100 books like The Book of Salt

This book made me reflect deeply on whom we praise as trailblazing “rebels” and who we ignore, erase, or brand with criminal status in the stories we inherit and then repeat thoughtlessly.

Hartman reimagines “transgression” through the lenses of race, gender, sexuality, and class in early 20th-century New York and Philadelphia. She immerses us in up-close and poignant stories of women’s nonconformity, showing how their choices were flexes not only for survival but for thriving, a refusal to be defined by the ugliest social denigrations of their time (as well as our own).

Wayward Lives is richly sourced, including recovered photographs with the evocative literary portraits. It is a moving, haunting, unforgettable book.

The devastating story of two boys unjustly sentenced to serve time in a nightmarish juvenile reform school, The Nickel Boys won a Pulitzer Prize and became a New York Times bestseller.

It is a must-read for anyone sampling literary works featuring Florida. The boys in the story, Elwood and Turner, endure and witness hellish abuse at the Nickel Academy. The boys’ haunting story, exquisitely told by Colson Whitehead, is based on Florida’s real-life Dozier school where thousands of children were tortured, raped, and murdered for more than a century.

Whitehead’s unflinching descriptions of terror and abuse can be tough to take, but they serve an important purpose, by forcing the reader to confront the hellish reality that was America under Jim Crow laws. Long after the last page is turned, if ever, this novel won’t leave you.

The Buddha in the Attic is a novel about early 20th century Japanese “picture brides,” women who came to the United States to be united with husbands they’d never met. Otsuka writes their story in the first-person plural, which you couldn’t imagine would work, but it does—and beautifully. There’s a choral quality here, a sense of a shared history that transcends any one life. Like her (also extraordinary) first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, it’s written with an almost pointillist perfection. Every word feels chosen, radiant, radical.

In this poetic, ranging novel, C. Pam Zhang reimagines an American western through the eyes of two siblings—Lucy and her younger sibling Sam, who packs with a half-carrot. We follow the two of them as they navigate natural disasters and Sinophobia in the American West circa the 1860s. In a time when I was working to steady my own sibling relationship, I found Lucy and Sam’s complicated, distanced, but nonetheless durable and caring connection deeply comforting. The book reminds us that family is complex and that there’s a lot of blurry ground between outright rejection and acceptance.

Set in Paris, with David the sexually conflicted central character who has an affair with the doomed Giovanni.

This book – written in 1956 – is an incredibly brave exploration by Baldwin into Gay/Bi sexuality – breaking new ground in LGBTQ+ representation whilst at the same time creating an atmosphere of almost stereotypically gay angst – perhaps even initiating some of the cliches around gay life that were to become mainstream – and used by heterosexual society against us.

That doesn’t stop it being a novella of great significance and febrile passion – like a passionate quickie up against the wall!

There are very few books that capture the particular suffering of loving someone and not being loved back.

Greenwell’s powerful debut novel is one of them. Set in the capital city of Bulgaria, the novel begins with an encounter that the narrator, an American teacher working abroad, has with Mitko, a sex worker. It is written in prose whose beauty, beat by beat, is as achingly beautiful as the unrequited love the narrator has for Mitko. This is one to savor slowly.

My copy is heavily underlined. Garth, a trained opera singer, reads like a dream. Accompany your reading with his readings from the work (they’re on YouTube). 

The tagline for this book is “Agatha Christie but make it gay.” But Cat Sebastian does something better than that; although like Christie, everyone is concealing a secret, in Hither, Page almost everyone’s secret is being kept for a good reason—to prevent hurting someone they care about. In this book, Leo, a jaded, world-weary spy, is sent to investigate a murder in a small village. It's just after the end of WWII, and everyone is exhausted and wishes life would just get back to normal already, none more so than James, a local doctor with a touch of PTSD who needs nothing less than to get involved with espionage and smuggling. And then he meets Leo. (Spoiler: things go better than you'd think for the two of them.)

Reading this book is like someone you care about bringing you a bowl of tomato soup on a rainy day.

This book has a provenance that’s almost like a prison sentence: released in 1953 under the title Cast the First Stone, it would have been Himes’ first novel, but its frankness about homosexual relationships in prison and the fact that a Black writer had written white main characters, made publishers shit their pants and doctor the life out of it to make it conform to 50s market expectations. Of course, in the process, they ruined it.

But in 1998, Old School Books released Himes’ "director’s cut,” a much different, more beautiful, raw, and thoughtful book that’s as much about prison life as it is about the prison of masculinity. Paradoxically, prison seems to be a place where people indulge homosexual desires, though the atmosphere somehow remains homophobic.

Reading this book could foster more compassion for queer desires, whether those of prisoners who identify as LGBTQIA+, or those who claim… show more.

We’ll start with another novel (there are many) inspired in part by the Leopold and Loeb crime. This one swaps Chicago for Pittsburgh, and changes their mismatch in IQs for a stark class divide.

One of the variations I most enjoy in this retelling is that university students Paul Fleischer and Julian Fromme are both damaged when they meet. Julian is scarred physically from a car crash in his youth, and Paul is still recovering emotionally from the death of his father.

Additionally, since the book is set in the 1970s, their sexual involvement with one another is more explicit than the original story could allow (though it still comes with social stigma).

A captivating work of dark academia and crime, the obsession between these two compels them to court their own ruin.

I'm a political junkie. And if you want Veep in book form, this is for you. Are Thom and Clay likable? Eventually, yes! Is the premise completely nuts? Totally, and I love it.

I am a huge sucker for enemies-to-lovers. And pining. And the public lens being trained on our MCs. And this one has it all. The banter, the chemistry, everything you want in a romance, plus the absurd US political system is like a cherry on top.