Here are 92 books that Peace Like a River fans have personally recommended if you like
Peace Like a River.
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As a goth chick from the American South, I’m obsessed with stories of old evil from the past finding its way into the present. I even live in a haunted house, a disintegrating Craftsman built in 1901. Our ghosts are very cozy, two cat-loving maiden ladies who were co-presidents of the local temperance society. We’ve given up on keeping liquor in our liquor cabinet; bottles cracking and leaking, glassware broken for no reason. And we’ve gotten so used to seeing and hearing their famous cat, Tom, we barely react anymore—a huge orange tabby tomcat who runs past our feet and jumps on the foot of our bed.
Reading this book made me stop writing my own Southern gothic ghost book in the middle, rethink it completely, and start over again from scratch, and I wasn’t even mad about it. It’s just that good. It’s about thirteen-year-old Jojo and his family—his much-loved and very much dying grandmother, his strong, silent, and protective grandfather, his wild child mother, Leonie, his baby sister, Kayla, who looks to Jojo to keep her safe, and his white father, Michael, who just got out of jail. Everybody has secrets, and everybody sees ghosts. This literary novel won the National Book Award, but I promise you, horror readers, it will scare you silly and break your heart.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2017
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017
SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW STATESMAN, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, TIME AND THE BBC
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
'This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare. A must' Margaret Atwood
'A powerfully…
I knew I wanted to be a writer of fiction when I was 10 years old, being raised by my father. He thoughtfully gave me a typewriter, and plenty of other encouragement too. As a youngster, I couldn’t read enough about what youngsters read about: animals, sports, cowboys, child detectives. Soon, I came to love books that probed human conflict through characters who reached deeply into my soul. Not simplistic “good versus evil” driven principally by plot, but gut-pulling interpersonal struggle coming to life (and sometimes death) in characters facing moral and legal dilemma, and facing it with wit, humor, and human frailty.
I think this novel did more to open white minds to the needless social harm of racism than any other book. It’s almost unparalleled success in reaching American readers of all ages, in my view, places it at or very near the top of the list of great American fiction.
Though not Harper Lee’s intent, her literary and commercial blockbuster remains an enduring tutorial for writers like me: writers preoccupied with storytelling and the voices telling it. Sometimes, after a long writing session, I read a random chapter of Mockingbird to relax and to keep myself modest.
'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'
Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped…
I’ve always believed in magic, the kind that’s just around the corner, out of view. I loved books and libraries. So, it was no surprise that I became a teacher, and later, a poet and novelist. Now, as the author of four novels, I want my books to capture what I love best from poetry and teaching: beautiful, unexpected language, a touch of wonder, and themes that probe the big questions of life. A library shows up in most of my novels along with a bit of the fantastic.
What’s a better family secret than a golem tasked with protecting the main character?
Set against World War II in France, remarkable characters that I rooted for faced unspeakable odds. The book is a testament to what makes us human: The power of love and redemption. The golem, Ava, is a fully fleshed character with her own character arc.
'Oh, what a book this is! Hoffman's exploration of the world of good and evil, and the constant contest between them, is unflinching; and the humanity she brings to us - it is a glorious experience. The book builds and builds, as she weaves together, seamlessly, the stories of people in the most desperate of circumstances - and then it delivers with a tremendous punch. It opens up the world ... in a way that is absolutely unique. By the end you may be weeping' Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive…
I grew up as a closeted homosexual in a fundamentalist Christian home, enduring nearly two decades in a crisis of faith. Sermons frequently warned of damnation for my natural inclinations, pushing me to fast, pray, and achieve to resist temptation. This crisis gradually resolved over the eight years I spent writing Playing by the Book, the first coming-out novel to win a National IPPY Medal in religious fiction. Although I don’t consider myself a spiritual writer, I am drawn to stories that explore existential struggles and triumphs, including those related to a crisis of faith—much like the characters in the novels on this list.
I loved this book for its fantastical portrayal of a Pacific voyage that mirrors the internal conflicts many of us face. Like Pi, who embraced multiple faiths during his ordeal, I searched for answers to reconcile my faith and sexuality across various denominations, religions, and philosophies.
Pi’s story as he journeys across the Pacific, a tiger in tow, allowed me to reflect on the moments when I felt alone, wrestling with my faith in the face of an overwhelming challenge, given my fundamentalist upbringing.
After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.
Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi Patel, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with the tiger, Richard Parker, for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his…
I started my academic life with two passions: listening to those I was researching and writing in ways that were accessible to all readers. I wasn’t willing to bow down to orthodoxies that would stifle my capacity to think and to write and make my way into new and emergent ideas and practices. Questions of ethics threaded their way through it all, not the kind of rule-based nonsense of university ethics committees, but ethics that enabled me to consider how matter matters and to re-think what we are in relation to each other and to the Earth.
There is a purity and grace about this book that is deeply moving; it tells me about the love of a good man, as he explores his own life in the face of death. All he has to leave his small son is not money but the possibility of dedicating oneself to a good life.
It is set in middle America, in 1956, when I, as it happens, was ten years old. Everything that matters to me is captured here in this exquisite book. It is written beautifully, not ever weighed down by mind-numbing cliches. If only everyone would read this book, I thought as I sobbed my way through it, there would be no wars, and there would be time and inspiration for healing the planet. I take it with me wherever I go.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK
In 1956, towards the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son: 'I told you last night that I might be gone sometime . . . You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother's. It's a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I'm always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after…
I’m a writer. I also teach plot through non-credit university workshops and writer groups, and the one thing I stress is that storytelling is about reader experience. Worlds are a huge part of that experience. A degree in social anthropology makes me very conscious of the way my characters interact with their worlds. My fictional cowboys currently reside in Montana. But what if I wanted to move my cowboys to Manhattan? That requires a whole different story world—one my characters may or may not be comfortable in. My readers would now have to buy into the change in location. See the effect the world has on the story?
The Far Pavilions is one of the most beautiful, culturally aware, historically accurate, and vivid books I’ve ever read, and I re-read it every few years.
I’ve loaned this book and not gotten it back so many times that I’m sure it’s still in print because of the number of copies I’ve had to buy to replace it. Based on the history of British direct rule in India, it tells the story of a young British boy raised as Indian by the nanny who saves his life during the Sepoy uprisings.
He struggles with having a foot in two worlds and not really belonging to either, and the author does a fantastic job of illustrating this. India truly comes alive.
This is a BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of M.M. Kaye's epic novel of love and war. M.M. Kaye's masterwork is a vast, rich and vibrant tapestry of love and war that spans over twenty years, moving from the foothills of the Himalayas, to the burning plains, to the besieged British Mission in Kabul. It begins in 1857 when, following the Indian Mutiny, young English orphan Ashton is disguised by his ayah Sita as her Indian son, Ashok. As he forgets his true identity, his destiny is set...A story of divided loyalties and fierce friendship; of true love made impossible…
I consider myself above all to be an American Adventurer; I have been traveling in unorthodox methods for the last eight years beginning as a vagabond living in my car, a wilderness survival instructor in the Mojave, a privately contracted sailor in the Caribbean, funding an exciting independent film in remote Northern Pakistan, teaching English in Central Europe, and planting trees as part of a forestry project in remote Australia. I have committed myself to developing an organic method of traveling purposefully towards a vague destination and have turned it into a way of life.
Some people will argue that of all the movies adapted from books, the book will always win, but in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I believe the film adaptation is more alluring than the original short story, but it would not be fair to discredit that this film was influenced by Fitzgerald’s original satire of a child born aging in reverse.
While the movie veers away from the short story in time period, setting and character development, the short story draws more into the philosophical questions I believe we ourselves as a society are subconsciously thinking—even today, nearly a century after it’s writing as to how we contradict the specific wisdom that comes with age while also relinquishing it due to natural mental decline and end up treating our elderly like children.
Unlike the film, the story takes place just after the American Civil War and draws a…
As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never…
I grew up in northern Wisconsin, where a love of books set my imagination on fire as I waited out the long, cold winters. Southern writers were my favorites because they took me from the plains of my northern home to a landscape vined in lushness, where people had names like Scout, Calpurnia, and Battle Fairchild; where places had names like Yoknapatawpha, and where a streetcar was named Desire. I got lost in that place of different constellations with its mint julep and velvet evenings, and its readiness to accept magic. It wasn’t until my children were grown that I finally earned bachelor's and master’s degrees, and determined that I would be a writer.
Finch Nobles is a gutsy, burn-scarred loner. She’s also a cemetery caretaker who can hear the dead talking. She listens to their stories and engages them in conversation, since they’re the only friends she has. This story is strong from the start, and so are all of its characters. I found it easy to love as I witnessed Finch finding out what she needed to know.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Sheri Reynolds delivers an emotionally moving novel of Finch Nobles, a girl severely burned as a child, who later discovers she can hear the voices of the dead.
After sustaining terrible burns from a household accident as a young girl, Finch Nobles refuses the pity of her hometown. The brave and feisty loner finds comfort in visiting her father’s cemetery, where she soon discovers that she can hear the voices of those buried underground. When she begins to speak to them, their answers echo around her in a remarkable chorus of regrets, explanations, and…
I grew up in northern Wisconsin, where a love of books set my imagination on fire as I waited out the long, cold winters. Southern writers were my favorites because they took me from the plains of my northern home to a landscape vined in lushness, where people had names like Scout, Calpurnia, and Battle Fairchild; where places had names like Yoknapatawpha, and where a streetcar was named Desire. I got lost in that place of different constellations with its mint julep and velvet evenings, and its readiness to accept magic. It wasn’t until my children were grown that I finally earned bachelor's and master’s degrees, and determined that I would be a writer.
This one is all about the enchantment and disenchantment that comes with love. In it, women fall for the wrong sort of man and a grieving mother grows “belladonna, thorn apple, hemlock, black nightshade...everything poisonous” in her garden. The story is told in reverse until it comes to 12-year-old Lucy Green in 1952 who blames herself for a tragic accident, then spends forty years looking for the angel she hopes will renew her faith.
This haunting, poignant and addictive story travels effortlessly across time, telling the tale of three generations of women who make the wrong choices and have to live with the consequences.
It opens in London in the present day, when an envious sibling comes to her sister's wedding. Back in the Swinging Sixties, the bridegroom's conventional English mother, Freida, behaves in a wholly unconventional way while working in a Knightsbridge hotel. Even before that, the seeds of tragedy are sown in the Fifties, when twelve-year-old Lucy first visits London and the same hotel. Precocious, impatient, wise beyond her years, Lucy becomes…
As the daughter of a prim and proper New England family, expectations were that I would follow societal norms: attend college, get married, and raise a family. I knew practically nothing about the world outside the United States, nor had I any curiosity about it. Everything changed in 1980 when I took a job as an accountant working for one of the world’s greatest adventurers, Richard Bangs. He literally dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the remotest heart of Africa, where I became infected by wanderlust. Ever since, as a single woman, I have embraced a life of adventure traveling around our amazing planet.
This story also tells of a river journey by four young orphans who in 1932 escape from a horrid Indian training school and travel for months down the Mississippi River. They head into the unknown, unprotected from the perils they encounter.
On my journey, I needed to be constantly vigilant for natural predators like lions, hippos, and crocs. These children had to be on the lookout for human predators: the search party sent looking for them, drifters, grifters, and traveling faith healers. Facing each obstacle we encountered on our trips, we managed not only to survive but actually thrive in hostile surroundings.
1932, Minnesota-the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O'Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent's wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.
Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphans will fly into the unknown and cross paths with others…
