100 books like Runner

The one thing I appreciate above all else in a novel is emotional gravitas. That feeling transcends time and place; the only thing that matters is what happens to the character(s) you care about. You feel your heart beating, and when you finally put the book down, all you can say is ‘wow.’

Stacy Willingham’s debut lingers long in the memory after the book is read. Her talent at describing setting is any writer’s dream, and her characters snuck into my heart and made me care deeply, all the way to the pulse-pounding conclusion. It is the best thriller I have read in the past half-decade, only challenged by her subsequent novels.

As a twin myself, I’m a sucker for a thriller with a creepy and unreliable twin relationship. The setting in a secluded forest added an intensity to every scene as the two sisters, one an agoraphobe being dutifully cared for by the other, have their quiet escape rocked by the disappearance of a young girl in a nearby cabin.

You spend the entire book trying to figure out which twin might be the unreliable narrator, only to slam headfirst into incredible twists and an ending that deftly incorporates the singular importance of the forest in which they live.

A traumatizing incident that brings teens together, only to be rehashed years later when one of them goes missing during a storm in a secluded location? Megan Miranda’s book hits every mark for a must-read thriller.

I loved the weaved flashbacks, hinting at what happened without giving the full story, even until the end. Knowing enough about who survived—and who must not have—made every flashback fraught with foreboding tension. One of the things I love most in a book is when the story seems complete, and then one tiny extra detail is revealed, completely changing how you think.

I felt like I was there, both in the present at the Outer Banks beach house and in the past, on the banks of the river after the horrible bus crash.

Harlan Coben is the master of the twists and reveals that wrench your heart out, and I could have picked any of a dozen of his books here. He places ordinary people in extraordinary situations and rarely resorts to using a simple ‘evil’ bad guy. There’s always meaning, there’s always hope, and often there is pain as well.

Four kids disappear in the woods, presumed lost forever, until a murder victim twenty years later is discovered to be one of the missing kids. Paul, the brother of one of the missing kids, finally has new hope that his sister is still out there. That’s what’s best about Harlan Coben: he provides hope and heart and the reader has no clue what the next twist will be.

I am sure that the authenticity of someone who has ‘been there and done it’ is unchallengeable. Airey Neave, who tragically died in 1979 at the hands of the Irish National Liberation Army, was one such. After successfully escaping from the PoW camp at Colditz, he joined MI9, the War Office section that supported escaping PoWs and downed aircrew. This strikes a chord with me as a former pilot. In this book, he tells the stories of French men and women of all ages and backgrounds, who, at great personal danger, formed the backbone of secret escape lines. The narrative is not over-dramatised and the matter-of-fact style is one I respect, but the courage of those who harboured escapees or acted as couriers comes through clearly. 

This is the story of Allied POWs who dug escape tunnel after escape tunnel. Simultaneously, they plotted to drive their captors crazy while stealthily equipping successful escapees to evade the enemy as they fled across hostile territory. Although the story has been told several times, including in a movie with the same name, this version was written by a journalist who had been in the camp.

The book is alternately laugh-out-loud funny to awe-inspiring, heroic to tragic. While entertaining, it also raises questions about human strengths and weaknesses. What would you do in the same situation? This has been one of my favorite books since I first read it.  

Saturday was the codename given to Airey Neave when he worked for MI9, the branch of military intelligence for escape and evasion in World War Two. Neave has achieved legendary status as the first British man to successfully escape from Colditz Castle, Leipzig in Germany in 1942, and make it back to England. This fortress – nicknamed ‘the camp for naughty boys’ by British officer POWs – was believed by the Germans to be impenetrable and from which no prisoner could ever escape. Neave’s success vastly raised the morale of airmen and soldiers going into action because they knew it was possible to escape from such camps. Neave was perfectly placed to write this first history of MI9, placing on record the establishment and running of the major escape lines as well the bravery of thousands of women and men of Nazi-occupied countries who aided MI9 and saved over 35,000… show more.

Although The Scar is the second book in the Bas Lag series, I prefer it to Perdido Street Station (which is also glorious.) The Scar takes to the seas, a place I always prefer to be, in the form of the floating, roving city of Armada.

We come aboard (as it were) and experience life on Armada—its precincts, villages, towns, secrets, and its people—swordsmen and librarians and vampires and the mysterious pair who run the place—The Lovers (that’s the only name we get) through the eyes of Bellis Coldwine, a prickly, difficult, but fascinating woman who would literally rather be anywhere else.

I get where she’s coming from but I would absolutely book a cruise on Armada!

The copy I read came from my dad’s collection. It was signed by the author. I don’t know how Dad knew Pappy Boyington, but years ago when Dad and I were walking through a throng of people at Oshkosh, Pappy broke away from a conversation with two very attractive women to wave and call Dad by name. A teenager at the time, I stood in utter shock and amazement while my dad talked planes with a legend. Though the book covers Pappy’s exploits before, during, and after World War II, a large segment is devoted to his time in a Japanese prison camp. One of his fellow detainees was Louis Zamperini, famous Olympic miler. 

As public awareness of mass incarceration has grown, reformers, and even law enforcement, have attempted to build alternatives, policies, and institutions they argue are alternatives to prisons and jails. These alternatives include policies like electronic monitoring, drug courts, halfway houses, lockup mental health facilities, and court supervision. In this book, Law and Schenwar systematically demolish the notion that such initiatives do anything more than widen the net of incarceration. In their view, these “alternatives” create programs and institutions based on the notion that altering the form or style of punishment will eliminate mass incarceration. Instead, they argue this requires the elimination of the paradigm of punishment and the establishment of programs outside the criminal legal system that provide freedom and opportunities for targeted populations.