67 books like The Black Tides of Heaven

This Hugo Award-winning novel has one of the most original stories I’ve read that revolves around a remarkable mother, Essun.

While Essun pretends to be ordinary, she is an orogene, a race of humans with the ability to significantly alter her environment. As a result, the orogenes are wretched exiles, feared by society and trapped in a governing system that seeks to control them.

I was immediately taken with Essun’s emotional journey as the story opens with the loss of her child. She wants to live a quiet life with her family but is pursued by officials who cannot allow her to go free.

The story really tapped into the most primal aspects of motherhood. Ultimately, it’s motherhood that strengthens Essun’s power as she unleashes it with devastating effectiveness. 

Honestly, I could’ve picked any book by McLemore. They are all absolutely stunning. McLemore’s prose is lush and poetic, rich in metaphor and nuance. Their stories have a timeless quality about them at once grounding them in reality and yet offering glimpses of the surreal and ephemeral. When the Moon Was Ours is an incredibly poignant love story between Sam, a Pakistani trans boy, and Latinx Miel who has literal roses growing out of her wrists. This story provided insight into both Pakistani and Latinx culture while weaving a breath-taking tale of love and identity.

I hate Ikea stores. To me, they are hellish landscapes and this book—set in a fictional store modelled after Ikea—just gets me! This novella is a hilarious romp through the multiverse, balancing swashbuckling adventure with quiet yet razor-sharp insight into the ebb and flow of romantic relationships. This story shows that navigating love can be even more complicated than navigating interdimensional wormholes!

This, and its sequel, is truly one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. It’s a punk rock road trip following Danielle Cain as she struggles to deal with the grief of losing her best friend while also going up against some truly bizarre characters and creatures in a utopian squatter town called Freedom. I loved the raw and unapologetic attitude of the main protagonist and the diversity of the supporting cast. This book is dark and brooding, fun and poignant in equal measure. It’s a paranormal riot and I loved every minute of it, and the follow up called The Barrow Will Send What It May.

I left this book for last because it is, perhaps, the heaviest and most gut-wrenching. In this book, Emezi crafts an exceptional paranormal story showing the true-life difficulties (that is the life-threatening and openly hostile discrimination) faced by LGBT+ people in Nigeria. A fact that’s sadly true in many other African countries too. This book has so many layers, every scene dripping with nuance and a clear tenderness for the subject matter. It would have been easy for this story to remain steeped in tragedy, but Emezi manages to elevate their characters and narrative above that, providing an ultimately heartwarming story that leaves the reader with a sense of wonder and hope while never dismissing the severity of the reality so many LGBT+ people face on the African continent.

Geek Love is one of the strangest, most fascinating, and thoroughly unsettling novels I’ve ever read. It tells the story of a carny family whose mother and father breed their own exhibit of human oddities with the help of a variety of illicit drugs, insecticides, and radioisotopes. I’ve certainly felt freakish at times, but compared to the Binewski spawn—a boy with flippers, a hunchbacked albino dwarf, resplendent piano-playing Siamese twins, and Fortunato, the normal-looking baby who has telekinetic powers—I feel downright ordinary! The story is beautiful, shocking, repulsive, exhilarating, and deeply moving all at once, and might challenge your conceptions of what you consider weird, deformed, beautiful, ugly, normal, or socially acceptable. Surprisingly, the novel was a bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award in 1989. 

This gothic-esque collection of short stories explores so many different forms of grief.

It mainly focuses on tales of women and the kinds of grief that often come from living and moving through the world as women. There is a tale of a young woman whose agency of her own body is breached by her husband removing her mysterious neck ribbon, exploring grief at a loss of trust in a relationship as well as loss of agency.

A woman left alone and isolated in the wake of a deadly global virus, left to grieve the way the world once was. Many stories that explore the oppressive, many-faced grief of the smothering patriarchy, from women who whittle down their bodies to nothing in the pursuit of beauty, to those who learn they are hardly real beyond the male gaze.

The only male author on this list, Coleman Dowell’s Southern Gothic tale is included because it contains some of the most nuanced writing of female characters I’ve ever encountered. Too Much Flesh tells the narrative of a well-endowed farmer named Jim, his petite wife Effie, and a young man, Jabez, whose mutual obsession with Jim leads to, well, something of a frenetic climax. A story within a story, the tale is told to us by a “spinster schoolteacher” (the book was published in 1977), Miss Ethel, who channels her sexual repression into this story of the farmer.

Neither Miss Ethel nor Jim’s wife, Effie, come across as one-dimensional—they feel and act like real people on the page. Dowell himself was gay and deftly handles this queer narrative in a way that is somehow both quiet and stunning, and makes an interesting case study for the time period and genre. And… show more.

One is a novel in verse I keep coming back to for the way it uses form to make the reader feel the emotional journey of its protagonists.

Crossan uses verse to capture the emotional intimacy of a relationship between two conjoined twins as they encounter challenges in everyday life, including grief. This book uses visual form so smartly and subtly to show us how these two depend on each other, as well as what it means for Tippie to find herself away from her twin. 

Loot is a really fun book about kids for whom thievery runs in the family. Twelve-year-old March sees his father die during a heist, and now March is on a mission to find the precious stones that will reverse the curse on his family. On the way, he meets the twin sister he never knew he had, and together, they set out to find the jewels. What I love most about this book is that March is kind of an anti-hero. He’s not the all-around good guy that readers find in so many middle grade books. He loves being a thief and wants to carry on his father’s legacy. But, of course, March is a great kid at heart, and I couldn’t help but root for him all the way through this maze of a mystery.