Fans pick 100 books like The Fifth Child

I couldn’t finish this list without including one of the most famous examples of pregnancy in science fiction.

Humanity comes face-to-face with an alien species, the Oankali, who use gene editing, cloning, and mating to refresh their gene pools. The focus is on Lilith, a black woman taken hostage by the aliens who must learn about their plans for her and strategize her responses.

I really appreciate the way Butler’s work manages to speak to the legacy of slavery, particularly through a scene where the aliens create the circumstances for Lilith to breed with a human man in aid of their experiments. Lilith’s refusal to succumb to this animalistic treatment confronts the legacy of breeding humans during slavery.

I find Lilith (like many of Butler’s other characters) a driven character who deals with outlandish situations and the potential invasion of her own body with a pragmatic determination that invites me,… show more.

The novel presents a range of archival material, including graphical elements. The main account has an objective restraint that reads almost like a scientific report, which makes it moving at times. The main character Bella develops rapidly from a child-like state into a mature woman and way her language and insight progresses is skillfully handled.

I found it fascinating how reasonable-sounding scientific ideas can become barbaric actions. The novel is multi-layered, with competing narratives and Bella undermining most of what appears in the Lanthimos film, Poor Things. In the end, I was left in a state of exhilarated confusion and went to read it all again. 

This book takes us into a space colony populated solely by females who live in a symbiotic relationship with their organic starship. The ship is their shelter and protector, and in return, the women birth tools and components that the ship needs to function.

I love the gory spectacle of these bloody, mechanical births but also how they allow Hurley to explore ideas about community, duty, and belonging. The book is part of a wider sensibility that can be found throughout Hurley’s work, but for my money, this is the one where her imaginative powers are most successfully harnessed. 

The unnamed protagonist of this book is a pregnant woman who has recently moved to the isolated Australian outback with her (pretty useless) husband. The couple have fled the city in part because of our narrator’s fear of a novel pandemic that is sweeping the land. As her pregnancy develops, skin cells replicating inside her body, the narrator fears that her fetus may harbour the virus.

This virus really speaks to my interest in difficult, gory pregnancies and births: cutis is an illness that causes the skin cells to hyperactively replicate, sealing over the body’s orifices and suffocating or starving its victims.

 While this book has a Wicker Man-style horror of small-town life, I particularly appreciate the way that its dystopian setting reflects and distills the anxieties that many women really experience during pregnancy. 

Something Blue has some of the best possible ingredients for a great women’s fiction novel—forgiveness, personal transformation, friendship that blossoms into more, and the icing on the cake is that it’s set in London! The book focuses primarily on Darcy, who finds herself alone and friendless for the first time in her life. She’s not particularly likable at the beginning of the novel. Still, Giffin does an excellent job of making the reader connect with Darcy, invest in her transformation, and root for a happy ending. Although I don’t have much in common with Darcy, her experiences with pregnancy and childbirth in London caused me to reminisce about my own time living in London and the birth of my first child there. Due to the beautiful descriptions of the setting and the subject matter, it was like a walk down memory lane when I read Something Blue. 

This book gave me a reminder of faith that neither time nor distance can ever impede upon two individuals destined for each other. Sometimes, what is said–or rather not said at all–doesn’t exactly portray the truth of someone's intentions or feelings.

Even though I know the ending, I’ll pick this book up every year or so and still find myself wondering how Anne and Wentworth will ever reconcile. But alas, Austen knocks it out of the park once more.

I love a good story about a therapist having to not only battle her own demons but also her patients – and Creep has this covered. I went to bed thinking I’d start the book and read a few chapters – I ended up finishing it with only a few hours to spare before my alarm went off. 

A three novel serial with tones of Victorian adventure and steampunk fantasy that sets three disparate characters against a mysterious cabal with influence in the government of an unnamed European country (possibly an analogue of Victorian England) – with the sinister glass of which the books are made able to record and play back real-life events (quite often sexual or violent) to be experienced (quite literally) by the reader.

Each chapter of the books are seen from the point of view of one of the main characters; Miss Celeste Temple – a stereotypical Victorian adventuress and heir to a fortune who finds herself drawn to both Cardinal Chang – neither a cardinal nor Oriental, he is a dichotomy, capable of extreme violence but with a decent side and a love of poetry; and to the Contessa – ostensibly evil, she is a beautiful, cunning and deadly woman who seems to… show more.

I wish Greg Behrendt were my brother: that awesome guy in my life who loves me unconditionally, thinks I’m the greatest, but tells it to me straight. Unflinchingly and unapologetically. Noogie sandwiches and all.

What I loved most about this book is Greg’s unfiltered and (sometimes horrifyingly) honest dating advice for the modern female. This is the guy who tells you exactly how to navigate the male mind, stop deluding yourself, and stop wasting your time. Part cheerleader, part therapist, part drill sergeant, part stand-up comic, Greg does not want you to settle for any guy who isn’t over the moon for you. I love a good tough love approach. Greg and Liz deliver. Yum.

Emily Bronte wrote one novel in her short life, but what an amazing novel it is. The anti-heroes Heathcliff (rough, bitter, and rude from early mistreatment) and his childhood beloved, Catherine (spoiled and willful), are unique in fiction, and when they go head-to-head, there’s no stopping them. But Bronte doesn’t make it easy to understand them.

Heathcliff obsessively pursues Catherine after she’s married, but what she feels for him has been debated by many scholars, such as myself–some say it’s not sexual, but I disagree. The scene where they finally kiss and cling to each other while she is eight months pregnant with her husband’s child, right before her death, was extremely shocking to the Victorian public. It was so powerful that it scared me when I first read it at age 14.