96 books like Saga Volume 1

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series might be uneven at the end, but the beginning is masterful.

Roland, a dusty old cowboy on the edge of reality, is the prototypical antihero. He doesn’t care much for other people, he’s got a dark past, and I wanted to follow every dusty step of his journey. The broken pieces of Roland are what make The Dark Tower series unique—that and some astral plane travelling shenanigans. With each dark deed or questionable decision, I wanted to know more about Roland and what led him to that point.

It’s difficult to stay grounded in a world with interdimensional travel and monsters, but I always felt like I had one foot planted in humanity through Roland.

I can only speak from my experience and, wow, this book hooked me right at the end of that first chapter, “but it’s happening faster.” Now to go into what that means, I will remain spoiler-free, but my jaw dropped. And the story only ramped up after that.

I love stories where the protagonist finds themselves in genuine peril, and Claire puts Harry August in a particular type of peril that truly had me terrified for his well-being in every chapter. The best type of suspense escalates in every chapter and it escalates here in this book in the best possible ways.

I’ve read this book so many times that I had to buy a hardcover edition to replace the paperback I wore out.

Michael Chabon creates an alternative world where the Jewish people didn’t last long in Israel after World War Two. They wound up in the Federal District of Sitka, Alaska, with a lease for the land from the U.S. government, but now the lease is up, and they have to move. Somewhere. Almost anywhere.

Good story if it ends there, right?

But wait, this one doesn’t.

In the middle of this political conundrum, homicide detective Meyer Landsman finds a neighbor in the fleabag hotel he calls home murdered. And get this; the dead man might be the Messiah the Jewish people have been waiting for.

Good story, End it here? Nope.

Guess who shows up unexpectedly. Meyer’s ex-wife! And now she’s his boss. Awkward!

And it’s also a hell… show more.

If Bridget Jones and Black Mirror had a baby with Arrival/“Story of Your Life” and a crime thriller, you might get something close to Drunk. In it, we encounter a familiar-but-changed post-First Contact world where Lydia (an alien in her own right, being a small-town Brit in Manhattan) works as a translator for a telepathic alien cultural attaché. The narrator’s lack of technical expertise and her fluency with the alien Logi keep the science-fiction elements of the book familiar and largely devoid of exposition. I actually listened to this book and Amy Scanlon does a great job putting you in Lydia's (and Fitz’s!) head.

Taking a transnational frame and drawing on English- and Chinese-language sources by and about Eurasians, this book uses juxtaposition to bring different perspectives to bear on each other. People’s lives, the choices they make amid various external limitations, are at the heart. The book takes a unique structural approach, with a prologue before each main chapter that describes a central story and helps ground and guide the larger narrative. In exploring interracial marriages and the lives of couples and children, the work shows how Eurasians have been producers of knowledge. Through highly diverse sources from the era, the author demonstrates that Eurasians have engaged in self-representation in complex ways and a broad range of voices and experiences comprise the category “Eurasian.”

London 1945: the heir to the largest tribe of Bechuanaland (Botswana) arrives in Britain. Seretse Khama, an urbane 24-year-old was welcomed into the elite world of Oxford. But when he fell in love with Englishwoman Ruth Williams, the full force of colonial power was brought to bear to prevent their marriage. 

It has personal resonance for me because when I met Atam, in 1964, Smethwick was in the grip of a racist campaign. Atam and I volunteered to help the sitting Labour MP, Patrick Gordon Walker combat the Conservative Peter Griffiths’ campaign. The slogan was, ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’. Atam was welcomed because he spoke Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu and we accompanied Patrick Gordon Walker canvassing. When I watched A United Kingdom, the film about Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, I knew that they had portrayed it well when the government representatives treat… show more.

Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All portrays the contact between seeming opposites: the author who grew up in Boston and traveled to New Zealand when she was a graduate student in Australia and the Maori man she met there and married; the “colonizers” who were her direct ancestors and the “natives” her husband descended from; the history of the encounters between the two groups (including the story of Captain Cook).  At the heart of this complex, mesmerizing, and unflinching story is the couple’s devotion to their three sons—boys growing up in a Boston suburb and navigating their identities as “a little bit of the conqueror and the conquered, the colonizer and the colonized” as Ms. Thompson explains to them in a letter she tucks into the folder containing her life insurance policy.

As a woman, I have experienced my share of sexism but it dims in comparison to what Lester faced in the 1950s and 1960s. When applying for a job at a bookstore, a young Lester is told the store can’t hire girls because they only have one toilet. Her plucky response—she could use the same toilet as the men—is one reason I enjoyed this book so much. 

Lester is repeatedly pushed to the sidelines even as she takes up the fight for civil rights, devoting herself to bettering the lives of others while setting aside her own dreams—for a time. Luckily Lester never completely loses her nerve. Her second act is a fun adventure to follow for those who have faced their own setbacks, no matter their gender.

We love this memoir that reads like a mystery story.

E. Dolores Johnson is the daughter of a Black father and white mother who fell in love in Indianapolis in the 1940s, when Indiana still enforced anti-miscegenation laws. Her mother “disappeared” so that she could flee to NY with the African American man she loved and marry there. Dolores’s birth certificate listed her as Black (the “one drop” of Black blood rule); she grew up in a Black family and lived in a Black neighborhood. Her mother never spoke of her white family.

The book resonated with us for both its graphic details about the racism Dolores and her African husband endured as highly educated corporate executives, including a cross-burning on their front lawn, and poignant description of her journey to find her white family and understand her biracial identity. Her mother’s response when Dolores says she is going to… show more.

I’ve always been fascinated by American Indian culture. Girls wore intricately beaded dresses and headbands with feathers. Moms carried elaborately decorated baby backpacks. Also, I didn’t understand why the cowboys couldn’t get along with the Indians. In this novel, based on a historical event, the government strikes a deal with the Cheyenne, trading 1000 white women for 1000 horses. 

The women are culled from poorhouses, prisons, and asylums, like May whose father committed her for living in sin. May jumps at the opportunity to escape the asylum. Once on the reservation, the newcomers bond and slowly adapt to their new lives and families. Readers too get an intimate portrait of Indian life, and compared to actions of the US Army, it begs the question, who should be labeled savages?