13 books like Paupers' Graves

This book opened in a graveyard and never let me go from there.

It’s not the sort of book I expected to like, let alone be wowed by or to be pleasing to a kid, but it works so well. Neil Gaiman’s writing is almost never stronger than it is here and every page kept me hooked to the point where I just wanted to keep reading, page after page.

This book scared the bejeebers out of me when I was just a teen. (Not fair, Steve.) I think it’s a highly underrated King novel, if possible, maybe because the various movie versions flopped. Sure, it’s a horror novel, but I was stricken by the story’s messages about dealing with grief due to the death of a loved one. And it also had the age-old message that we all need to remember: if it seems too good to be true, it absolutely is.

I loved the New England vernacular and characters. I also enjoyed how something as simple as a cat’s death can lead to something infinitely worse. I found it an emotional, tense, and spooky supernatural ride.

I loved BirdBox, but then I read Unbury Carol and discovered Josh Malerman had managed to peer directly into my brain and write a book just for me. I don’t know how he did it, and I don’t really want to know because it’s possibly more than a little freaky, but there you go.

This is not your typical horror novel. I’m not sure if it’s even horror, but who cares? It feels like a real olde-worlde adventure yarn where steampunk meets western and they have a scrap to decide who is best, and the only winner is the reader.

I know what you’re thinking: is this really a graveyard? To be honest: Who knows?

But… there are things buried underground, so I’m including it because this is a great book. Sometimes you read something which has such a perfect idea at its core that all you can do is devour it with a curl of envy growing in your heart as you think to yourself “I really wish I’d come up with that.” The window in the ground is most definitely one of those books. 

It is.. odd. But good odd. The sort of odd where you recognise the world being described and yet is it different enough from reality to make you question what else might be hidden out there.

If you’ve read all of the books on this list and are looking for something new, this book is the story of Robin Hood with all the backstabbing, politicking, and civil unrest of A Game of Thrones. Though not “Fantasy” (there is no magic, second-world, divine intervention, etc), this historical fiction novel was no less epic, and I would be remiss to leave it off this list.

As someone who exclusively reads fantasy and some sci-fi, I find this story (and its sequel, Lionhearts) to fit right into my reading list. The use of character perspective was so powerful because despite there being six primary POV characters who are diametrically opposed to one another in different ways, I somehow found myself rooting for all of them. Each character was so convincing in their justifications and righteousness that every chapter constantly reflected on who was in the right.

This… show more.

The 12th and final novel in John Harvey’s series about Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick, the jazz-loving, exotic sandwich-eating loner who investigates crimes in the East Midlands city of Nottingham where I’ve spent a lot of my working life.

Darkness, Darkness is partly set in 1984 during the miners’ strike which threatened to tear England apart. Thirty years later the remains of a young woman, an activist who campaigned for justice while her husband continued to work during the strike, are found in a garden.

You root for Resnick, the world-weary detective who despite coming across every possible flaw in the human condition is still driven to bring criminals to justice – even if this means troubled times in his life come back to haunt him.

This book is a Robin Hood retelling. While both our Robin’s fight for social change and the poor while falling in love along the way, S.L. Prater’s has a gender swap twist as features a thieving witch pestering the sheriff of Nottingham. I believe Robin being a woman subverts expectation and by seeing the known in a new light like that makes the world a bit more empathic to each other. I think the old and known can change and still hold so much heart.

Townscape is more than a book on how good cities are shaped. It is a book that describes generic qualities of space.

Cullens's way of understanding and analyzing urban structures with pen and paper has much to tell future architects. That the book has been around for more than sixty years is a compelling evidence of its outstanding capacity to educate generation after generation on how to create richness and avoid chaos.

Urban planners of today have much to learn from Cullen’s simple, but efficient, drawings and captions. 

This is an important book for me personally and for football more broadly. I met Justin Fashanu when I was a kid and got his autograph as he was a hero of mine. His story, vividly told in this thoroughly researched biography, is ultimately sad.

Fashanu, the first openly gay player in English football, became a star and an early Black footballing icon at Norwich City in the late 70s/early 80s. However, after a big-money move to Nottingham Forest, his life gradually unraveled and ended in tragedy.

The book details this downward spiral, which makes it a harrowing read but a vital one as it reveals so much about attitudes towards gay players in a bygone era that sadly still resonates today.

Patriarchy has silenced women for generations, and in my first book, I uncover how women have been taught to “play nice” and be “care-givers” rather than “care-receivers.” Uncovering women’s emotional reality, I expose the culture of female service and how no one is looking after mothers, not even mothers themselves. This book provides exercises to help women claim their voice, needs, and rights in all of their relationships.