Here are 100 books that One Last Stop fans have personally recommended if you like
One Last Stop.
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As a journalist, author and screenwriter, my work has always pondered loss and grief. I think this has something to do with the fact that of my mother’s religion; she was a convert to Hinduism and started conversations about the inevitability of death and how the soul and the body aren’t the same when us children were at a very young age. It probably also has something to do with the constant presence of death within my family and communities as a Black and queer person in a violently anti-Black and queerantagonistic world. I currently volunteer at a hospice, and provide community-building programming to death workers from diverse communities.
This list could be full of Toni Morrison novels and be no worse for it.
I’d argue that the late writer is the finest we’ve ever had on the topics of grief, loss, and ancestry—especially from the Black American perspective. One of my favorite examples is Song of Solomon, a mesmerizing journey through what it takes to craft an identity in the midst of racism and the ruptures it creates in our lives.
Morrison's singular prose is pure magic as it weaves a tale of the enduring power of love. A literary masterpiece.
'Song of Solomon...profoundly changed my life' Marlon James
Macon 'Milkman' Dead was born shortly after a neighbourhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly.
In 1930s America Macon learns about the tyranny of white society from his friend Guitar, though he is more concerned with escaping the familial tyranny of his own father. So while Guitar joins a terrorist group Macon goes home to the South, lured by tales of buried family treasure. But his odyssey back home and a deadly confrontation…
I have always loved history, ever since my childhood obsessions with Boudica, Anne Boleyn, and the witch trials. I love exploring different historical periods through literature, as books can help us develop real feelings of connection and empathy with people who lived in times and places very different from our own. I like to think that, in turn, this encourages us to be more empathetic with others in our own time. Since coming out as lesbian when I was 14, I have read a great deal of queer fiction, seeking to immerse myself in my own queer heritage and culture.
This is a coming-of-age novel set in 1950s San Francisco. As teenagers my best friend and I shared a mutual hyperfixation with the Cold War. It beautifully explores that era, from the Space Race to the McCarthyism that targeted both queer Americans and Chinese Americans. My best friend now lives in San Francisco, and when I last went to visit her I treated myself to going on a little walking tour of some of the places mentioned in the novel, all around Chinatown and Russian Hill.
The desire Lily feels towards her butch friend is beautiful and stirring, and the excitement she feels at exploring the underground gay scene is absolutely infectious.
"That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other." And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: "Have you ever heard of such a thing?"
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.
America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall…
I’ve always loved things like dragons and dinosaurs, even as a child. And as a Malaysian-born Chinese-Australian, I consumed both Western and Eastern media. I read traditional fantasy books such as The Hobbit and Game of Thrones while simultaneously learning about Chinese folklore and eating zongzi for Dragon Boat Festivals. So, while I’ve always had an interest in dragons, I specifically love the lore, magic, and mythology surrounding East Asian dragons. East Asian dragons are different from the typical fire-breathing dragons we see in Western stories. Unlike in Western media, Eastern dragons are not monsters, and it can be hard to find books that portray them in that light.
This might be cheating a little, as the ‘dragon’ in this book is actually a giant robot-like mecha that is piloted by human soldiers, but I couldn’t leave this list without a mention of Iron Widow.
This is a fierce feminist fantasy re-imagining of China’s only female sovereign, Wu Zetian, and it absolutely pulls no punches. A furiously paced story of vengeance and redemption, this book was a thrill from start to finish.
Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid's Tale in this blend of Chinese history and mecha science fiction for YA readers.
The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn't matter that the girls often die from the mental strain.
When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it's to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister's death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected—she kills him through…
I studied forty years of the political misuses of the memory of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement as a sociologist at USC and the daughter of Iranian immigrants who has always been interested in questions of identity and belonging. My interest in civil rights struggles started early, growing up in Virginia, a state that celebrated the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday alongside Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. I wanted to understand how revisionist histories could become the mainstream account of the past and how they mattered for the future of democracy.
I am, to put it lightly, obsessed with the way Octavia Butler revolutionizes the timescape and invites us to speculate about worlds that could be. In this and so many of her books, her vision of Afrofuturism is one that reminds us that our ancestral pasts and our imagined futures are always connected.
I thought a lot about the future when I wrote my book, and I share Butler’s conviction that there is collective healing and liberation in revisiting and reimagining the past.
I also love that my neighborhood library in Pasadena is the one Octavia Butler used to frequent!
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner
The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”
Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon…
As a Dominican-American writer, I grew up constantly looking for representation and characters I could relate to. I could never really find whatever I was looking for until I got to college and discovered the long history of infusing realistic storytelling with surreal elements that finds roots in Indigenous and Black communities in Latin America. Once I found it, I was obsessed. I was so bored of western storytelling and basic, straightforward books, and here was this well of creativity that belonged to my ancestors. That’s when I noticed that the books I loved in my childhood all had this same quality – just a touch of magic.
One of my all-time favorite books. I recommend the whole trilogy. This YA book focuses on a young girl named Janie who has grown up with the annoying (sometimes dangerous) power of constantly getting sucked into people’s dreams when they sleep near her. It’s dark and realistic. There’s a mystery and it turns into a Veronica Mars-esque detective story, especially as the books progress. The romance is also amazingly developed. Chef’s kiss.
For seventeen-year-old Janie, getting sucked into other people's dreams at any given moment is getting tired. Especially the falling dreams, and the standing-in-front-of-the-class-naked ones. But then there are the nightmares, the ones that chill her to the bone... like the one where she is in a strange house...in a dirty kitchen...and a sinister monster that edges ever closer. This is the nightmare that she keeps falling into, the one where, for the first time, Janie is more than a witness to someone else's twisted psyche. She is a participant...
As a Dominican-American writer, I grew up constantly looking for representation and characters I could relate to. I could never really find whatever I was looking for until I got to college and discovered the long history of infusing realistic storytelling with surreal elements that finds roots in Indigenous and Black communities in Latin America. Once I found it, I was obsessed. I was so bored of western storytelling and basic, straightforward books, and here was this well of creativity that belonged to my ancestors. That’s when I noticed that the books I loved in my childhood all had this same quality – just a touch of magic.
I love a historical fiction novel. Give me every iteration of Pride and Prejudice, give me old time-y things, give me Great Gatsby flapper dancers. I love it. Distant Waves is a really fun YA novel focused on five sisters who meet as they find their way onto the Titanic and befriend famous inventor, Nicola Tesla. The sisters come from a mother who is in the spiritualist community and they have a feeling the ship will sink, but they hop aboard anyways with a very sweet boy named Thad. There’s paranormal stuff and kooky inventions. Gotta love a sprinkle of magic.
Science, spiritualism, history and romance intertwine in Suzanne Weyn's newest novel. Four sisters and their mother make their way from a spiritualist town in New York to London, becoming acquainted with journalist W. T. Stead, scientist Nikola Tesla, and industrialist John Jacob Astor. When they all find themselves on the Titanic, one of Tesla's inventions dooms them . . . and one could save them.
As a queer speculative fiction writer, I often find myself drawn to themes of identity. Reckoning with identity and defining your own (and redefining, and redefining, and redefining) is a critical part of the queer experience in the cis-hetero norms of the real world. Fantasy and science fiction have always given readers a lens to see themselves through, and many queer readers have found their own definitions between the lines of a book. The protagonists and stories in these books couldn’t be more different, but each offers a unique and compelling vision of discovering—or making—a place for themself in their magical world.
This is a story that challenges our understanding of identity–Zhu is a girl, and she is a male novice in a monastery. Zhu wears her dead brother’s name like armor and schemes to make his fate hers as well. Zhu is as unapologetically callous as the world that discarded her. Zhu lives as a man and never wishes to live as a woman, but her pronouns never change.
Her story forces the reader to confront the heavy hand of circumstance in our lives and our definition of self. Zhu performs gender without regret or longing, it is a tool of her survival; instead, she defines herself in her ambition. And even though the person that Zhu ultimately chooses to become isn’t one we might admire, her relationship to gender speaks to those of us who sit between the boundaries of gender, who move between, or who fill more than one…
I'm a poet and fiction writer who enjoys popular feminist retellings of Greco-Roman mythology. But I want to draw attention to the rich and powerful myths beyond that canon, myths used by contemporary writers to make sense of our world, our brief mortal lives, and what lies beyond. Scholar Karen Armstrong writes in A Short History of Myth, "Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which we initially have no words. Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence." My poetry bookA Terrible Thingreinterprets goddess myths and Siren does the same with myths of hybrid women, half-fish and half-bird and more.
I adored Cho’sBlack Water Sisterfor the wit, verve, and humour with which its protagonist, Jess, newly returned to Penang from the USA, faces down being possessed by the spirit of her dead grandma, a former medium. Jess, despite her Harvard degree, hasn’t found a job and is unable to tell her conservative family about her Singapore-based girlfriend. How Jess manages to negotiate the contradictory demands of pushy aunties, powerful businessmen, and a furious goddess known as the Black Water Sister, whose temple is threatened by property developers, makes an immersive and absorbing tale.
'A sharp and bittersweet story of past and future, ghosts and gods and family, that kept me turning pages into the dark hours of the night' - Naomi Novik, author of Uprooted
This mischievous Malaysian-set novel is an adventure featuring family, ghosts and local gods - from Hugo Award winning novelist Zen Cho.
Her grandmother may be dead, but she's not done with life . . . yet.
As Jessamyn packs for Malaysia, it's not a good time to start hearing a bossy voice in her head. Broke, jobless and just graduated, she's abandoning America to return 'home'. But she…
I am a contemporary romance writer, mom, queer, dog-lover, and coffee enthusiast. I have a deep love of the genre, particularly sparkly and swoony, sapphic romcoms, with a borderline obsession with happily-ever-afters. Knowing I will always have a happy ending while smiling through pages gives me the comforting hug I sometimes need. My goal is to spread queer joy in my writing and provide a safe, celebratory, and affirming space for my readers to escape reality.
Salty, spicy, funny, and totally relatable, the main character, Delilah, became the most memorable character of the year for me. The story was funny, touching, and very, very (did I mention very) sexy. It dove into family dynamic complexities and explored what being an outsider is like.
I laughed out loud multiple times, rooted for the MC even when she was making terrible decisions, and wanted to read it again the moment it ended. Super fun read and so hard to put down.
A clever and steamy queer romantic comedy about taking chances and accepting love—with all its complications—from the author of Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail.
Delilah Green swore she would never go back to Bright Falls—nothing is there for her but memories of a lonely childhood where she was little more than a burden to her cold and distant stepfamily. Her life is in New York, with her photography career finally gaining steam and her bed never empty. Sure, it’s a different woman every night, but that’s just fine with her.
When Delilah’s estranged stepsister, Astrid, pressures her into photographing her wedding…
I am a contemporary romance writer, mom, queer, dog-lover, and coffee enthusiast. I have a deep love of the genre, particularly sparkly and swoony, sapphic romcoms, with a borderline obsession with happily-ever-afters. Knowing I will always have a happy ending while smiling through pages gives me the comforting hug I sometimes need. My goal is to spread queer joy in my writing and provide a safe, celebratory, and affirming space for my readers to escape reality.
Food and pining, what’s not to love? This book was such a fun read!
I loved the behind-the-scenes details of the restaurant scene, the food descriptions, the fierceness of the women, and the exploration of identity. The character descriptions were brilliant, and I could picture each scene like I was watching a movie.
"The feelings in this one are dialed up so high you almost can’t look at them directly: It would be like staring into the sun... Like Rosie Danan or Kate Clayborn, Barrett has a way of making palpable the full journey of a relationship" –New York Times
“Simply put, The Romance Recipe is a treat.” –USA TODAY
Amy Chambers: restaurant owner, micromanager, control freak.
Amy will do anything to revive her ailing restaurant, including hiring a former reality-show finalist with good connections and a lot to prove. But her hopes that Sophie’s skills and celebrity…
