Here are 77 books that The Night Raven fans have personally recommended if you like
The Night Raven.
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As a writer who's struggled through building a lot of worlds and making them credible, I always admire a writer who can make me believe their world from the first paragraph. That conviction should go beyond belief. The reader should have great anticipation watching this world unfold, in learning how it works. All the writers I've mentioned achieved this goal, and exceeded it. My hat is off to them.
I loved The Rook for its amazing originality, the bizarre forms of magic shown by the various employees of the Checquy, and the true grit of the Rook, a young woman whose magic simply explodes when she's threatened. Though she's lost her memory, she's left herself notes in anticipation of that very thing! You have to admire her.
The body you are wearing used to be mine.' So begins the letter Myfanwy Thomas is holding when she awakes in a London park surrounded by bodies all wearing latex gloves. With no recollection of who she is, Myfanwy must follow the instructions her former self left behind to discover her identity and track down the agents who want to destroy her. She soon learns that she is a Rook, a high-ranking member of a secret organization called the Chequy that battles the many supernatural forces at work in Britain. She also discovers that she possesses a rare, potentially deadly…
On the surface, my childhood was characterized by 1980s unsupervised country freedom in rural Alberta. Deeper in, my history involved emotional abuse and neglect. I wanted nothing more than to be seen and loved for my true self. The library was a refuge, but the fiction section allowed me to find the community I so greatly desired. I was seen and loved by the characters I read. They showed me it was possible to be myself–loudly and audaciously–and still be accepted. I read and now write books that delve into themes of identity, autonomy, and acceptance because I still struggle with these themes today.
The title made me stop mid-step. Sometimes, a book title is misleading. I’ve been burned before. I finally borrowed it from the library and found myself smitten by the “Dramatis Thingummy” at the very beginning and headlong in love by the end.
I re-read this series often: I weird out my neighbors by laughing so hard I can’t breathe; I seek the community of St. Mary’s. Mostly, I love Max. For all her flaws, her sarcasm, her deep-seated need to go down in flames, I love her to bits. She gives me hope that no matter how screwed up a person may be, they can find love and a place in the world. This is the first book in a many-book series. With short stories. And Christmas specials. All of which I now own.
Time Travel meets History in this explosive bestselling adventure series.
`So tell me, Dr Maxwell, if the whole of History lay before you ... where would you go? What would you like to witness?'
When Madeleine Maxwell is recruited by the St Mary's Institute of Historical Research, she discovers the historians there don't just study the past - they revisit it.
But one wrong move and History will fight back - to the death. And she soon discovers it's not just History she's fighting...
Follow the tea-soaked disaster magnets of St Mary's as they rattle around History. Because wherever the…
I’m a huge fan of paranormal and dark romance, and these books definitely check all my boxes. Great world-building, plots that engage, and in most cases, a heavy dollop of smut. They also explore the unexpected and take into account real-world concerns in a fashion where you can absolutely justify the decisions the main characters are making.
This book is the beginning of an amazing series. I love the way Patricia Briggs folds in real-world concerns with shape-shifting and how every shifter is just a little bit different than the next.
Another fantastic element of her writing is the way she folds in various mythologies. It’s done absolutely seamlessly with the plot and makes for some incredibly enjoyable reading.
The first novel in the New York Times bestselling Mercy Thompson series - the major urban fantasy hit of the decade
'I love these books!' Charlaine Harris
The best new fantasy series I've read in years' Kelley Armstrong
MERCY THOMPSON: MECHANIC, SHAPESHIFTER, FIGHTER
I didn't realize he was a werewolf at first. My nose isn't at its best when surrounded by axle grease and burnt oil . . .'
Mercedes Thompson runs a garage in the Tri-Cities. She's a mechanic, and a damn good one, who spends her spare time karate training and tinkering with a VW bus that happens…
As a writer who's struggled through building a lot of worlds and making them credible, I always admire a writer who can make me believe their world from the first paragraph. That conviction should go beyond belief. The reader should have great anticipation watching this world unfold, in learning how it works. All the writers I've mentioned achieved this goal, and exceeded it. My hat is off to them.
I was wrapped up in this world the minute I read the first page. This is a different America, a different power is in charge, and life is perilous in the extreme. Bishop’s protagonist has been raised in inhuman conditions, but she is determined to find a life for herself. She finds so much more than that! I love the shock that humans are not the apex predators in this world.
Enter the world of the Others in the first novel in New York Times bestselling author Anne Bishop’s thrilling fantasy series: a place where unearthly entities—vampires and shape-shifters among them—rule the Earth and prey on the human race.
As a cassandra sangue, or blood prophet, Meg Corbyn can see the future when her skin is cut—a gift that feels more like a curse. Meg’s Controller keeps her enslaved so he can have full access to her visions. But when she escapes, the only safe place Meg can hide is at the Lakeside Courtyard—a business district operated by the Others.
I write
action-packed post-apocalyptic and dystopian adventures—with a dash of romance.
An avid reader of science fiction and fantasy from an early age, the only job I
ever wanted—besides being a writer—was to be a Star Fleet Officer. I owe my
love of all things zombie to my older brothers, whose influence in books,
music, and film continues to this day, although my tolerance for puns and
movies that are "so bad they're good" is a whole lot lower than
theirs. The idea of becoming a zombie because my car runs out of gas gets me to
the gas station when I'd rather not bother.
Charles de Lint is one of my favorite authors, and this book of short stories is set in Newford, his fictional city. It’s a fully-formed universe where there's always more to discover. You can read any of his books at any time; there’s no order they must be read in. I guarantee that the more you learn of his worlds—and especially Newford—the more you’ll want. I read Pixel Pixies (my favorite short story of all time) to my mom and dad when my mom was dying of cancer. I could barely read the last paragraph for wanting to cry; not because the story is sad, but because it's so beautiful, so hopeful, so abso-freaking-lutely wonderful. I still get teary-eyed thinking about that evening of reading that story to my mom and dad.
That’s what de Lint does. He transports you not only to a world, but indelibly marks the feelings…
World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Onion Girl
The city of Newford could be any contemporary North American city...except that magic lurks in its music, in its art, in the shadows of its grittiest streets, where mythic beings walk disguised. And its people are like you and me, each looking for a bit of magic to shape their lives and transform their fate.
Here are a bluesman hiding from the devil; a Buffalo Man at the edge of death; a murderous ghost looking for revenge; a wolf man on his first blind date; and many more. We're reunited with Jilly,…
I grew up in the Scottish countryside, reading passionately. When adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer came from my latest book: a nun, an outlaw, a queen, or an explorer. Not until I was in my twenties did I realise that I wanted to be the person behind the covers of a book, not between them. My early stories, written between waitressing shifts, were bafflingly bad. Gradually I began to understand that the fiction I loved was driven by a hidden machinery. I now teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and have been lucky enough to explore this idea with many talented students.
As a boy, Baxter stood at the window of his mid-western home and looked out at the empty street. He went on to fill that street with stories. In Wonderlands he talks about how those stories were made in terms of craft—he writes vividly about requests, lists, dreams, ghosts—and the events in his own life that shaped his fiction, including a long period of failure. An deeply companionable book.
Searching and erudite new essays on writing from the author of Burning Down the House.
Charles Baxter’s new collection of essays, Wonderlands, joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext. In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other fabulist writers, to how request moments function in a story.…
My Swedish grandmother first introduced me to the horror genre when I was a small boy. Her folktales of trolls and witches really fueled my imagination! Then, when I was in junior high, my father encouraged me to read Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. I didn’t get hooked on things Gothic, however, until I heard the lyrics of Jim Morrison and the Doors in high school. After college, I became a freelance writer. I quickly learned that 80% of my spooky stuff got accepted by magazines while only 10% of my general interest work was published. That said, it’s no wonder I became a horror writer!
The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood features the author’s scariest tales, including “The Willows” and “The Wendigo”. Blackwood piles detail after detail atop one another until the reader nearly suffocates from the gloom and terror they create! He also squeezes much fear from isolated places like Canada and the Danube River.
A woman of snow . . . a midnight caller keeping his promise . . . forests where Nature is deliberate and malefic . . . enchanted houses . . . these are the beings and ideas that flood through this collection of ghost stories by Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). Altogether thirteen stories, gathered from the entire corpus of Blackwood's work, are included: stories of such sheer power and imagination that it is easy to see why he has been considered the foremost British supernaturalist of the twentieth century. Blackwood's ability to create an atmosphere of unrelieved horror and sustain it…
I’ve written and published one hundred very short ghost stories, plus a handful of longer ones, and have spent a lifetime reading and watching and thinking about stories of ghosts and the afterlife. My expertise, such as it is, involves ghosts as beings of narrative and metaphor. I’ve encountered great numbers of them on the page and on the screen—nowhere else—but I confess that I would love someday (though don’t expect) to encounter them in the flesh. My flesh, that is to say; their fleshlessness.
Harington was one of the great unheralded—or at least under heralded—novelists of the last fifty years, bursting with stories and whole populations of flawlessly captured human voices, and With was one of his highest achievements. It follows the fortunes of a kidnapped girl in the Arkansas Ozarks who befriends the woods’ menagerie of animals, as well as the ghost (or, as Harington would style it, the “in-habit”) of a twelve-year-old boy whose body did not die but moved away and abandoned him. Recommended if you like your ghosts warm-hearted and aching for home.
With is the sensual, suspenseful and irresistible tale of Robin Kerr, a young girl abducted from her family and brought to a remote Ozark mountaintop, where she is left to fend for herself. Over the course of a decade, Robin grows up without human relationship, but with the company of animals and an inhabit, the half-living ghost of a young boy. In this magical novel in the Stay More series, Harington gives us one of the most original survival, coming-of-age, and love stories ever told.
I was invited to travel to Africa and the Mid East on a job and I started to say, “I’m not that kind of guy.” Then I realized I am. I‘d already traveled around the world and even off it, reading. I’ve been happy and sad in books, victorious, scared, in love, survived storms and fierce wars, mourned valiant friends, and even space traveled. Books add dimension to life. What is dimension? Simply more. Like frosting on cake, hot sauce on fries, ice cubes in soda... fudge sauce on ice cream... I read daily, get great ideas and feelings from books, still make new friends asking, “Have you read this?” Well, have you?
I originally found this book used, for a buck, read a few pages, and decided to chance it. I have now read it multiple times, loving the notion of ghostly beings among us, and of time shifts, in a context that really makes sense in a story. (It helps that I’m also a sucker for old spooky houses.) I quickly imagined myself in these pages, part of the fabric of risk, intrigue, and danger, never guessing where it all might end up. Let’s see if you do.
Lucy and her brother Jamie meet two mysterious figures in the garden, beginning a dangerous friendship with two children who had died a century earlier. Reprint.
I was five when we moved to Australia, and soon after I discovered two things: I am the seventh child of a seventh child, with magic powers including the ability to see ghosts. My mother’s brother Dennis drowned when he was six. Naturally I started talking to him. Mind you, Mum also told me if the wind changed my face would stay like that, so the ghost thing probably wasn’t true either. Technically she only brought two of us to term. Dennis and I still talk, but we don’t have much in common anymore. With that in mind, please enjoy my ghosty best friends book recommendations.
I found this one in a charity shop and read it in a day. It was a while after that I saw the tv series, and a while after that the movie. And it’s another one I still have in my bookshelves.
It’s another story about finding your place in the world, but at the same time, it’s about a timid widow, mother of two, finding herself through the mentorship of the ghost of a well travelled sailor. One who’s there waiting for her at the end of her life, not her bloody husband!
The basis for Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s cinematic romance starring Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison.
Burdened by debt after her husband's death, Lucy Muir insists on moving into the very cheap Gull Cottage in the quaint seaside village of Whitecliff, despite multiple warnings that the house is haunted. Upon discovering the rumors to be true, the young widow ends up forming a special companionship with the ghost of handsome former sea captain Daniel Gregg. Through the struggles of supporting her children, seeking out romance from the wrong places, and working to publish the captain's story as a book, Blood and Swash,…
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