the feeling of the story being propaganda lurks in the back of the mind (like every Hollywood action film), this was the very first novel that I read cover to cover.
My novel Venice Beach—like the five books I recommend here—has been classified as a “coming-of-age” novel, a classification that I have no quarrels with as long as it’s understood that coming-of-age is not regarded simply as a synonym for “adolescence” or “being a teenager.” The coming-of-age years—generally defined as between ages 12 and 18—are so much more than a period of life wedged between childhood and adulthood. Coming of age is a process, not a block of time; it is a hot emotional forge in which we experience so many “firsts” and are hammered, usually painfully, into the shapes that will last a lifetime.
Bruiser is only nine years old, younger than most “coming of age” protagonists, but his anxiety-ridden family life in a Manhattan apartment has aged him. His father is a philanderer who rarely is home and often physically abusive when he is; his mother is a deeply depressed poet. Bruiser spends most of his time running around his Upper West Side neighborhood with a make-shift gang of older boys—and has the bruises to show for it, hence his nickname—or hiding at the bottom of the clothes hamper when his parents are going at it. He befriends a 10-year-old girl, Darla, who lives across the courtyard with her drug-addled mother and who convinces him to run away with her. Their journey, which takes them first to West Virginia in search of Darla’s father and eventually to North Carolina, is the book’s magic. Both kids are pre-puberty, so it’s…
After spending another morning hiding in the clothes hamper eavesdropping on his miserable parents, Bruiser realizes it's time to change his life. It's New York City during the late 1970s, and in the middle of a chilly autumn night he takes to the open road with Darla, a kindred spirit who lives across the alleyway. Their flight from the mounting tensions of home -- an adventure dotted with frightening episodes and surprising revelations -- is a journey in search of liberation and emotional truth.
This is Bruiser's tale in his own words, captured by first-time novelist Ian Chorao with uncanny…
I grew up a closeted gay in a very straight world. I enjoy reading both true and fictional stories about how others grew up and came out. I decided to write about coming-out and coming-of-age because this mixture of topics just didn’t exist when I was a teen. The books that I have listed here are ones that I feel capture both the realism of what is, what we wished had been, and the hope of what could be—a world where "coming out" wouldn’t be necessary.
I loved the mixture of third and first person that this story is told in. The main character Dillon is both fun, sad, and imminently well-drawn. His harrowing dash from Perth to Sydney, his relationships with Amy, Pastor Pete, wonderful Dixie, and Stephen, and his sheer will to be his authentic self, had me both scared and happy for him.
I loved the mixture of coming-out and coming-of-age with some thriller elements thrown in, not something that I see a lot of in coming-of-age novels.
A teenager's quest for freedom leads him on the streets and into the path of a local serial killer.
15-year-old Dillon is on the run.
Until recently he enjoyed friends, family, and the safe confines of a religious cult. But when a confession ignites the wrath of his church Dillon escapes ... and he's about to discover a vast world beyond the private walls of his former life.
Once in Sydney he faces a bustling city full of dreams and nightmares. Desperate to survive, Dillon is lured to the red-light district where strangers pay for pretty boys.
A fast-paced literary thriller with a strong sci-fi element and loaded with existential questions. Beyond the entertainment value, this book takes a hard look at the perilous world of publishing, which is on a crash course to meet the nascent, no-holds-barred world of AI. Could these worlds co-exist, or will…
I grew up on a Viking battlefield, in an English coastal village once raided then occupied by Norsemen. We had ancestors who lived on the Isle of Orkney, and in the Celtic south-west. From a young age, I read Norse and Celtic myths and legends, and went on to study history and philosophy – and then became an author. Now, I have family in Sweden and grandchildren of Ash and Elm. My list offers pure escapism, but also shows how our ancestors lived in an age with no electricity or compulsory schooling. It’s the wonderful combination of the ‘other world’ myths and history that I believe makes us who we are.
This beautifully written novel showed me what life must have been like on the island of Orkney in the Dark Ages and trapped me in a gripping, almost ‘other-world’ coming-of-age tale.
Full of fascinating descriptive details and wise human insight, the story tells of the developing, sometimes tender, sometimes aggressive, relationship between two homeless adolescents in a very dangerous adult environment.
