Here are 100 books that The Diviners fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a half-Mexican author who grew up in a tiny Alabama town, where I spent my summers playing with sticks in the woods and exploring such distinguished careers as Forest Bandit, Wayward Orphan, and Woodland Fairy Princess. After college, I ran away to New Zealand for seven months and only pretended to be a character from Lord of the Rings on special occasions. Nowadays, I live and work in South Carolina with my clingy (and, unfortunately, non-magical) cat.
I’ve always loved a good Gothic novel, but Moreno-Garcia raised the bar with this book.
Part mystery, part romance, part haunted house story—this novel runs the gamut from eerie to enchanting. The menacing secrets of High Place, set against the backdrop of glamorous 1950s Mexico, drew me into an intriguing plot that was as captivating as it was frightening.
The award-winning author of Gods of Jade and Shadow (one of the 100 best fantasy novels of all time, TIME magazine) returns with a mesmerising feminist Gothic fantasy, in which a glamorous young socialite discovers the haunting secrets of a beautiful old mansion in 1950s Mexico.
He is trying to poison me. You must come for me, Noemi. You have to save me.
When glamorous socialite Noemi Taboada receives a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin begging to be rescued from a mysterious doom, it's clear something is desperately amiss. Catalina has always had a flair for the dramatic, but…
I’ve always loved to be scared! When I was young I turned off the lights to watch movies like Alien and It. When I got older, I played Resident Evil and Silent Hill. And when I got even older, I started writing things that would make me jump if the dog came in too suddenly mid-chapter. I think we are drawn to scary books and movies because they give us a safe way to explore the unknown – and, less philosophically, because sometimes it’s just fun to get sucked into a dark and creepy universe!
Pre-Covid, I loved to read about dangerous viruses taking over the world. The genre has lost a liiiiitle bit of its charm since then, but Contagion is too good a story to pass up. It reminds me powerfully of the Dead Space video games, with its mysteriously uninhabited space stations. Like the very best scary sci-fi, it blurs the line between the terrifying things close to home – like an unexplained illness – and the deep, dark, scary depths of space we have yet to understand!
Perfect for fans of Madeleine Roux, Jonathan Maberry, and horror films like 28 Days Later and Resident Evil, this pulse-pounding, hair-raising, utterly terrifying novel is the first in a duology from the critically acclaimed author of the Taken trilogy.
After receiving a distress call from a drill team on a distant planet, a skeleton crew is sent into deep space to perform a standard search-and-rescue mission.
When they arrive, they find the planet littered with the remains of the project—including its members’ dead bodies. As they try to piece together what could…
I have a biology and chemistry degree and have worked in a hospital laboratory for over 25 years. History has always been an interest, and my affection for the Tudor era was sparked after learning some background about Shakespeare’s works. The politics, the forgotten words and their meanings from that time, fascinate me. I fancy myself a bit of an armchair historian and time traveler. My suggested books succeed in transporting me back in time. I learn on the coattails of smart protagonists created by intelligent writers who get the mix of history, mystery, and science just right.
One of the first books I ever read set in the medieval period that hooked me on historical mysteries set in medieval/Tudor times.
Eco’s plot is absolutely unique and memorable. The story is dotted with eccentric monks who do not always follow the rules. The atmosphere feels incredibly well done. I feel present in the cavernous stone abbey, with the winter chill and sinister machinations that seep straight into my bones.
A true genre classic, they even made it into a movie starring Sean Connery.
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective.
William collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.
As a doctor, writer, and mother of middle schoolers, I was ready to scintillate the sixth-graders when I volunteered for the chicken wing dissection class, demonstrating the exciting connection between muscles, tendons, and bones. I opened and closed the wing, placed it in their hands, and showed them the thin strips of tissue coordinating all the action. Did I see fascination? Excitement? Feigned interest of any sort? Sadly, no. They were much more enthusiastic about a different topic I volunteered for. Mythology. Greek gods. Beasts with multiple heads. They knew everything, and I knew books like Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief series were the reason. Books can entertain and educate.
My boys read these, and then I read them. The hero is a boy with dyslexia who never fits in and who discovers he can read Greek and is the son of a God.
In modern-day New York City, he battles ancient mythological creatures. Kids learn everything there is to know about mythology and then some while enjoying this engrossing and exciting story. We loved these books.
The Lightning Thief: the First book in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series.
The first bestselling book in Rick Riordan's phenomenally successful Percy Jackson series.
Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood. I never asked to be the son of a Greek God. I was just a normal kid, going to school, playing basketball, skateboarding. The usual. Until I accidentally vaporized my maths teacher. That's when things started really going wrong. Now I spend my time fighting with swords, battling monsters with my friends, and generally trying to stay alive.
I tell stories for the page and the screen (and sometimes to bribe my kid to brush her teeth). The stories I tell have one thing in common – they transport the reader to another world. For me, building a new world starts with building a new character – a narrator with strong opinions and a complicated past that will shape how the reader experiences their world. We don't experience the real world objectively – no matter how hard we try, our past, our feelings, and even our bodies affect how we experience the world. That's why the worlds I build and the stories I tell are all filtered through the particular truth of a bold narrator.
Illuminae is the first book in a YA science fiction series called the Illuminae Files Trilogy.
The story is told through intersecting first-person narratives constructed from journals, letters, texts, reports, and pictures. You want to absorb all that “found footage” goodness on paper. Trust.
There’s almost no exposition in Illuminae, especially in the first few chapters. That’s the beauty of these books – the narration is so visceral and urgent that you get invested in the story long before you really understand what’s happening. Putting the pieces of the world-building together is an addictive mystery in and of itself.
I don’t recommend cracking open this book the night before anything requiring a good night’s rest and lots of focus – your mind will be in 2575 until well after you’ve finished the last page.
'Never have I read a book so wholly unique and utterly captivating.' Marie Lu
'It certainly filled the Battlestar Galactica-shaped hole in my heart.' Victoria Aveyard
The internationally bestselling first book in a high-octane trilogy
Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the worst thing she'd ever been through. That was before her planet was invaded. Now, with enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra are forced to fight their way onto one of the evacuating craft, with an enemy warship in hot pursuit.
But the warship could be the least of their problems. A deadly plague has…
I’ve always loved to be scared! When I was young I turned off the lights to watch movies like Alien and It. When I got older, I played Resident Evil and Silent Hill. And when I got even older, I started writing things that would make me jump if the dog came in too suddenly mid-chapter. I think we are drawn to scary books and movies because they give us a safe way to explore the unknown – and, less philosophically, because sometimes it’s just fun to get sucked into a dark and creepy universe!
Icarus is a totally different kind of scary read from what I normally pick up, more psychological thriller than actual horror – but don’t let that stop you from reading this amazing book. In Icarus, Stone leads us through a complicated, dark, and forgotten history until we find the place Tess’ present intersects with her half-forgotten past. The ride is thrilling and the conclusion won’t leave you disappointed!
Being the ‘new kid’ at school is hard, but for Tess Novak - who’s moved more times than she can remember - it’s a role she knows by heart. Transferring during senior year means yet another place she’ll eventually leave, more classmates she’ll forget. Fate, it seems, has other plans.From the moment Tess is introduced to honor student Drew Martinez, she is convinced she has met him before. But when? Confident and attractive, Drew is exactly the type of ‘rich kid’ Tess’s father hates, and Tess avoids. Thrown together by a class project, their tentative friendship sparks a smoldering attraction.…
I’ve always loved to be scared! When I was young I turned off the lights to watch movies like Alien and It. When I got older, I played Resident Evil and Silent Hill. And when I got even older, I started writing things that would make me jump if the dog came in too suddenly mid-chapter. I think we are drawn to scary books and movies because they give us a safe way to explore the unknown – and, less philosophically, because sometimes it’s just fun to get sucked into a dark and creepy universe!
This is another period piece, this one a classic Victorian gothic that appeals to my secret nostalgia for the old original horror pieces such as Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, or Jane Eyre. The main character finds herself enmeshed in a strange and dark world where right and wrong become blurred as she struggles to find the place she fits in. You won’t be able to stop reading between one chapter and the next.
An all-new creepy fantasy series from the New York Times bestselling author of Asylum.
Featuring stunning interior illustrations from artist Iris Compiet, plus photo-collages that bring the story to chilling life, House of Furies invites readers to a world where the line between monsters and men is ghostly thin.
After escaping a harsh school where punishment was the lesson of the day, seventeen-year-old Louisa Ditton is thrilled to find employment as a maid at a boarding house.
But soon after her arrival at Coldthistle House, Louisa begins to realize that the house's mysterious owner, Mr. Morningside, is providing much more…
I think the lure of the detective novel lies in our human instinct to problem solve. There’s something satisfying about following a smart, observant, and even flawed character as they solve a crime. We’re working through a complicated puzzle, deciphering clues and theorizing, alongside the detective. Personally, I love detective novels set in richly drawn historical settings. I grew up addicted to Edgar Allan Poe and Sherlock Holmes stories. I remember reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins in a few days because I couldn’t put it down. The following books are a must-have for any Sherlock Holmes fans.
This book has all my favorite detective fiction elements: a beautiful cover, an independent heroine, Abigail Rook, crime-solving alongside an elusive detective, R.F. Jackaby, and a solid plot that kept me guessing until the end. Set in late nineteenth-century New England, Rook teams up with Jackaby in a parallel to a Watson-Holmes relationship except this detective novel features the supernatural. Rook learns quickly that Jackaby stands out among detectives as he can see supernatural creatures. I love so much about this book, particularly the chemistry between Rook and Jackaby as co-investigators. This is a must-read not only for detective fiction fans, but for Dr. Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans as well.
Alone and newly arrived in New Fiddleham. 1892, Abigail Rook finds work as the assistant to R. F. Jackaby, an investigator of the unexplained with the ability to see supernatural beings. On her first day, Abigail finds herself in the midst of a thrilling case: A serial killer is on the loose in New Fiddleham. The police are convinced it's an ordinary villain, but Jackaby is certain the foul deeds are the work of the kind of creature whose very existence the local police - with the exception of a handsome young detective named Charlie Cane - seem adamant to…
I think the lure of the detective novel lies in our human instinct to problem solve. There’s something satisfying about following a smart, observant, and even flawed character as they solve a crime. We’re working through a complicated puzzle, deciphering clues and theorizing, alongside the detective. Personally, I love detective novels set in richly drawn historical settings. I grew up addicted to Edgar Allan Poe and Sherlock Holmes stories. I remember reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins in a few days because I couldn’t put it down. The following books are a must-have for any Sherlock Holmes fans.
Often overlooked on detective fiction lists, Lady Audley’s Secret is a hidden gem. My favorite Victorian detective novel, I didn’t discover the book until grad school, and since have taught it in numerous British lit courses. When Robert Audley becomes curious about the beautiful, young bride of his uncle, Michael Audley, he starts investigating her past. He finds surprising ties to his friend George Talbot, who, years earlier, abandoned his young wife and son to seek his fortune in Australia. What I love about this book is how Braddon plays with Victorian anxieties—particularly preoccupations with the unconventional means a woman might go through to escape unhappiness.
Originally published in Robin Goodfellow magazine, Lady Audley's Secret is the essential work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and is considered a staple of sensation fiction. The story centers on a mysterious woman, whose dark past slowly comes to light.
Lady Audley is a former governess who marries the wealthy widower, Sir Michael Audley. She thoroughly enjoys the life of privilege and status associated with her new husband. Although she appears beautiful and polished, Lady Audley is more than meets the eye. She has a dark secret that could jeopardize everything she's worked for. To maintain her facade, she plots and…
As a doctor, writer, and mother of middle schoolers, I was ready to scintillate the sixth-graders when I volunteered for the chicken wing dissection class, demonstrating the exciting connection between muscles, tendons, and bones. I opened and closed the wing, placed it in their hands, and showed them the thin strips of tissue coordinating all the action. Did I see fascination? Excitement? Feigned interest of any sort? Sadly, no. They were much more enthusiastic about a different topic I volunteered for. Mythology. Greek gods. Beasts with multiple heads. They knew everything, and I knew books like Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief series were the reason. Books can entertain and educate.
Another great series from Rick Riordan. Set somewhat in the real world, a brother and a sister who don’t look alike discover they are descended from long line of a family of both Egyptian pharaohs and magicians. They have special talents to battle gods from Egyptian mythology and must save their father and the world.
Again, so much history and mythology packed into an exciting adventure story. Our whole family loved it.
The Red Pyramid: the first book in Rick Riordan's The Kane Chronicles.
Percy Jackson fought Greek Gods. Now the Gods of Egypt are waking in the modern world...
'I GUESS IT STARTED THE NIGHT OUR DAD BLEW UP THE BRITISH MUSEUM . . .'
CARTER AND SADIE KANE'S dad is a brilliant Egyptologist with a secret plan that goes horribly wrong. An explosion shatters the ancient Rosetta stone and unleashes Set, the evil god of chaos . . .
Set imprisons Dr Kane in a golden coffin and Carter and Sadie must run for their lives. To save their dad,…
