100 books like The Hero of This Book

Harkening back to the well-established trope of inviting several seemingly unrelated guests to a secluded location (I’m thinking of the movie for the board game Clue right now) and wrapping them up in a creepy mystery, Kiersten Modglin has delivered a secluded thriller with originality, delectable darkness, and a series of great twists.

I was enthralled by the constant sense of danger and did not see the ending coming. I’ll admit that as a writer myself, the premise of authors invited to a writing retreat intrigued me from the start, but I was so pulled in by this thriller that I finished reading it in no time. Great work.

I’m fascinated by the stories of DNA secrets that unite, confuse, and complicate lives. Camino Rios and Yahaira Rios had no idea they shared the same father—until he perished in an airplane disaster. Told in verse with alternating viewpoints, this novel drew me in right away. Camino Rios had her father every summer while Yahaira had her father the rest of the year, both living very different lives—until their father’s death changed everything. Suspense builds as the two girls follow clues to the shocking realization that they are sisters. Once I started reading, I could not put the book down. 

This is book 1 in the Avery Ayers Antique Mystery series, is a wonderful cozy mystery with a delightful cast of characters, a touch of romance, and unexpected twists and turns that make the book impossible to put down.

I highly recommend it, especially to readers who love mysteries featuring jewels, antiques, and appraising, and heroines who are both smart and struggling to recover from difficulties in their recent past. It was wisely nominated in 2022 for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. 

After losing both parents to cancer, almost simultaneously, twenty-something Dave becomes father to his much younger brother. Don’t be put off by the jokey title, this book is a heartfelt and hilarious celebration of young men and the way their competitive, raucous humour can be an expression of love and support. I guarantee you will love these two boys-on-the-way-to-be-men.

This book, by Nobel-prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, was the first novel in which I saw a character like myself—someone who grew up in a culture that was very different from his parents'. The mystery plot gets wild, but I found that the main character’s search for closure felt connected to my own nostalgia and grief over the places I’d left behind.

In Scar Tissue, a 1993 Booker Prize finalist, an unnamed narrator gives a first-person account of the precipitous decline of his mother from dementia (though her condition is never explicitly named).

“She remembers captions of New Yorker cartoons,” he says, lamenting that “it is what happened five minutes ago that is slipping away.” It is a predicament with which dementia caregivers are all too familiar.

Yet, despite his mother’s descent into oblivion, the narrator insists she be treated with dignity. “You keep telling me what has been lost,” he tells her neurologist, “and I keep telling you something remains.”

This is another book about death that will also make you laugh.

I appreciate how direct this book is while still managing to be tender and sensitive. And the artwork matches the tone of the text well. Death looks both friendly and a little creepy.

It may not be for every family, but I love how oddly funny and heartbreaking this book is. 

Hope and Glory has to be one of the most relatable books I’ve ever read, and not just because it’s set in my old stomping ground, Peckham. It follows Hope, a twenty-something British Nigerian who, after returning to London for her dad’s funeral, discovers a life-shattering family secret. What I loved about this book was that I felt as though the author was writing a love letter to those individuals who didn’t have it easy growing up and whose stories are not often told in mainstream fiction. I feel as though Hope and Glory will provide a sigh of relief for so many readers; I, for one, certainly felt seen. Beautifully observed, heartfelt and authentic, I felt a xylophone of emotions while reading this exquisite novel, but in the end, very hopeful.

Modern medicine has dramatically extended life expectancies. But as our life spans extend, our fear of death grows. As our hope of living a long life and seeing our children survive grew, we became more rather than less anxious about losing out. We might have expected the opposite. Aries vividly illustrates how people viewed death as a part of life before the nineteenth century and how they reconciled themselves to it. He picks out 1886 as the point where Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Illych recognized that medical advances were creating anxiety rather than hope. This book may make you less fearful of death. It will ask you whether you can now achieve serenity half as well as those before us did and whether medicine is bad for our sanity? 

This has been my go-to book for processing loss with our kiddos. It connects the human experience of death to that of animals and plants in a matter-of-fact yet deeply comforting way.

I adore the specific, clear language that doesn’t require abstract interpretation for a small child. There’s a palpable sense of peace that comes with zooming into a range of life cycles and the finality of landing with some version of, “That is the way butterflies live, and that is their lifetime.”

By staring death right in the eye (no, really…there are dead insects galore), it no longer feels so terrifying or out of reach. We all have beginnings and endings, and we are tasked with the living in between.