100 books like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

I read this strange and riveting novel several years ago, so I have to confess that I’ve forgotten a lot of the details.

But I have remembered with absolute clarity the richness of the prose and the well-observed wit, so reminiscent of all the Victorian novels I devoured when I was young; the imaginative scope of a world in which an empire can rise or fall on the skill of her magicians, and the all-too-familiar danger of a rivalry between two powerful and ambitious men vying for supremacy.

It is delightful, moving, and an absolute pleasure from beginning to end.

A time-travel classic, this book is also a masterful example of how to juggle two very different tones and timelines without it coming across as jarring to the reader. The two timelines diverge at the start of the story, which begins in near-future Oxford. Time travel has been invented, and a student named Kivrin is going back to the Middle Ages to conduct research. Half of the book follows her story as she navigates the Black Death, while the other half follows the much lighter (and at times very funny) story of her colleagues dealing with the bureaucracy of an unexpected lockdown in response to a flu outbreak.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series might be uneven at the end, but the beginning is masterful.

Roland, a dusty old cowboy on the edge of reality, is the prototypical antihero. He doesn’t care much for other people, he’s got a dark past, and I wanted to follow every dusty step of his journey. The broken pieces of Roland are what make The Dark Tower series unique—that and some astral plane travelling shenanigans. With each dark deed or questionable decision, I wanted to know more about Roland and what led him to that point.

It’s difficult to stay grounded in a world with interdimensional travel and monsters, but I always felt like I had one foot planted in humanity through Roland.

I love the idea that books have souls, and I adore this quotation from Zafon’s classic novel: “Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.”

I was thrilled to find this novel after I’d written my book because it shows that there are others who sense the soulful quality of old books. I also love it because it is written by a Spanish novelist, and it is in the Spanish-speaking world that we find the true literary origins of my most-loved genre of writing – magical realism.

This book was just fun. (And informative!) As my editor, Lisa Poisso, put it (paraphrased), “I’ve never seen an author manage to build so much narrative tension around something so simple as, ‘And now I have to push this button.’”

So yes, Weir continues to be awesome at making hard sci-fi fun and thrilling. What really stuck with me most, though, was the relationship the main character, Ryland Grace, forms with his unexpected interstellar buddy, the Eridian he dubs Rocky. The care and thought Weir puts into every aspect of their interactions… Those were the moments that got me. Never have I ever had so much fun watching a character think about how to solve problems. And who couldn’t use a bit more laughter and problem-solving in their life?

In my head, there’s a high I’m chasing, and it’s the high I got when I finally finished David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the high of one synapse in my head connecting with one another in a bright feverish spark as I volley from one page to the next, one character to the next, one era to the next.

If I had to summarise what the book even is, I’d say it’s reincarnation and samsara in the hands of Mitchell’s trademark ventriloquism, arranged into this wonderfully nested set of Russian doll narratives. It sounds very smart and full of grand ideas about the nature of human suffering, and it is! But it is also deeply romantic and about the peculiar destiny that can tie one human soul to another all throughout eternity.

I loved this book because it gives a dark vision of what could go wrong if we fail to control pandemics. I read this book in 2019–just before the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave it a terrifying reality!

I am a lab scientist, and my work can focus on somewhat abstract ideas about infection, but this book inspired me to think about the (huge) human impact.

It’s kinda funny; I actually didn’t finish this book the first time around. I don’t even remember why. I tend to juggle a lot of books and sometimes get distracted, and to be fair, this book doesn’t necessarily start with much of a bang. But man, oh man, was I hooked on the journey once I sank my teeth into the seven pilgrims’ stories and really got going. The worlds are fantastically imagined, and the mysteries (of the Shrike and of everything else) kept me turning pages in the best way possible.

Love or hate the rest of the series, I’ll never forget my time with Hyperion. It stands in my mind as a shining example of what sci-fi worldbuilding can be on a similar level to what Frank Herbert accomplished in Dune (which absolutely deserves an honorary spot on this list but won’t be included because it’s getting… show more.

Okay, this might seem like a bit of a strange choice to be included in a list of best “ripped from the headlines” crime novels, but it really isn’t. I mean, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, is probably the most famous big news headline of our times. 

I was totally blown away by King’s brilliant concept of using that legendary date in history to write this fascinating thriller about what “might have been” if someone could somehow go back in time and stop it from ever happening.

Like the other four books on my list, King takes a major real-life news story and uses it to create a fascinating work of fiction. I just love books like this!  

I also love books that combine thrilling adventure stories with the thoughtful exploration of ideas.

The protagonists of this haunting sci-fi/existential horror novel make contact with an alien species that, while highly intelligent, appears to lack any sense of self-awareness. This leads to the scary question: Are the aliens the weird ones in this scenario, or is human consciousness a unique mutation in a universe filled with zombies?