16 books like The Keeper of Stories

As a latecomer to long-distance hiking, this book is now one of my all-time favourites. It explores regrets and life's lessons, going beyond Alzheimer's.

One morning, Harold receives a letter from a long-lost woman, informing him of her impending death and wanting to bid farewell. Believing that walking the entire 600-mile journey and answering her in person could save her life, he embarks on this quest wearing only the clothes on his back.

With each step, Harold's past is peeled back, revealing deep wounds and losses that shaped his life and bringing him closer to healing. Along the way, he opens himself to the world, embracing not only others' vulnerabilities but also coming to terms with his own.

Driven by regret and the search for redemption, Harold's journey, both physically and emotionally, turns out to be a heartening one, narrated with a perfect blend of humour and pathos.

I fell in love with the protagonist, Molly Black. Molly has autism, which gives her a different perspective on life and the murder that occurs in the hotel where she works as a maid. I grew to cheerlead Molly as she negotiated unfriendly staff and challenging social and employment crises.

I was simultaneously impressed by her ethics and intelligence and worried about her naivete. Happily, Molly navigates her way to solving the crime while figuring out life’s rules and finding friendship and community along the way.

I loved this book for its characters, especially Norman. Only a twelve-year-old boy, Norman has suffered the loss of his one true friend and now forms brave new plans: to find his birth father and to perform as a stand-up comedian at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival. He is helped by his mother, her older colleague, and others he meets on the road trip to Scotland. Norman has terrible skin psoriasis, a fetish for cheese on toast, and vast quantities of courage and determination.

Some wisdom from Norman: "Never give up. Because no matter if everything goes to hell in a hand basket and you lose your father, your footy career, your baby, your memory, your son, your breath or your best friend, you’ve just got to keep on going."

This novel made me giggle and made me think, too. It’s written from the perspectives of several very different people whose lives unexpectedly intermingle on a train. The one who steals the show (for me, at least) is Iona Iverson. She’s a middle-aged eccentric, equipped with an ever-ready handbag and French bulldog, and she is magnificent with it! She does not care what others think of her and has her own rules and routines firmly in place, but she has a huge heart. 

Some advice from Iona: "Your past experiences… are the foundations on which to build your future. Build them on pride, not shame."

Rembrandt is a fascinating journey through Rembrandt’s paintings and also his lesser-known (to the general public) prints. It’s also a chronological roadmap of his works from his early years until his final period.  Watching his progression and the mastery in his latest period was a true learning process of how ‘less’ can be ‘far more.’ In the works displayed in the book, Rembrandt shows his skill at wringing every last bit of functionality out of each color in a very limited palette and also the cornucopia of atmospheric density he played with so masterfully to push and pull the viewers’ eye.  

This book is colourful, joyful, and deliciously diverse. The simple rhyme is rollicking but not too sweet, the illustrations are bright and playful, with plenty of fun detail. I love the mixture of people (all ages and colours and abilities) at work in the community garden, and how there is room for different ways of doing things (some plots are neat and proper while others are messy and wild). Best of all is how the story ends with everyone sitting down together to enjoy a garden-grown feast. Community, humour, hospitality, gratitude, and care for the earth—this little story is a cornucopia of good things. 

I really enjoyed this playful, ethereal, experimental collection of seventeen stories from prolific Tanzania-Australian author Eugen Bacon.

Her work often defies genre, spanning science fiction, horror, fantasy with a strong literary sensibility. These are poetic, evocative stories, about migration and displacement, about climate change and technology, about blackness and womanhood, about politics and community.

Adding up to more than just the sum of its parts, I could not help but be impressed. As a whole, with each story allowed to resonate with the other, it’s an excellent, inventive collection.

Ostensibly an academic dissertation, the footnotes begin to reveal a far wilder and manic story happening to the writer.

There are trilingual puns, verbal pratfalls, and all the wild humour that Nabokov is known for throughout this book. Of all the metafiction I have ever read, this book made me feel as if I’d been given something rather than just had a big literary joke played on me.

This must be one of the strangest works I have read in a long while, and I admire it deeply. It surfs on the documentary graphic novel trend. It exists to teach people about the disastrous impact of intensive farming on the environment, and more particularly on dirt. Not a very attractive topic, despite how serious it is – but, and that’s where this comic is so innovative, it twists all this knowledge around a suspenseful battle royal orchestrated by Hades in the Underworld. Unlikely, isn’t it? I loved discovering the facts while cheering on my main characters, two lost 16 years old, who struggle to survive in the underground. While it is directed at teens, I would recommend it to the above 16 only, as there is gore (this book follows the Hunger Games pattern of only one survivor) and nudity. 

I originally sought out this book as a way to inspire some hands-on creativity for a time when I was feeling uninspired, and gosh did it deliver! Joy is someone who I’ve followed for a long time, and I’ve always loved how "joy" has become more than just a name for her.

All of the exercises with flowers in particular were my favourite and Joy offered so many ways to play with them that I had never even thought of. The floral pop print and blooming background exercises were so much fun. My little boy and I also had an amazing time with all of the recipes, and playing with food.

Such a special book that really gets the creative juices flowing.