Here are 100 books that The Burning Girls fans have personally recommended if you like
The Burning Girls.
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I've been writing for 20 years, and the more I learn about the craft, the less interested I am in big, bombastic thrillers about the end of the world. Now I'm more impressed by books that do a lot with a little. Some talented writers can spin a gripping story out of nothing more than two people in a room (Stephen King's Misery is one of my all-time faves). The domestic noir genre lends itself to this kind of minimalism. Sure, serial killers are scary, but not as scary as the thought that your spouse might not be who they seem.
Christine has a brain injury, which causes her memories to degrade every time she sleeps. She wakes up every morning as a blank slate, and her devoted husband explains who she is and then helps her get through the day. Unbeknownst to him, she starts keeping a journal—and soon realizes that his story about how she was injured is a little different each time.
I'm never in the mood for a thriller with a big twist in the penultimate chapter. I always want one with a big twist at the end of every chapter, and this book absolutely delivers. Is the husband a good guy or a bad guy? I changed my mind a dozen times over the course of this book, expertly manipulated by the author. I read the whole thing aloud to my wife on a long drive, and the time went by in a blink.
I am the author of the DI Winter Meadows series. I love reading and writing crime fiction, especially books set in rural locations. I live in South Wales where I go hiking mountains, exploring caves, and discovering waterfalls. I take inspiration from these remote areas and close-knit communities to create the settings, characters, and plots for my books.
The book grabs your attention from the first chapter.
Lenny Moon is a struggling Private investigator who is asked to look into the disappearance of Betsy Blake. Betsy disappeared 17 years ago when she was 4 years old. The catch? Betsy’s father is about to go into heart surgery with only a 50 percent chance of survival. The clock is ticking.
The book quickly draws you in and keeps up the tension throughout. The characters are engaging, particularly the girl who is kept in the basement. The clues are all there and even if you think you’ve worked it out the twist at the end will leave you reeling. I raced through this book desperate to know the outcome.
Whatever happened to Betsy Blake? can be read as a standalone story.
Betsy Blake was only four years old when she vanished outside her family home in Dublin. Her father – wracked with guilt for the past seventeen years – still can’t bring himself to admit the search is over, despite the fact that his wife has moved on and police have closed off the investigation.
When he is informed he must undergo major heart surgery that he only has a fifty percent chance of surviving, Gordon Blake hires a…
I am the author of the DI Winter Meadows series. I love reading and writing crime fiction, especially books set in rural locations. I live in South Wales where I go hiking mountains, exploring caves, and discovering waterfalls. I take inspiration from these remote areas and close-knit communities to create the settings, characters, and plots for my books.
In 1963 13-year-old Alison Carter vanishes from her home. A man is convicted and hung for her murder. Her body is never found. 35 years later Catherine Heathcote is writing a book about the Carter investigation, but she is not prepared for what she is about to discover.
The story is atmospheric with well-drawn characters. The first half of the book follows the investigation in 1963 and gives you an insight into the family of the missing girl. I found myself fully immersed in the tight-knit community. Nothing is as it seems, and this is one book you won’t want to miss.
A riveting psychological thriller from the Number One bestselling Queen of crime fiction - Val McDermid.
In the Peak District village of Scardale, thirteen-year-old girls didn't just run away. So when Alison Carter vanished in the winter of '63, everyone knew it was a murder.
Catherine Heathcote remembers the case well. A child herself when Alison vanished, decades on she still recalls the sense of fear as parents kept their children close, terrified of strangers.
Now a journalist, she persuades DI George Bennett to speak of the hunt for Alison, the tantalizing leads and harrowing dead ends. But when a…
Liveaboard sailor Cass Lynch thinks her big break has finally arrived when she blags her way into skippering a Viking longship for a Hollywood film. However, this means returning to the Shetland Islands, the place she fled as a teenager. When a corpse unexpectedly appears onboard the longship, she can…
I am the author of the DI Winter Meadows series. I love reading and writing crime fiction, especially books set in rural locations. I live in South Wales where I go hiking mountains, exploring caves, and discovering waterfalls. I take inspiration from these remote areas and close-knit communities to create the settings, characters, and plots for my books.
This was the first book I read by Sharon Bolton and it got me hooked on this author.
The book draws you into the lives of the residents of a small village where beneath the idyllic setting lurks secrets and malice. We follow newcomer Clara, a local vet, who is called upon when poisonous snakes turn up in the residents’ homes. The book has a brooding atmosphere which will leave you checking under the bed before you sleep.
Clara Benning, a veterinary surgeon in charge of a wildlife hospital in a small English village, is young and intelligent, but nearly a recluse. Disfigured by a childhood accident, she generally prefers the company of animals to people. But when a local man dies following a supposed snakebite, Clara's expertise is needed. She's chilled to learn that the victim's postmortem shows a higher concentration of venom than could ever be found in a single snake—and that therefore the killer must be human.
Assisted by a soft-spoken neighbor and an eccentric reptile expert, Clara unravels sinister links to an abandoned house,…
I’m a French-born, London-based novelist and food writer. As an author, I have nurtured my voice at the kitchen counter, where I find language loosens up and as a reader, cookbooks, food memoirs, and novels sit in one pile on my bedside table. Food is never not political and I find that its depiction is a wonderful narrative tool, for plot development with the setting of a meal or to portray a character through ingredients for examples. The relationship between food, culture, and writing is something I also explore with my podcast, book club, and culinary community The Salmon Pink Kitchen. Happy reading, and bon appétit!
I devoured this modern classic comedy of manners like a good period drama.
The novel follows the adolescent years of Sebastian, duke and heir of the country house Chevron, where his mother Lucy plots luncheons and indulges parties where alcohol, games, and affairs are the prime guests. The tone is witty and the food, from the ingredients on display to the behaviours of those who eat, is used as a powerful show of appearances.
An instant bestseller when it was published in 1930, this glittering satire of Edwardian high society features a privileged brother and sister torn between tradition and a chance at an independent life.
Sebastian is young, handsome, moody, and the heir to Chevron, a vast and opulent ducal estate. He feels a deep love for the countryside and for his patrimony, but he loathes the frivolous social world his mother and her shallow friends represent. At one of his mother’s decadent house parties, Sebastian meets two people who shake his sense of self: Leonard Anquetil, a lowborn arctic explorer, who questions…
I grew up a closeted gay in a very straight world. I enjoy reading both true and fictional stories about how others grew up and came out. I decided to write about coming-out and coming-of-age because this mixture of topics just didn’t exist when I was a teen. The books that I have listed here are ones that I feel capture both the realism of what is, what we wished had been, and the hope of what could be—a world where "coming out" wouldn’t be necessary.
Love gone wrong. I grew to really care about Lars (Conner... somewhat), and I turned the pages because why the love had gone wrong was a mystery until late in the novel. I thought Lars’ pining away over a boy he cared about but hadn’t talked to in three years was compelling, especially in an age where we are encouraged to "move on" or "get over it."
I loved this story and plan to read it again soon!
Science, Shakespeare, and superheroes come together in this heartwarming tale of friendship, love, and second chances
This Valentine's Day, sixteen-year-old Lars Lofgren is crabby. Everyone is in love and reminding him he isn't. Things proceed from bad to worse when Connor Perry, Lars's former best friend and first crush who hasn't spoken with him in three years, starts dating social media star Jaden-Dominic Choi.
Joining an illustrious cast of characters for a school production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the former friends suddenly find themselves back in the same social circle, but it's a complicated affair as Lars can't seem to…
Riley Masterson has moved to Greenbrier, SC, anxious to escape the chaos that has overwhelmed her life.
Questioned in a murder in Alabama, she has spent eighteen months under suspicion by a sheriff’s office, unable to make an arrest. But things in gentrifying Greenbrier are not as they seem. As…
I grew up a closeted gay in a very straight world. I enjoy reading both true and fictional stories about how others grew up and came out. I decided to write about coming-out and coming-of-age because this mixture of topics just didn’t exist when I was a teen. The books that I have listed here are ones that I feel capture both the realism of what is, what we wished had been, and the hope of what could be—a world where "coming out" wouldn’t be necessary.
I loved the mixture of third and first person that this story is told in. The main character Dillon is both fun, sad, and imminently well-drawn. His harrowing dash from Perth to Sydney, his relationships with Amy, Pastor Pete, wonderful Dixie, and Stephen, and his sheer will to be his authentic self, had me both scared and happy for him.
I loved the mixture of coming-out and coming-of-age with some thriller elements thrown in, not something that I see a lot of in coming-of-age novels.
A teenager's quest for freedom leads him on the streets and into the path of a local serial killer.
15-year-old Dillon is on the run.
Until recently he enjoyed friends, family, and the safe confines of a religious cult. But when a confession ignites the wrath of his church Dillon escapes ... and he's about to discover a vast world beyond the private walls of his former life.
Once in Sydney he faces a bustling city full of dreams and nightmares. Desperate to survive, Dillon is lured to the red-light district where strangers pay for pretty boys.
I don’t think I’m alone in considering cults and those who join cults fascinating, but I’ve also always found it frustrating when non-fiction accounts or documentaries focus on the logistics of how the communes operate rather than finding out the why. Why do people join a cult, why do they stay, why do they follow increasingly erratic and dangerous instruction? For me, researching cults for my new novel The Sleepless – about a commune whose disciples believe that sleep is a social construct – was about finding out about the characters, the individuals, who are drawn into organisations which often ask you to relinquish that self-same sense of individuality.
This is a novel about a young woman, the titular Nina, escaping from a Maoist cult and it’s a terrifically absorbing and engrossing tale.
What makes it unique is that it’s as much about the protagonist reclaiming, or even forming, her own identity as it is about the cult that she’s wrestling herself free from. Both the storyline and the form of the book itself involves the reader in that journey into freedom. An excellent and under-rated book.
Winner of the Saltire Literary Award Fiction Book of the Year
'Literary gold . . . Morrison has published his masterpiece' Sunday Times
'Sensational. Like nothing I've ever read. A tour de force' Ian Rankin
Nina X has never been outside. She has never met another child. Nina X has no books, no toys and no privacy. Nina X has no idea what the outside world is like. Nina X has a lot to learn.
Nina X has no mother and no father; she has Comrade Chen, and Comrades Uma, Jeni and Ruth. Her closest emotional connection is with the…
I have always loved reading about individuals and the ways they behave in extraordinary or unusual circumstances. Stories that are about a person growing up and coming to an understanding that the world around them is deeply flawed, and that they themselves are patched-up, imperfect creatures, fascinate me. I find myself observing people and the words they say. Those are the kinds of stories I write, about regular people stumbling along and discovering some truths about themselves.
The protagonist is a Pakistani girl moving from the urban city of Rawalpindi to a rural city in the US, as part of a program that places students abroad for a year in high school.
There were so many instances when I completely understood Hira, the way she talked about the US, about growing up in Pakistan, about language. Her adjusting to life far from home is complicated by her illness, a disease the perception of which further makes us question our prejudices about a place and its people.
'Prose that dances with charge and potency' LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
WINNER OF A 2023 ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR LITERATURE
On a year-long exchange programme, sixteen-year-old Hira must swap the bustle of urban Pakistan for church and volleyball practice in rural Oregon.
Stuck between two worlds, her experience of America is sometimes freeing, sometimes painful, often quite painful. And while she faces racism and Islamophobia, she also makes new friends and has her first kiss.
But when her new life is blown apart by a shocking health crisis, Hira's sense of belonging is overturned once…
Buried Secrets. A web of deceit, betrayal, and danger. Can she survive her fight for justice and truth? Laura thought she knew everything about her late husband before he died. Now, her life and the lives of those she loves are in danger. As Laura delves into his previous role…
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen sometimes: you start a book only to find you simply can’t put it down. This was the case for me with Lonely Castle in the Mirror, a coming-of-age story.
At first glance the book seems like an entertainment novel with a fantasy element. Six teenagers slip through their respective bedroom mirrors and find themselves in a surreal castle with a mission to complete. Only at second glance does it become clear what this book is really about.
It is about loneliness and friendship, and about the painful process of growing up. None of the teenagers are really any good at forming relationships. And yet: by taking the risk and accepting commitments, the sense of responsibility within them grows, and they surpass themselves.
A magical parable. And who actually says that good literature can’t also be entertaining? It’s ideal when both happen at…
For fans of BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD, fairy tale and magic are weaved together in sparse language that belies a flooring emotional punch.
'Strange and beautiful. Imagine the offspring of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle with The Virgin Suicides' GUARDIAN 'Genuinely affecting. A story of empathy, collaboration and sharing truths' FINANCIAL TIMES
Translated by Philip Gabriel, a translator of Murakami _______________________________
Would you share your deepest secrets to save a friend?
In a tranquil neighbourhood of Tokyo, seven teenagers wake to find their bedroom mirrors are shining.
At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives to a…
