95 books like The Bone Clocks

What a weird and wonderful book. I've read and reread it several times now, and it always casts its spell. I've never been so willing—so eager—to suspend disbelief. It's Murakami's special gift.

The novel creates its own wondrous world out of what seems to be the stuff of this one—a young runaway, Colonel Sanders, alley cats, a beautiful librarian, a seashore painting, a demented old man—but the result is more magical than any fairy kingdom. I was completely carried along by the experience of an understanding beyond sense.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a female astronomer who was prominent in the mid 20th century. Cecilia showed that stars are made predominantly of hydrogen, and thus that stars were not simply ‘hot earths’. This point of view was such a blow to the scientific establishment that she was laughed away and, in the end, added a sentence to her thesis saying her results were probably incorrect. Her results were quickly proved right of course... though she was given no credit. She loved astronomy, knitting, her children, her smallholding of chickens, and she wasn’t afraid to speak of the unfairness she faced… and so I feel some very faint parallels from which I drew strength from. Sexism in science has improved so much since her time, but there remain many, many challenges and so her writings are an inspiration.

Despite the title, I think that any gender can draw something from this book. It is the sequel to her phenomenally successful book “How to be a woman”, which quite frankly changed my life and made me decide to have children. This new book can be read as a stand-alone and charts Caitlin’s thoughts on her late 30s and 40s. It begins with her usual hilarious and irreverent tone, speaking about the pressures put on you by children, parents, work, best friends, basically everything. It suddenly becomes very serious in a way I didn’t expect though, and the message of balance is one that is important for anyone to read in this way. I rarely say this and mean it but… it made me laugh and it made me cry.

This is the first self-help book I have ever read, and I read it in 2019. I have always been honest about my battle with my mental health, from anxiety to depression. This book was recommended to me by an excellent expert in the field and it changed my view of my relationship with mental health as a battle. It sounds corny putting it into words but when you learn to accept the different parts of your personality and how they help and protect you, then it is easier to say “not right now, I need to make dinner, not crawl into bed”. The analogy that stuck with me was pulling a rope opposed by a character representing anxiety on the other side, and a pit in the middle. You can pull and pull, trying to avoid the pit, or you can… let go of the rope and accept that… show more.

Barbara Kingsolver’s magnum opus follows a Georgia missionary family’s self-destruction in the dark jungles of the Belgian Congo. The story is narrated by the mother and four daughters as the father, Nathan Price, leads his family to a remote village where they live squalid lives.

In a series of misadventures, he is resolute and foolish, attempting to lead the natives to Christ. Through poverty, culture clashes, and even death, the American women learn to depend on the villagers as Nathan blindly attempts to shove them into an Americanized form of Christianity. Kingsolver’s epic is an engrossing study of how destructive blind, stubborn, prejudiced faith can become. It is, at times, heartbreaking and painfully realistic. 

Kingsolver is not afraid to question Christians' motives and show the dark side of Christianity. Yet, she is also respectful of the faith and especially respectful of the African villagers. After reading this story, I found… show more.

I love this book because it really erases the line between the real and the fantastic. I’ve been a Neil Gaiman fan since Sandman. This is a middle-grade book written for me. The path I took through this book led me back to my childhood and reminded me of Where the Wild Things Are, with its nearly seamless transition between the “real” world and the imagined.

Neil’s done this before with Caroline and the Graveyard. But Ocean is different. Here, I never lose touch with the real world. The turn to fantasy just makes the real world more dangerous. I think that’s an important change. When I was a child, when I daydreamed or pondered the things and people and dark corners that I didn’t understand, when I added the additional layer of the fantastic, it wasn’t really an escape.

It just made the challenges of being a child… show more.

A book rarely brings me to tears. I didn’t know what to expect when I first picked up this one. The main thing I love about this book is that it takes you right into the head of the main character, who happens to be a very precocious nine-year-old boy. Outwardly, the main character is on an adventure to solve a mystery, but inwardly, he’s on a journey to come to terms with his father’s death.

The protagonist–who, on the surface, is nothing like me–made me feel and address things I had not come to terms with in my life. I felt myself struggling along with the character, and then I ultimately began to heal with him, too. It’s a powerful, tragic, yet absolutely hilarious story that allowed me to forget myself for a while before realizing that I was learning about myself the entire time I read it.

When it comes to family sagas turned myth, it’s hard to top Calliope Stephanides tracing the passage of the hermaphroditic gene—transforming Callie into Cal—through three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family.

An epic origin story that moves from Asia Minor to Detroit, Michigan, complete with incest and a nuanced exploration of gender identity. It also has one of my all-time favorite novel openings ever. “Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!”

For a more traditional take on fantasy, Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria is lovely and immersive, a fascinating new world worthy of Ursula Le Guin and Gene Wolfe.

Reportedly, she created Olondria from a combination of regions in Turkey and North Africa, and it feels absolutely fresh and instantly powerful. A teenage merchant becomes haunted by the ghost of a young girl and must find a way to put her to rest.

But the story is really about the power of books and stories and language itself. It’s a love letter to adventure and open seas, harbors, and alleys, and snowy mountains in the distance.

Ms. Samatar holds several advanced degrees in language and literature, including Arabic and various African dialects, and you can feel the joy of her verbal artistry dancing on the page.

Stranger is not to be missed.

I absolutely love Sharon Shinn’s writing, both her luscious, sophisticated prose and the way she writes relationships between characters. She hits the perfect balance between well-planned, interesting plots, rich fantasy worlds, and the exact right amount of romantic subplot and character development.

This book—which follows a group of magic-wielding mystics and the reluctant, militaristic King’s Riders assigned to protect them as they travel the land, investigating a rise in anti-magic sentiment—is my favorite of her books, not least because it has some of the coziest found family dynamics and campfire friendships to be found outside of classics like The Lord of the Rings!