77 books like Sugar Money

When I first read Cormac McCarthy, I was awestruck by the brutal beauty of the way he used language. His way with words is almost enough to make you look past the truly horrendous things he describes in this book . . . all while telling what appears to be a simple “tale of the Old West.”

I have never read a singularly more elegantly written book, yet I’ve never read anything as mind-numbingly horrific. This book is so intense and complex that it is considered the only Cormac McCarthy book that can never be made into a movie. (He also wrote All The Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country For Old Men.)

Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed Witchfinder General, was one of the most venal and vicious Englishmen to ever live. This is a brutal novel, a veritable catalogue of horror, but a necessary lesson in man’s inhumanity and corruption. There is an authenticity here that will but ice in your marrow. 

I am including The Underground Railroad as it’s both historical fiction and magical realism—a beautiful surrealist imagining of Civil War history. This inventive novel follows Cora, who is enslaved on a plantation in Georgia. When Cora hears of the underground railroad, she plots her escape—but in this book, the railroad is more than a secret network. It is a real, physical, underground train. Cora must fight for her life and her freedom on a harrowing journey north, evading the slave hunter Ridgeway as he seeks to track her down. Cora’s strength and independence make her a character that will stick with you.

I am particularly drawn to stories about early adventures at sea. 

Life on a whaling ship was difficult and bred all manner of contemptible acts by the crew. When the journey was ill-fated, like the one in this book, it pointed the spotlight directly on the tainted core of ship life. 

This book introduced the greedy side of the 1800s whaling industry and told the story surrounding the doomed whaling ship and the ship’s drug-addicted surgeon. It presented the raw side of humanity and what lengths desperate men resort to in order to survive. It was shades of whaling seamen Herman Melville and John Rumell’s experiences surviving with savages. 

The story was riveting and begged the question: Who are the real savages?

As a bookseller as well as a writer and editor, I believe strongly that good children’s books should also be read by adults.

The setting here is 1683, and the River Thames is frozen. I studied history, and I often stand on London Bridge and try to imagine the flowing water as a field of ice with stalls and side shows on the frozen surface. Embankments and new bridges mean the river no longer freezes, but this story brings historical London to life and allows us to feel what it would have been like.

A magic nocturnal Frost Fair, a lost boy, and a determined twin sister are at the heart of this bewitching story, which is dark yet uplifting–a perfect combination that had me gripped throughout. 

There is something very powerful about finding beauty in a dark and gritty situation, as Cory Anderson does in this novel. Told in a multi-person viewpoint, the language is powerful yet also poetic and shines a light into the dark, uncomfortable spaces of poverty and crime, and limited options, but still comes back to the hope, love, and friendship that can exist in-between those places.

There is cold, and then there is the unforgiving cold of an Idaho winter. The setting echoes the biting poverty that Jack and his younger brother are forced into by events out of their control. The crimes of his father drag Jack and his brother further into a desperate situation with no safe way out, even with the help of Ava, who has demons of her own. The despair of poverty, the desperation of trying to do the right thing and being forced not to,… show more.

This one was very unique in that it barely introduces the dystopian world in the first book and focuses on it much later in the series despite the significant impact it has on the characters from the very first page. The lead is male, which is becoming less common these days, and gives us a more calculating look into the world of dystopia. I enjoyed seeing things from another angle as that really reminds me to explore those less-common threads in my own writing as well. And what could be more interesting than people disappearing on their birthday and then finding out who is taking them, right?

This book explores grief tied together with a mysterious death. Holly received ominous, out-of-character messages from her brother before he suddenly took his own life, leaving her to try to figure out the truth of his violent death while working through her own grief.

She finds herself moving in with Dane’s girlfriend, Maura, in her gothic, haunting townhouse, hoping to get clues and to see her own grief reflected in the other woman’s. And while this grief does bring them together, the shallowness and violence of Maura’s mourning makes it clear that she knows more about Dane’s death than she’s sharing.

This is a story of how grief can become the haunted thing that lurks in gothic halls, and the extremes that it can drive people to, completely upending one’s world.

My college literature professor lent me a copy of this novel twenty-five years ago and I spent an entire summer savoring it while it made me fall in love with baseball.

This epic novel follows the lives of the Chance brothers as they come of age, leave home, and grapple with the changing world of the 1960s. And it’s about the passion and drama and absolutely relational nature of baseball.

I still have my professor’s copy of the book on my shelf. I tried to return it a few years ago, but George wouldn’t take it back. He, apparently, has a habit of keeping several copies on hand to give to students so they’ll fall in love with it as much as he did.

In this fictional story about the Battle of Gettysburg, two 11-year-old buglers (one from the 71st Pennsylvania Infantry and the other from 11th Mississippi) meet in the woods and share some moments in conversation away from the din of the fighting.

The story helps young readers reflect on the common humanity and suffering of the soldiers on both sides during the Civil War. In elegant prose and beautiful pictures it humanizes the experiences, fears, and uncertainties faced by these men and boys (and their families).