100 books like Love Happens, Eventually

I love an amnesia trope, and this one delivered!

I couldn’t read fast enough to find out who Zoe really was before her accident and how everything would be revealed. And Jo Watson delivered a rollicking ride filled with feelings–so much feels!–and it just kept getting better, coming together like a tapestry right until the end. It was a journey the heroine went on, and as a reader, I also went along with her, which was magical & so enthralling!

Set in Johannesburg mainly and the South African countryside, it showed normal people living normal lives amid extraordinary circumstances, all with a feel-good, rom-com vibe throughout.

I’m of Indian heritage, and when I see Indian-origin protagonists, I’m on it like white on rice! Add to it another trope: I love the marriage of convenience, and I was hooked.

Now, you can expect Indian protagonists to mean Indian families, usually big, often messy, and definitely loud. I just needed a Bollywood-style soundtrack in the background, and this one would’ve been a perfect blockbuster from Bollywood.

Vash Karuppa also knows how to write feelings, delve deep, and make you feel everything that’s roiling inside her main characters’ hearts. Definitely, a thrilling, colourful, boisterous ride where love is swept along whether it wants to or not!

I’m a sucker for all things Royal! Give me a prince and/or princess looking for love in today’s world, and I’m sold. This one has a princess and a prince!

Imagine you’re a princess bidden to enter a marriage of convenience with a neighbouring land’s prince. Then, on your wedding day, you get into an accident, your new husband dies, and when you wake from a coma, you find you’ve now been legally married off to the new Crown Prince, aka your late husband’s younger brother. And he’s hot as sin itself!

This one is more on the steamy side, but don’t let it deter you. Amidst all the heat is a treasure trove of feels and warring emotions and a seismic journey of falling for the "wrong" person who now happens to be exactly the right one!

Another one with the amnesia trope (I told you it’s a fave of mine!) Except in this one, the hero wakes up with amnesia, not recalling that his gorgeous wife is his on paper only…Kiru Taye can write angst! Feelings in general, but angst, turmoil, and passion that don’t just mean an opened bedroom door? She delivers.

I loved witnessing the romance brewing here and just waiting for the other shoe to drop. When it did, everything escalated, yet at no point did it feel like "too much." I also loved how it showed me a slice of Nigeria, in lifestyle, culture, and day-to-day living, that I’d never experienced before, opening my eyes to what life on the African continent is truly like when one looks beyond the trauma and misery overflowing in African literature.

Eben Venter, though born in the heart of the South African ‘platteland’ (the South African equivalent of ‘fly-over country’), has spent much of his adult life in Australia, and the novel poignantly straddles the two locales: the constricting conservatism of the protagonist’s farm background, and the bewildering freedoms and opportunities of a more cosmopolitan setting. Here that conflict is heartbreakingly acted out and in a grim sense resolved in the main character’s losing battle against AIDS, and his death-bed reconciliation with his hitherto unbending father. Venter gives us a harrowing account of what it is like to die of a disease that wastes your body, blinds you, and makes you mad before killing you. It is all the more remarkable that the experience is registered from the inside, as it were, in a subjective stream of consciousness. The poignancy of the novel is intensified for me by knowing that the… show more.

Kabu Kabu takes its name from Nigerian slang for a dodgy taxi that gets you where you need to go, one way or the other. It’s a fitting name for this short story collection, which took me on a journey of twenty-one stories that include excellent science fiction, fantasy, horror, and excerpts from her wildly popular and award-winning novels. Drawing from her own Naijamerican heritage and using a skillful balance of characters, plot, setting, and themes, Okorafor offers an array of stories based on dual identities, folklore, philosophy, and contemporary issues filtered through a speculative lens.  

Another remarkable first novel, and the first of a trilogy, now complete. Dangarembga is a multi-talented Zimbabwean woman—filmmaker, playwright, novelist, and not least, political activist. A coming-of-age tale set in the late colonial period [when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia], the focus is on two girls, cousins. Tambu, the narrator, begins the book this way: “I was not sorry when my brother died."  Now, that will get your attention [we gradually learn why]. But it is her cousin Nyasha who will grab you: brilliant, passionate, troubled, sickly. In 2018 the BBC named Nervous Conditions one of the 100 stories that have shaped the world.

I found Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory a compelling and interesting book about Dr. Gess and his work as a doctor in Africa. Although he treated various medical conditions, his work focused on the plight of the blind in Africa. This dedicated Christian doctor brought not only physical healing to his patients, but also spiritual help and guidance to his patients and their families. The book includes many photographs of the events being described. By end of the book, I had a new awareness of the physical and spiritual needs of the people in this vast continent.

When Anne Innis Dagg was a little girl, she longed to study giraffes in Africa. Many obstacles including gender discrimination stood in her way, so she hide her female identity to get a job and then traveled to Africa on her own. Anne fulfilled her dream and became the world's leading scientific expert on giraffes, inspiring the next generation of women scientists to pursue their dreams.

I loved this book! It is an engaging inspirational novel of two people who love God and answer His call to go to Africa as missionaries. The author does a wonderful job of putting the reader right there in the scene. I especially loved the way the characters at times struggled in their faith but always sought God's will. This is a really great book that will help to strengthen the reader's faith and walk with God. Harriet Michael was born in Nigeria, West Africa. The Whisper of the Palms, based on the love story of her parents, offers an authentic insight into a missionary’s life in Africa.