100 books like Northern Spy

By Flynn Berry,

Here are 100 books that Northern Spy fans have personally recommended if you like Northern Spy. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Night Watchman

Lynn Kanter Author Of Her Own Vietnam

From my list on when the political turns personal.

Why am I passionate about this?

Many of us were taught as children that life isn’t fair. I never accepted this; shouldn’t we do all we can to make life fair? I grew up to be a lifelong activist and a writer for social justice organizations. As a reader and writer, I love books about women’s lives, especially women who realize that the world around them shapes their own experiences. Sometimes history is happening right here, right now—and you know it. Those transformative moments spark the best stories, illuminating each book I’ve recommended. 

Lynn's book list on when the political turns personal

Lynn Kanter Why did Lynn love this book?

What I loved most about this book is true of all Louise Erdrich novels: she creates such warm, complicated, fully human characters that I delight in their presence and grieve when I have to leave them at the book’s end.

In this novel, history hit home in a devastating way when the U.S. government in the 1950s decided to solve its “Indian problem” by simply reclassifying Native people as no longer Indian—a kind of paper genocide that wiped out Indigenous people’s cultural identity and tribal rights, such as land rights.

Sadly, this is all historical fact; the fiction comes in when Erdrich re-imagined in riveting detail the (also true) story of how one small tribe in North Dakota fought back.

By Louise Erdrich,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked The Night Watchman as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION 2021

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

It is 1953. Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the first factory to open near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a prominent Chippewa Council member, trying to understand a new bill that is soon to be put before Congress. The US Government calls it an 'emancipation' bill; but it isn't about freedom - it threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land, their very identity. How can he fight this betrayal?

Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Pixie…


Book cover of The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Lynn Kanter Author Of Her Own Vietnam

From my list on when the political turns personal.

Why am I passionate about this?

Many of us were taught as children that life isn’t fair. I never accepted this; shouldn’t we do all we can to make life fair? I grew up to be a lifelong activist and a writer for social justice organizations. As a reader and writer, I love books about women’s lives, especially women who realize that the world around them shapes their own experiences. Sometimes history is happening right here, right now—and you know it. Those transformative moments spark the best stories, illuminating each book I’ve recommended. 

Lynn's book list on when the political turns personal

Lynn Kanter Why did Lynn love this book?

I’d always assumed that the Dust Bowl in the 1930s was a natural disaster. Nope. The scouring dust storms that destroyed thousands of lives and millions of farms in five states didn’t have to happen. They were the predictable—and predicted!—result of short-sighted human decisions, such as the government handing tracts of formerly Indian land to white settlers to tear out the nourishing native grasses and plant wheat instead.

The human hand behind extreme weather might seem obvious to us now, but it was eye-opening for me in 2006 when I read this riveting nonfiction drama of families trapped in a living nightmare. I have never forgotten its impact or its lessons.

By Timothy Egan,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked The Worst Hard Time 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?

In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters…


Book cover of Time's Undoing

Lynn Kanter Author Of Her Own Vietnam

From my list on when the political turns personal.

Why am I passionate about this?

Many of us were taught as children that life isn’t fair. I never accepted this; shouldn’t we do all we can to make life fair? I grew up to be a lifelong activist and a writer for social justice organizations. As a reader and writer, I love books about women’s lives, especially women who realize that the world around them shapes their own experiences. Sometimes history is happening right here, right now—and you know it. Those transformative moments spark the best stories, illuminating each book I’ve recommended. 

Lynn's book list on when the political turns personal

Lynn Kanter Why did Lynn love this book?

Any book in which a journalist and a librarian are the heroes gets a gold star from me. In this gripping novel, a Black journalist from Detroit who writes about the Black Lives Matter movement goes to Birmingham, Alabama, in 2019 on a personal and professional quest.

Her great-grandfather was, she believes, killed there by a white policeman 90 years ago, and she’s determined to find out the truth. She also thinks his story can illuminate what’s happening nationwide today. Based on this compelling premise, the novel is a mystery, a love story, a history, and an examination of racial justice rolled into one. I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes view of exactly how a journalist builds a story.

By Cheryl A. Head,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Time's Undoing as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A searing and tender novel about a young Black journalist’s search for answers in the unsolved murder of her great-grandfather in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, decades ago—inspired by the author’s own family history

Birmingham, 1929: Robert Lee Harrington, a master carpenter, has just moved to Alabama to pursue a job opportunity, bringing along his pregnant wife and young daughter. Birmingham is in its heyday, known as the “Magic City” for its booming steel industry, and while Robert and his family find much to enjoy in the city’s busy markets and vibrant nightlife, it’s also a stronghold for the Klan. And with…


Book cover of We Are Called to Rise

Lynn Kanter Author Of Her Own Vietnam

From my list on when the political turns personal.

Why am I passionate about this?

Many of us were taught as children that life isn’t fair. I never accepted this; shouldn’t we do all we can to make life fair? I grew up to be a lifelong activist and a writer for social justice organizations. As a reader and writer, I love books about women’s lives, especially women who realize that the world around them shapes their own experiences. Sometimes history is happening right here, right now—and you know it. Those transformative moments spark the best stories, illuminating each book I’ve recommended. 

Lynn's book list on when the political turns personal

Lynn Kanter Why did Lynn love this book?

I love quiet novels that pack a punch, particularly when the writing is gorgeous and wise, as in this case. The book takes place in the real Las Vegas, where people live and work, and it pulls us deep into a community and its fault lines.

Four very different characters are drawn together as they are propelled into situations where the stakes are high yet intimately human. They must face the crucial issues of their time—war, poverty, sanctuary—and the most terrifying question: what kind of person am I?

By Laura McBride,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked We Are Called to Rise as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“Your heart will break…then soar” (Redbook) when, far from the neon lights of the Vegas strip, three lives collide in a split-second mistake and a child’s fate hangs in the balance.

Avis thought her marriage had hit a temporary rut. But with a single confession in the middle of the night, her carefully constructed life comes undone. After escaping a tumultuous childhood and raising a son, she now faces a future without the security of the home and family she has spent decades building.

Luis only wants to make the grandmother who raised him proud. As a soldier, he was…


Book cover of The Cold Cold Ground

J. Woollcott Author Of A Nice Place to Die: A DS Ryan McBride Novel

From my list on Irish murder mysteries with great settings.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a Canadian writer born in Northern Ireland. My first book, A Nice Place to Die, introduced Northern Ireland detective DS Ryan McBride. In 2019, A Nice Place to Die won the RWA Daphne du Maurier Award for Mainstream Mystery and Suspense, was shortlisted in the Crime Writers of Canada Awards in 2021, and was a 2023 Silver Falchion Award finalist. As for my choices, each of these fabulous, atmospheric mysteries has richly drawn settings inhabited by characters the reader comes to care deeply about. This brings a book alive for me — each has a wonderful, compelling cast of characters and a clever, complex plot.

J.'s book list on Irish murder mysteries with great settings

J. Woollcott Why did J. love this book?

McKinty takes you right to the streets of a city in chaos. An excellent, edgy, police procedural with a great sense of place––and McKinty doesn’t spare the language or violence in DS Sean Duffy’s first appearance.

In 1981 Belfast, it seems a serial killer is targeting homosexuals––an anomaly in Ulster during the troubles when most murders are sectarian. Just as Duffy starts to doubt this angle, a young woman, ex-wife of a hunger striker, commits suicide, or was she murdered––and was she connected somehow to the killings?

We’re immediately caught up in Duffy’s dysfunctional world, he’s a Catholic detective in the predominantly Protestant RUC. A hard drinker, too smart for his own good, but with a strong moral compass. 

By Adrian McKinty,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked The Cold Cold Ground as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Fast-paced, evocative, and brutal, The Cold Cold Ground is a brilliant depiction of Belfast at the height of the Troubles -- and of a cop treading a thin, thin line.

Northern Ireland, spring 1981. Hunger strikes, riots, power cuts, a homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera, and a young woman’s suicide that may yet turn out to be murder: on the surface, the events are unconnected, but then things -- and people -- aren’t always what they seem. Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. It’s no easy…


Book cover of Divorcing Jack

Jason Johnson Author Of Did She See You?

From my list on Northern Ireland since the end of the Troubles.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in this place, born here when the Troubles began. In one form or another, the conflict was everywhere. It was built into the infrastructure, into attitudes. It infested conversations, hurt friendships, killed old folks, children, friends, and family. Fiction from and about Northern Ireland was inevitably hamstrung by that dominant, terrible story. Since the 1994 ceasefires, our fiction has come charging forward. It’s analytical, bullish, enlightening, funny as hell, and it moves us forward by taking honest stock of what came before. I love this emerging place and its new voices. And I love to read and write stories about it. It’s a stubborn home, often maddening, truly kind, forever breath-taking.

Jason's book list on Northern Ireland since the end of the Troubles

Jason Johnson Why did Jason love this book?

I was twenty-five and enraged at the self-pity and posturing dominating the Irish peace process. I was dying to write yet terrified of even attempting to say anything in print. And then, like a rogue rocket, Divorcing Jack arrived. A hilarious assault on Northern Irish sacred cows right at the bitter end of the bloody Troubles. A timely, wisecracking strike back at a place where being a self-important Muppet had become a job description. So… Dan Starkey, suspected of murdering a lover, stumbles through local fiefdoms to solve the crime himself. He was in places I knew, bars I drank in, saying things that needed to be said. Divorcing Jack started a train of thought that still runs in my mind, one that insists rules are for rulers, not writers. 

By Colin Bateman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Divorcing Jack as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Fast, funny, scary. A truly up-to-the-minute novel set in Belfast from a brilliant new writer. Now a major BBC/Scala film starring David Thewlis and Robert Lindsay. Dan Starkey is a young journalist in Belfast, who shares with his wife, Patricia, a prodigious appetite for drinking and dancing. Then Dan meets Margaret, a beautiful and apparently impoverished student, and things begin to get out of hand. And then, terrifyingly, Margaret is murdered. Is it because of her liaison with Dan? Is it because she was not exactly who she claimed to be? Is it the IRA? A Protestant extremist group? A…


Book cover of Trespasses

Anna Bliss Author Of Bonfire Night

From my list on historical stories with interfaith love stories.

Why am I passionate about this?

After graduating with a BA in English, I moved to England to pursue a master’s in Literature and Visual Culture. My focus was on women artists working in London during the Blitz and I wrote my dissertation on Lee Miller, who went on to photograph (and doggedly publish) the liberation of German concentration camps. Later I worked in arts administration and marketing, and didn’t start writing my debut novel until I was thirty-five. My work is inspired by my favorite authors from the 1940s: Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Hamilton, and Penelope Fitzgerald. I’m also drawn to historical fiction about ordinary people in difficult social conditions, especially when there’s a love story involved.

Anna's book list on historical stories with interfaith love stories

Anna Bliss Why did Anna love this book?

Trespasses evokes the anguish of Northern Ireland during The Troubles through the story of a doomed love affair.

This is a heart-wrenching, complex novel full of startling emotional insights. It’s the 1970s in a small town outside of Belfast, and the stakes could not be higher: Cushla is a young, Catholic teacher and Michael is a married, Protestant barrister known for defending IRA members.

It’s unusual to read historical fiction by an author who actually lived in the same time and place that her characters do; I felt I was getting inside knowledge about a historical period I’ve always been interested in.

By Louise Kennedy,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Trespasses as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

“Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking.”—J.Courtney Sullivan, New York Times Book Review
 
“TRESPASSES vaults Kennedy into the ranks of such contemporary masters as McCann, Claire Keegan, Colin Barrett, and fellow Sligo resident, Kevin Barry.” —Oprah Daily

Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.

Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast, teaching at a parochial school and moonlighting…


Book cover of Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

Jason Johnson Author Of Did She See You?

From my list on Northern Ireland since the end of the Troubles.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in this place, born here when the Troubles began. In one form or another, the conflict was everywhere. It was built into the infrastructure, into attitudes. It infested conversations, hurt friendships, killed old folks, children, friends, and family. Fiction from and about Northern Ireland was inevitably hamstrung by that dominant, terrible story. Since the 1994 ceasefires, our fiction has come charging forward. It’s analytical, bullish, enlightening, funny as hell, and it moves us forward by taking honest stock of what came before. I love this emerging place and its new voices. And I love to read and write stories about it. It’s a stubborn home, often maddening, truly kind, forever breath-taking.

Jason's book list on Northern Ireland since the end of the Troubles

Jason Johnson Why did Jason love this book?

Absurd, funny, ingenious, sad, and violent, this book is an ode to Belfast. The first line – and I’m big into first lines – runs: “All stories are love stories.” Are they? Are they not? I still don’t know. Yet that’s the nature of the characters here, the nature of this cynical society too, back in 1994 as the ceasefire trembled into life and everyone was confused by the silence. So, ceasefire time, an obese Protestant waster cashes in by selling ‘ethnic accessories,’ including walking sticks for leprechauns. And his erudite, tough Catholic mate prowls Belfast while getting hassled and thinking deeply about getting laid. Self-appointed ‘revolutionaries’ get torn a new one here, and rightly so. All of Wilson’s books are blunt among the beautiful. Sadly there’s all too few of them.

By Robert McLiam Wilson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Eureka Street as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When your street address can either save your life or send it up the creek, there’s no telling what kind of daily challenges you’ll face in the era of the Northern Irish Troubles.

“All stories are love stories,” begins Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson’s big-hearted and achingly funny novel. Set in Belfast during the Troubles, Eureka Street takes us into the lives and families of Chuckie Lurgan and Jake Jackson, a Protestant and a Catholic—unlikely pals and staunch allies in an uneasy time. When a new work of graffiti begins to show up throughout the city—“OTG”—the locals are stumped. The…


Book cover of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

James Lawless Author Of Letters to Jude

From my list on understanding experimental and literary fiction.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a novelist, poet, and short story writer born in Dublin, Ireland. I have always been interested in literature particularly books which I deem as works of art and which throw light on the human condition, something which I try to do in my own work. I have broadcast my poetry and prose on radio and write book reviews for national newspapers. I divide my time now between Kildare and my little mountain abode in West Cork. 

James' book list on understanding experimental and literary fiction

James Lawless Why did James love this book?

I was so moved when I read The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne that it inspired me to write my novel with my protagonist Laurence J Benbo as a male equivalent of Judith Hearne, an innocent exploited by an uncaring world. The quotidian details of Judith’s life are delineated brilliantly by Moore in all her wretchedness reminiscent of some of the characters in Joyce’s Dubliners which Moore would have read and which possibly influenced him. The dark surroundings of Judith’s life lead her into a fantasy world aided by her one necessary weakness—alcohol. But, as Moore points out, it doesn’t have to end tragically. There is a glimmer of hope with life going on, but nothing as before.

By Brian Moore,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One of The Guardian’s “1,000 Books to Read Before You Die”

This underrated classic of contemporary Irish literature tells the “utterly transfixing” story of a lonely, poverty-stricken spinster in 1950s Belfast (The Boston Globe)

Judith Hearne is an unmarried woman of a certain age who has come down in society. She has few skills and is full of the prejudices and pieties of her genteel Belfast upbringing. But Judith has a secret life. And she is just one heartbreak away from revealing it to the world.

Hailed by Graham Greene, Thomas Flanagan, and Harper Lee alike, The Lonely Passion of…


Book cover of The Bulkies: Police and Crime in Belfast, 1800-1865

Anastasia Dukova Author Of A History of the Dublin Metropolitan Police and Its Colonial Legacy

From my list on policing, crime, and society in Ireland.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an historian of urban crime and policing. I specialise in metropolitan forces, for example the Dublin Metropolitan Police, London Police, and their colonial counterparts. I am particularly interested in the transnational exchange of concepts and personnel. The latter decades of the nineteenth century saw a lively and consistent movement of police across countries and continents, cross-pollinating ideas and experiences, shaping the future of organised policing. I have traced Australian policing roots to the streets of Dublin and London, which are explored in To Preserve and Protect: Policing Colonial Brisbane (2020) through personal life stories of policemen and criminals alike.

Anastasia's book list on policing, crime, and society in Ireland

Anastasia Dukova Why did Anastasia love this book?

It is not widely known that, like Dublin, Derry and Belfast were policed by their own municipal forces. The Belfast Police was responsible for preserving peace and order in the parts of the city which paid their rates. It looked after lighting, paving, and scavenging. Following sectarian violence and alleged police partisanship peaking in the riots of 1864 and 1869, Derry and Belfast forces were deemed inadequate in the face of rising public distrust.  In contrast to the Royal Irish Constabulary or the Dublin Metropolitan Police, which were headed by Commissioners, the Belfast police were under a single authority, the police board, until 1844, and a police committee thereafter – whose members, as Griffin aptly shows, gave ample reason for ongoing allegations of partisanship and corruption.

By Brian Griffin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Bulkies as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In Ireland, the story of nineteenth-century policing has been dominated mainly by studies of the Royal Irish Constabulary and, to a lesser extent, of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. This book tells the story of the Ã?Â?Ã?«forgotten forceÃ?Â?Ã?Â- of Irish police history, the Belfast Borough Police or Ã?Â?Ã?«BulkiesÃ?Â?Ã?Â-.


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in Belfast, single mothers, and Northern Ireland?

Belfast 19 books
Single Mothers 57 books
Northern Ireland 24 books