Here are 100 books that Night of Miracles fans have personally recommended if you like
Night of Miracles.
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I’ve had other Sisters in Christ, but it wasn’t until God introduced me to an amazing woman that I truly started to understand what it meant to be a Sister in Christ. A Sister in Christ is someone who encourages you, speaks the truth in love, and always points you back to God’s truths. She laughs with you, cries with you, and simply loves to do life with you. Sisters in Christ was born from this amazing friendship. To have this type of relationship is truly a blessing from God that needs to be shared in a community of fellow believers.
It talks about finding Sisters in Christ without referring to them as Sisters in Christ.
Wants you to focus on your five specific close relationships where you share everything. She explores these five “paths to connection” close, safe, protected, deep, and committed. She gave some great examples from her own life and one of the things that awed me the most was how close their small group in their new church was; to the point of discussing their finances with each other.
She said it brought real peace to their marriage because nothing was hidden, all was laid bare in front of people who truly wanted their success. Comes to the point of needing sisters in Christ from a different angle that I enjoyed and was really engaging.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE ECPA BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD • The author of Get Out of Your Head offers practical solutions for creating true community, the kind that’s crucial to our mental and spiritual health.
“My dear friend Jennie Allen shows us how to make true emotional connections with the right people so that our authentic relationships can be healthy for all.”—Lysa TerKeurst, author of It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way
In a world that’s both more connected and more isolating than ever before, we’re often tempted to do life alone, whether because we’re…
I’m a native of Texas who loves bluebonnets, big skies, and barbecue! With 25+ books in print, I write about imperfect characters who discover their inner strength as they lean on God and learn to trust each other and themselves. I’m fascinated by the dynamics of personalities and relationships, as well as the backstories that made the individuals who they are now. If you’re looking for stories of true-to-life characters growing deeper in faith while dealing with all the messiness human relationships entail, here are some novels you may enjoy.
When I read this book several years ago, I was just starting out in my writing career, and I remember thinking,If only someday I could write like this! Lisa Wingate has a beautiful way of eliciting emotion and empathy, of creating scenes and situations so true-to-life that she never fails to draw me in. Like all her books, Tending Rosestakes a deeply honest look at human relationships—the good, the bad, and the in-between—and always with an underlying current of faith. Kate’s situation may be different from my own, but I could still relate to her feelings and struggles, her questions and doubts. That resonance—that connection—is what makes any story memorable.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends and Before We Were Yours comes a heartfelt novel about the bonds of family and the power of second chances.
When Kate Bowman temporarily moves to her grandmother’s Missouri farm with her husband and baby son, she learns that the lessons that most enrich our lives often come unexpectedly. The family has given Kate the job of convincing Grandma Rose, who’s become increasingly stubborn and forgetful, to move off her beloved land and into a nursing home. But Kate knows such a change would break her…
I am a child sexual abuse survivor who struggled for years with the help of therapy to become the person I am today. My sister, my mother, and I suffered years of emotional abuse by my father. When I was a child, my best friend (who also suffered abuse by her brother) and I made up stories that helped us navigate the situations in our families. I read, hiked, backpacked, and traveled alone for years in order to take
risks and develop strength before attempting to write at age sixty-one. I love books that put me solidly in time and place and deeply empathize with characters who struggle and grow to become their genuine selves.
I love this book mainly because the main character is an ordinary young woman with grit who defies all hostility in Missouri during the Civil War, including neighbors who turn against her.
I went through lots of emotions with this character during her journey to finding love, from anger and trepidation to wonder and exhilaration. The setting, historical context, and unsentimental yet tender and poetic writing make this book a triumph.
"A gritty, memorable book ... it is a delight from start to finish, without a single misstep." Tracy Chevalier
Missouri, 1865. Adair Colley and her family have managed to hide from the bloody Armageddon of the American Civil War, but finally even their remote mountain farm cannot escape the plundering greed of the Union militia. Her house is burnt, her father beaten and dragged away. With fierce determination, Adair sets out after him on foot. So begins an extraordinary voyage which will see Adair herself denounced as a Confederate spy and thrown in jail. Here she falls passionately in love…
For much of my career as a sociologist and professor of social welfare, I’ve focused my research and teaching on the issue of economic and social inequality in America. Why should the United States have both great wealth and yet at the same time extreme poverty and inequities? This question has motivated much of my scholarly and popular writing over the years. For me, this represents the fault line of America. We profess the importance that all are created equal, and yet our actions undermine such a belief. Why should this be the case, and how can we change the reality to reflect the ideal?
This is a very powerful book that takes the city of St. Louis as a case study to illustrate the amount of violence, discrimination, and inequities that have happened across a 300-year period, particularly with respect to race.
Johnson develops the idea of racial capitalism throughout the book, and notes that “the red thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between imperialism and anti-Blackness.” At the same time, the city has also been home to both communist and Black radical organizing into the 20th century.
A highly interesting and important case study of American inequality and exploitation.
A searing and "magisterial" (Cornel West) history of American racial exploitation and resistance, told through the turbulent past of the city of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in The Broken Heart of America, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor Black residents, from slavery through redlining and…
I’ve been fascinated by how ordinary people can change the course of their own lives since I was a child. However, I had no idea until later in life that there were entire fields of study devoted to understanding how this process works historically. When I discovered “new labor history” many years ago, I knew I wanted to be part of it. It was the privilege of a lifetime to study under some of the best labor historians in the world at the University of Chicago. And I can’t describe how I felt when my dissertation won the Herbert Gutman Prize in Labor History. I hope these books spark your interest!
Let’s face it. Christianity has been used to support slavery, encourage white people to be racist, and send women back to the 1950s.
That’s why I found Jarod Roll’s Spirit of Rebellion refreshing and important. It was a good reminder that faith can also provide the moral courage necessary for change. It can unite people instead of dividing them.
I can’t imagine a place and time more disposed to racist divisions than rural Missouri in the late 19th century. Yet, poor white and Black farmers there found common ground as rebels against the emerging capitalist order. How? Through the Pentecostal revivals that swept the region in this same period. If that’s not a message of hope in these trying times, then I don’t know what is.
Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association
In Spirit of Rebellion, Jarod Roll documents an alternative tradition of American protest by linking working-class political movements to grassroots religious revivals. He reveals how ordinary rural citizens in the south used available resources and their shared faith to defend their agrarian livelihoods amid the political and economic upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century.
On the frontier of the New Cotton South in Missouri's Bootheel, the relationships between black and white farmers were complicated by racial tensions and bitter competition. Despite these divisions,…
Nearly a quarter century has passed since my childhood spent in the Ozark Mountains, but it still remains home. It’s a unique corner of America, not quite the South and not quite the Midwest, but undeniably country. Growing up there on a farm, near towns in decades-long decline, I saw the best and worst of rural life, and of the folks who call it home. That place and those people inspire me and my writing, driving me to show the Ozarks and its people as complex and ever changing. I aspire to move past the nostalgia of rural life, but not at the sacrifice of its beauty and charm.
Many would point to Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café as her opus to rural America, but the broader scope of The Whole Town’s Talking pulled me in instantly.
She draws out a full history of a small town, its good and bad and the people that made their mark there, some from birth to death. Even after death, their voices remain an active part of her tale, remaining as unbashful observers from the cemetery on the hill.
So much of rural America has fallen into disrepair, as does Flagg’s fictional Elmwood Springs, but I hold out hope that the increase in telecommuting and simmering desires to leave urban (and suburban) lives behind can reinvigorate some of these sleeping villages that are spread across much of the nation.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is at her superb best in this fun-loving, moving novel about what it means to be truly alive.
WINNER OF THE SOUTHERN BOOK PRIZE
Elmwood Springs, Missouri, is a small town like any other, but something strange is happening at the cemetery. Still Meadows, as it’s called, is anything but still. Original, profound, The Whole Town’s Talking, a novel in the tradition of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Flagg’s own Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven, tells the story of Lordor Nordstrom, his…
PoppyHarp has at its heart the mystery of a forgotten children’s TV show from the 70s, so I wanted to share books that explore a similar idea–the fiction in fiction–be it an invented book, movie, or TV show that drives the narrative in some way. These five books all feature the enigmatic quality of something lost or some kind of age-old mystery waiting to be unraveled by its protagonists. They are also five books that I absolutely adore.
I was introduced to the beguiling novels of Jonathan Carroll by the owner of a bookstore where I worked when I was young. Thirty years on and I still greatly anticipate a new novel by this unclassifiable author.
It follows the efforts of a teacher and his girlfriend to write the biography of a deceased children’s author whom they idolize. I love that Carroll’s books begin with familiar scenarios but soon take off into a very unique kind of magical realism.
Carroll always writes with a sure, sweet touch; his dialogue is whip-smart, his characters larger than life, and his stories always zip along with an easy conversational tone. You can start anywhere with his books, but there’s a special place in my heart for this one.
Have you ever loved a magical book above all others? Have you ever wished the magic were real? Welcome to The Land of Laughs. A novel about how terrifying that would be.
Schoolteacher Thomas Abbey, unsure son of a film star, doesn't know who he is or what he wants--in life, in love, or in his relationship with the strange and intense Saxony Gardner. What he knows is that in his whole life nothing has touched him so deeply as the novels of Marshall France, a reclusive author of fabulous children's tales who died at forty-four.
Jill Leovy, author of Ghettoside, is a journalist and independent researcher who covered the Los Angeles Police Department and homicide for fifteen years, and who is currently working on a book dealing with murder and feud in human history. She has covered hundreds of street homicides and shadowed patrol cops, and she spent several years embedded in homicide detective units. More recently, she has been a Harvard sociology fellow and a featured speaker on Homer and violence at St. John's College, New Mexico. She is a senior fellow at the USC Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.
Street Justice is a terrific ethnography on an issue too seldom talked about in criminal justice textbooks, namely, payback in the context of drug dealing.
Jacobs and Wright did not set out here for any new philosophical insights about revenge. Instead, they are interested in its reality. What emerges from this study is a stark catalog of how retaliation actually works, among real people, in a real American city, and what a chilling picture it is.
Based on interviews with actual St. Louis offenders who related their personal experiences with loss, pain, humiliation, and anger, Street Justice is an eye-opener even for those of us who thought we knew something about this topic.
Read this book if you a cop. If you are just interested in law and violence, as I am, read this one alongside Miller, Gould, and a few of the Icelandic Sagas, and I guarantee you will…
Street criminals live in a dangerous world, but they cannot realistically rely on the criminal justice system to protect them from predation by fellow lawbreakers; they are on their own when it comes to dealing with crimes perpetrated against them and often use retaliation as a mechanism for deterring and responding to victimization. Although retaliation lies at the heart of much of the violence that plagues many inner-city neighborhoods across the United States, it has received scant attention from criminologists. As a result, the structure, process, and forms of retaliation in the real world setting of urban America remain poorly…
Foreign cultures have always intrigued me. I am a Midwesterner who lived for several years in Latin America, teaching English and later doing field work in anthropology. As a young woman, I lived through a violent coup d’état in Chile, and I drew on that experience when I later wrote about political upheaval in Guatemala. A Ph.D. in anthropology gave me the opportunity to spend time in Guatemala and Mexico, some of it in Mayan towns. My love of historical fiction stems from my desire to enter and understand other worlds, and I am grateful to authors who spin their magic to bring far-off places and times to life.
I love Lidie Newton. She is a newlywed who accompanies her abolitionist husband from Illinois to Kansas Territory, at a time when the territory is mired in partisan rage and violence. Lidie narrates the story, and her straightforward, often insightful accounts pulled me in immediately. I was right there with her as she forged her way through numerous exploits, some humorous, others heart-breaking. The story is populated with characters who are both colorful and believable, and I came away with a heightened understanding of the role played by events in Kansas and Missouri during the frightening months leading up to the Civil War.
Lidie joins the pioneering Westward migration into America's heartland. It is harsher, more violent and more disorientating then Lidie could ever have imagined. They find themselves on a faultline - forces crash against each other, soon to erupt into the he American Civil War.
I’ve been a published romance author since 2010, but even before I published my first romance novel, I was an avid reader of the genre. In fact, I started at the very young age of eleven, checking out romance novels from my local public library. Over the years, I’ve read hundreds of books and found the ones that I enjoy the most have the most intriguing heroes who fall hard for the heroine.
This book was my first Beverly Jenkins novel, and it made me fall in love with her historical romance novels. Before I read it, all the historicals I’d read were Regencies. I was thrilled to find a historical romance with black characters in the United States, which opened my eyes to a part of history I didn’t know much about.
But, the historical aspects were not the only thing that captured my attention. Galen, the Creole hero and free Black man who worked as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, is the reason I recommend this book. There is plenty of chemistry and sensuality between the couple, but his gentleness and love for Hester, a former slave, is unmatched. Galen is one of the best kinds of heroes, and Hester deserves all the love he showers her with.
*** Now with new material -- Hester and Galen's favorite Mud Pie Recipe ***
As a child Hester Wyatt escaped slavery, but now the dark skinned beauty is a dedicated member of Michigan's Underground railroad, offering other runaways a chance at the freedom she has learned to love. When one of her fellow conductors brings her an injured man to hide, Hester doesn't hesitate…even after she is told about the price on his head.
The man in question is the great conductor known as the "Black Daniel" a vital member of the North's Underground railroad network. But Hester finds him…
