100 books like The Girl at the Back of the Bus

This book kept me on the edge of my seat, biting my nails, and err… made me forget to go to sleep. This book to me is the epitome of books that make you go wait, what??

I want to highlight the menacing ambiance and constant edge in the tone of the story by giving the character such vulnerability that made me squirm. I loved the pacing of this story as the main character is hurled from the one bad situation into another.

Yet again, this book taught me to re-think assumptions, because it proved all of them wrong. I love the uniqueness of this trope especially when it first came out but the originality of it captivated me entirely.

Everyone can relate to an unlikeable employer. I love a beautiful home and a perfect life. This book has it all. It’s beautiful and horrific at the same time.

If you love descriptive narrative, this is the book for you. It has some house porn and high fashion. Frieda paints the perfect picture and then unravels the unsavory truths.

The housemaid is damaged yet likable. There is nothing like rooting for the underdog, and the housemaid is just that person. I loved this book.

I love stories of adventure set in alternative magical worlds and was enchanted by this one. The world building is incredible with a wealth of interesting characters and a riveting plot. The writing is so beautiful and evocative it sang from the pages.

The protagonist of the story is Zarya who has been trained to fight but forbidden to use her magic by her guardian, who has kept her a virtual prisoner by a magical force that won’t allow her to venture far. One day she breaks free and goes in search of the truth of her past and is swept into an adventure with demons, dark magic and romance.

A real escapist read inspired by Indian mythology and culture. It’s the first of a quartet so I can’t wait to read the rest.

I love reading about characters and relationships, and Sue is a master at writing about relatable characters that have depth and a back story.

The story is centred around a bunch of long-lost love letters that Raff brings to Maddy’s Great Aunt Ruthie, who has poor eyesight. As Maddy reads the letters to her bit by bit, Maddy discovers a big secret. Maddy has her own heartbreak, a husband who disappeared years ago when she was pregnant leaving her to bring up their daughter alone.

It’s a heartwarming story with lots of love and laughter that I really connected to.

Can I “love” a book when it is so painful to read? I do, though, in the way of admiration for the compelling writing on one of the most depraved outcomes of racism: lynchings. Even worse, Branan’s own ancestors turned out to be involved. This 1912 lynching was of four Black people, including one woman, all of whom were involved in trying to protect a young Black girl against predation by a white man, another of the author’s relatives.

All this occurred in a rough moonshine-making area of Georgia. Growing up in Birmingham, I never knew there were places in the South where white men used their power to openly keep Black women and the children they had together in second homes. That didn’t mean, of course, that the men weren’t racist.

When it comes to Constance Greene, I hardly know where to begin.

She’s certainly the oldest and most deadly character in fiction writing today. I say she’s the oldest because she’s trapped in the body of a thirty-something-year-old woman even though she was born in 1873, long story.

She appears as a supporting character in multiple novels, as the love interest of Detective Aloysius Pendergast, but she is so much more than that. She’s eloquent, brilliant, and does not succumb to emotional distress under any threat of death.

In Blue Labyrinth, eight highly trained mercenaries pursue her and none of them live to tell the tale. At her most ruthless, she can kill with any tool at her disposal and she is loyal to the man she loves.

I love that this book takes a hard look at the perils, reality, and consequences of embracing truth.

It doesn’t sugar-coat the different attitudes and reactions of family members when Annie, with 3 adult children and 27 years of marriage, falls in love with Vivica. The aftermath of the seismic family upheaval reveals dark secrets about legacy, abuse, racial discrimination, revenge, class, and forgiveness.

For me reading this book was cutting edge because it was published not long after same-sex marriage was first made legal in the U.S., in Connecticut.

A bonus is that despite the family’s legacy of trauma the story ends on a note of love and hope.

A young man accused of murder stands before the jury in court. Fed up with his barrister’s advice to ‘only tell the jury what they can believe’ he makes his own closing speech. He tells ‘the whole truth’ in his own words. 

In setting out the details of his chaotic life, he aims to provide an innocent explanation for the eight pieces of circumstantial evidence against him. It’s only if the jury can understand what it’s like to be him (echoes here of Atticus Finch’s famous line, "You never really understand a person until you… climb into his skin and walk around in it.") that he will receive a fair trial.

A highly original angle for the modern, courtroom drama, executed to perfection. Clearly (as is only right) there’s a subtly-woven, social commentary agenda too.

This riveting whodunit captures the tension between native and naturalized citizens, something I’m familiar with. A Moroccan American man is killed in a hit-and-run in a small desert town in California. His daughter Nora returns home to the Mojave, determined to find the killer. The story is told through multiple voices, some of them immigrants: Nora’s mom, who still dreams of her old life in Casablanca; an undocumented man who witnessed the incident but is afraid to come forward; and the victim himself in the days before dying, when his future looked bright. The secrets Nora discovers about her family and her town, heartbreaking as they are, help her find love and also a sense of home that immigrants like me spend our entire lives trying to reach.

A widow with a new lease on life thanks to her secretly wealthy aunt becomes involved in a murder.

Multigenerational, with the Italian grandma, her newbie journalist granddaughter, plus an ex-nun sister and an ex-sister-in-law.

This story involves food, jokes, and family love, albeit with much more brashness and outspokenness than any of the other books I listed, and also a lot more Italian, though the book is set in New Jersey.