Fans pick 100 books like Night Brother

Barker is known best as a master of body horror, and this book certainly has some grotesque images. But it’s also a gorgeous meditation on memory, identity, love, and the use and misuse of great power.

Along with a vivid travelogue of the five realms that make up Imagica, Barker explores the use of the body itself as a canvas; malleable, changeable, and as fascinating as the view from the window of your train. That said, the view is often stunning, always inventive, and immersive enough that I feel I’ve walked the streets of Yzordderrex myself. 

The setting for Hermetech is a post-apocalyptic landscape. As with Imajica, the central quest is to heal a ruptured world. Futuristic science and magic coexist in the story as a group of disparate and dysfunctional travellers retrieve Ari and escort her (and the reader) through strange, broken lands and along unfriendly and dangerous roads.

It is a highly imaginative, speculative fantasy with another character who blends and transcends gender and steals a reader’s heart. Zambia Crevecoeur is deeply flawed and tragic, and it is hir journey (emotional rather than geographical) which drew me into this extraordinary novel.

Although The Scar is the second book in the Bas Lag series, I prefer it to Perdido Street Station (which is also glorious.) The Scar takes to the seas, a place I always prefer to be, in the form of the floating, roving city of Armada.

We come aboard (as it were) and experience life on Armada—its precincts, villages, towns, secrets, and its people—swordsmen and librarians and vampires and the mysterious pair who run the place—The Lovers (that’s the only name we get) through the eyes of Bellis Coldwine, a prickly, difficult, but fascinating woman who would literally rather be anywhere else.

I get where she’s coming from but I would absolutely book a cruise on Armada!

The world of The Changeling is strange and exhilarating. At first we are presented with what seems like a mundane NYC, but then the edges start to bleed as a more fantastical, deliciously disturbing world seeps into and disrupts the ordinary.

At the core of the story is a family and the lengths they go to protect each other. There are so many reasons this book resonated with me, but particularly for this reason—the idea that if only you pay close attention, you will see that a more fantastical world dwells at the edge of our own.

This is an idea I tackle in my own book, where myths and legends, and fairytales come to life. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I highly recommend it. Everyone who reads The Changeling will be… changed.

Semi-spoiler alert: this book has the best ending line ever so don’t flip to the end or you’ll rob yourself of something very precious. I adore a nice ending twist and although not so much an O’Henry plot twist (love his stories) as an “aha” shift in perspective, it has stuck with me more than any other element of the story.

The book’s blurb very aptly describes The Sea of Tranquility as “... a rich, intense, and brilliantly imagined story about a lonely boy, an emotionally fragile girl, and the miracle of second chances.” I’m a sucker for second chance stories, especially following an injustice. The beauty of this story lies not in the how the protagonist, Nastya, recovers her power by confronting and righting the injustice but in how she subtly and simultaneously learns to look forward instead of backward.

I love all of Stephanie Laurens’ books about historical London and high society during the Regency period or “the ton”, as it was called. The Bar Cynster series doesn’t disappoint. These books are fun to read and in keeping with the true romance books of boy meets girl themes and girl tames the cagy, self-proclaimed bachelor. Each book deals with a different brother or cousin in the Cynster dynasty and a specific event around their daily lives. The reader gets a sense of current events and the lifestyle of the rich during this period and how money and power can evade or remove any adverse effects on the family. 

There are six books in this series and I highly recommend reading all six. They are fun, light-hearted, and easy to read. I even like their nicknames of “scandal”, “rake”, and “devil”. It makes them seem like the bad boys of… show more.

John Berger was a fantastic cultural observer and art critic, this book is erotic both in its observation of culture and context but also of human fallibility, and psychic and psychological transportation of love itself. It had a big influence on me as an art student and for the brief years when I was a sculptor. What I love about it is its empathy for both the female and male inner erotic life, although it is set in England and Europe at the end of the 19th century, Berger’s razor-sharp, succinct blending of the internal and external world is both moving and sensual. 

In 1950s Sewanee, Chang and Katherine slowly fall in love and find that the Souths of Korea and Tennessee are not that different after all, both subject to lingering issues of class, family, race, and civil war. I love the poetic language in this novel, as well as its ambitious story and the complexity invested in every relation.

This speculative dystopia about drought-ruined California is equal parts lyrical gut-punch and surrealist adventure story. Main characters Luz and Ray set up residence in an abandoned celebrity mansion, subsisting on whatever they can scavenge. Their precarious existence is upended when they cross paths with a toddler, and the trio sets off into the Dune Sea in search of a life that offers more than mere survival. A warning: this is not a cool breeze of a read. But if you’re curious about the psychic impact of prolonged heat, thirst, and desperation, Watkins offers a masterclass on the grimy reality of human resilience in a hostile world of our own making.

Almost A Lady is filled with love, passion, and adventure for the restless soul. It has a fiery heroine who isn’t afraid to fight for her life, and the most ideal roguish pirate scoundrel one longs for in a Historical Romance. The perfect enemies-to-lovers tale that will have you staying up late for more. I loved this book because it revealed far more than what a traditional HR setting could be. It gave me love and peril and a hot slow-burn of fervor and intensity one needs in a great Historical Romance.