98 books like St. Patrick's Gargoyle

This is one book that truly qualifies as a “modern classic” of YA literature.

This is the book that launched what would go on to be a 22-book series spanning some 25 years. But really, this book is a perfectly good story all by itself. You need not read any other in the series to enjoy this tale of heroism and courage set in a richly adorned world of woodland creatures and villainous monsters.

The vivid imagery Jacques uses in his writing makes the whole world of Redwall really come to life. You might say, as Jacques himself said, that he was trying to “paint pictures with words.”

This collection of short stories remains an elegant and much-loved classic. Although Kipling was the product of an imperial era, he had a profound understanding of India and he was able to capture the wonder of the land and its people in these memorable tales. The wonderful allegorical array of characters in the stories includes the brave & kind-hearted Mowgli (the man-cub), Akela the wolf and Gray Brother, Kaa the python, Bagheera the black panther, Baloo the bear, the Bandar-log monkeys, and, of course, Mowglis nemesis, the malevolent tiger, Shere Khan. These lovely tales remain timely & heartwarming to those of us, young and old.

A unicorn believes she’s the last of her kind and undertakes a quest to find where the others have gone. This might be my favorite book!

It plays with the fantasy genre in a way that few books can. It seamlessly mixes the whimsical with the mundane and it gives us memorable characters who are unique twists on old tropes.

What I love most about this book is seeing life through the eyes of the unicorn protagonist. She’s a timeless creature—unaging, unchanging—who finds navigating a mortal world to be puzzling, inconvenient, and, at times, terrifying.

Can you imagine being immortal and suddenly being forced to confront your own impossible mortality? Read this book and you will.

When you’re in the mood for pure adventure-driven fantasy with a noble, troubled hero beleaguered on all sides, this is the one to pick up. Going back to when I first read about Theseus in grammar school and all the way through my Dungeons & Dragons years, I have always thought that minotaurs were cool and full of untapped potential. Herein lies the tale that proves I was right. It will evolve your feeling about minotaurs from mindless beasts in the labyrinth to courageous knights of quality and mettle. Don’t worry about the massive scope of the Dragon Lance Chronicles, this one can be read on its own.

A post-Donna Tart’s Secret History-esque tale of literary mystics who make up a secret society at Trinity College Dublin which tends, unfairly, to get left behind in analyses of Irish ‘Celtic Tiger’ fiction.

This is fiction from or dealing with the abrupt and accelerated modernity that hit Ireland like a cultural torpedo in the early 2000s, and quite a lot of it fails to capture the discombobulation of living through that time.

The First Verse is a campus novel about sexy secretive students and shady deeds which also plots a queer geography of Dublin’s gay scene as well as illustrating the emotional tension that exists in Dublin between city centre and its polarised northern and southern suburbs.

Dublin is such a mannered city, caught in Georgian poses while falling apart as postmodernity obliterates its value system, that it surprises me there aren’t more Dublin novels about baroque subcultures. McCrea is… show more.

In Dublin Hanged, Henry paints an evocative picture of the turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Irish capital collapsing under rising property crime, food shortages due to series of particularly inclement winters, and political unrest. He also vividly captures the events that led to the organisation of the first metropolitan uniformed police in the British Isles, which came to be widely unpopular. Henry shows, the organisation of the force was costly and in order to fund the new police, the household tax ‘skyrocketed’ virtually overnight. Henry’s analysis reveals there was a marked decline in the frequency of rape and violent assaults in the years following the introduction of the police in October 1786, indicating a degree of effectiveness of the new police despite the lack of its popularity.

Inspector Mallon covers the latter decades of the nineteenth century in Dublin history, which were characterised by unrest, extremist violence, and police strikes. The late 1800s were also the service years of the celebrated Dublin Police detective John Mallon, ‘the Great Irish Detective’. The book explores the behind-the-scenes relationships between official Dublin and the force, and between the police and the political activists. McCracken examines the impact the Dublin detectives, known as G-men due to their work in the G Division, had on undermining the political threats and bringing known Fenians and members of the Invincibles, responsible for the horrific Phoenix Park murders, to trial.

Foley depicts a struggle of finding oneself and learning where one belongs, and holding onto the everchanging definition especially when the geography surrounding us suddenly changes. Maggie and her family migrate from Chicago to Ireland, leaving behind her favorite uncle, and musical influence, the wayward Kevin. Add to this the backdrop of the anticipation of attending a Nirvana concert and you have all the fixings for a well-rounded tale of love, loss, and living. Having had the pleasure of meeting Foley a time or two, I can attest that her sense of setting is as apparent in her identity as an Irish Chicago resident as ever, and this comes through in her characters, who illustrate the same.

This is one of several excellent books that explores how nonhuman animals shaped cities (see also Andrew Robichaud’s Animal City, Frederick L. Brown’s The City is More Than Human, Dawn Day Biehler’s Pests in the City, and Hannah Velten’s Beastly London, for example). Cities are multispecies spaces and they have always been so, even as the history of a given city shifts and changes. When we walk through a city like Dublin today we may not immediately think about the many, many nonhuman animals who used to roam the same streets and pathways we walk on today. And yet, as Juliana Adelman explores in this book, there are hints and traces of this animal history if we know where to look.

This Stella prize-winning novel is so mysterious, the ominous atmosphere shudders off the page.

It’s a modern-day parable about ten women who are abducted and held prisoner in the Australian desert. Gradually they realised the common thread between them is they’ve all been involved in a sex scandal with a powerful man.

Wood ingeniously takes to the patriarchy with a blow torch. It’s breathtakingly powerful. Reading the final line, I shut my eyes and my heart hurt. In a good way. 

"Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves."