Here are 91 books that The Swallows fans have personally recommended if you like
The Swallows.
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I’m an October baby born during a full moon, into a small New England town notorious for their connection to the Salem Witch Trials. My house was for sure haunted growing up, I’ve had a lot of nightmares over the years, and I found solace in the horror genre. Though my true background is in comedy having studied with Second City Chicago, the experience afforded me the opportunity to explore the more pained and shadowed sides of myself as a tool to write relevant material. I learned to focus those explorations into narratives and create stories with a lot of heart that highlight my own quest to uncover inner peace.
A fellow New Englander, Tremblay took me by complete surprise with this novel. In the past, I saw horror defined by slashers, gore, and jump scares. This novel helped me understand that modern horror is a bit savvier and more nuanced, with a stronger focus on emotional suffering.
I really connected with the struggling working-class family and sympathized with their decision to let a documentary film crew create a series about their clearly struggling daughter. The film crew intended to market the girl as possessed by a demon, which the family signs off on in order to collect a desperately needed financial boost.
It expertly explores the hardships of the middle class, sibling love, and the societal hush-hush of mental illness. Plus, it’s got some twists and turns to that made my blood run absolutely cold.
The lives of the Barretts, a suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to halt Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show.Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie's younger sister, Merry. As she recalls the terrifying events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets…
Even as a boy, I could see (or maybe just sense) the darkness that resides just below the surface of this otherwise pleasant world. We all have stories, and the ones we hold closest to ourselves are often the darkest. Those are the stories that fascinate me the most. What are the limits of man’s menace? What causes seemingly normal people to snap? To turn on their fellow man? I could do one of two things with this fascination: become a sociopath (perhaps psychopath) or an author of dark, twisted, twisty tales. As you know, I chose the latter.
Of course, I’m including Gillian Flynn in this list. You may have expected her most popular novel, Gone Girl. I like that one, but this is my favorite of her works so far. In my opinion, it nudges out her other book, Sharper Objects (though that one is my wife’s favorite). I think it was her first book. It’s a dark story of a family with secrets, pain, and a moral decision that goes horribly wrong. Again, this one has a strong theme.
What if you could sacrifice everything to ensure your kids had a better life than you? Now, what if that sacrifice went horribly wrong and ruined not only your life but your kids as well? Flynn is a master of the thriller twist. She’s one of those authors who can lay out all the clues in plain sight for her readers without them even knowing it.…
'Eerily macabre... Wonderful' Guardian 'A nerve-fraying thriller' New York Times 'Every bit as horribly fascinating as In Cold Blood' Daily Mail
Libby Day was seven when her family was murdered: she survived by hiding in a closet - and famously testified that her older brother Ben was the killer.
Twenty-five years later the Kill Club - a secret society obsessed with notorious crimes - gets in touch with Libby to try to discover proof that may free Ben. Almost broke, Libby agrees to go back to her hometown to investigate - for a fee.
I love to take destination thrillers with me on vacation. It’s like a double whammy of travel. I also love to write destination thrillers and have written quite a few, including my first book, set in a charming lakefront community on Lake Erie, Ohio. My other destination thrillers include Beneath the Surface, set on a luxurious super yacht on a trip to Catalina Island from Newport Beach, California, and my latest, Under the Palms, set at a fabulous Laguna Beach luxury resort. I love to write about grown-ups behaving badly. Dropping the characters into a beautiful resort or vacation setting increases the suspense.
This island mystery is set on a chilly resort off the coast of Ireland, so you won’t need sunscreen here, but you will need stamina as you’re once again trapped.
I loved this cast of characters attending the wedding of a glamorous and famous bride and groom. Media celebrities are so much fun to read about. But the real star of the show is the hostile setting and the menacing characters who are all there for something, some cleverly hiding their true motives until the very end.
*The brand new thriller from Lucy Foley - THE PARIS APARTMENT - is available to pre-order now*
The No.1 Sunday Times bestseller
*Over 1 million copies sold worldwide*
*One of The Times and Sunday Times Crime Books of the Year*
*Goodreads Choice Awards winner for Crime & Mystery 2020*
A gripping, twisty murder mystery thriller from the No.1 bestselling author of The Hunting Party.
'Lucy Foley is really very clever' Anthony Horowitz 'Thrilling' The Times 'A classic whodunnit' Kate Mosse 'Sharp and atmospheric and addictive' Louise Candlish 'A furiously twisty thriller' Clare Mackintosh
I’ve always been fascinated by people’s motives whether that be in real life or written on the page. That’s what drew me to write in the thriller genre to begin with because at the core, it's about finding out why people do things. But sometimes this genre portrays female characters as either innocent damsels or evil femme fatales, neither of which captures that women are a mix of good and bad like all other people. That’s why I try to write my female protagonists in my novels, short stories, and fictional podcasts, in a way that makes them conflicted humans and causes them to experience both downfalls and triumphs.
This novel is exactly what I look for in a thriller.
It’s fast-paced, filled with twists, and full of complex female characters.
The Howell Family is forced to move from California to Brooklyn for the husband’s job. Wife and mother, Nora is tasked with setting up their new home and getting her two teen daughters settled into their new schools.
However, she discovers their new Brownstone was the site of a grisly murder of an entire family in the 1990s. Soon one of the daughters notices someone stalking her and their house causing the family to fear the killer has returned.
But Nora isn’t the helpless stay-at-home mother everyone thinks she is as she goes through great lengths including hiding a dark past to keep her family safe.
One of Bibliofile's Most Anticipated Mystery/Thriller Books!
“Great psychological suspense with a wallop of a twist.” —Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author
New York Times bestselling author Wendy Corsi Staub makes her trade paperback debut with a fast-paced thriller in the vein of Lisa Jewell’s The Family Upstairs and Megan Collins’ The Winter Sister. Here, a family making a fresh start moves into a house which was the site of an unsolved triple homicide—and are watched by an unknown person...
The watcher sees who you are...and knows what you did.
I spent nearly two decades as a highly successful corporate attorney. Or, perhaps I should say, a successful attorney with a crude mouth and a love for all things spandex. And my unabashed personality was a differentiator in my career—it allowed me to cut through the corporate nonsense and personally connect with my opposition. But my career imploded when I became the subject of overt sexual harassment in my workplace and my employer worked harder at a coverup than resolution. Rather than sell back my story through litigation, I decided to write openly about sexual empowerment in the face of systemic slut-shaming.
I really have no idea how Corporate Crush ever ended up in my hands.
The set up was all wrong for me—the boss and admin trope (power disparity concerns), the female villain defined only by her money-grubbing ways (eyeroll), the romantic relationship controlled by a formal contract (both ew and legally unenforceable). But I quickly discovered that I, as the judgmental reader, was the only one-dimensional villain in this story.
After I put down my ego, I discovered a hilarious book about strong, smart, potty-mouthed women fighting for power in an ever-antiquated corporate America. It promotes body positivity, shifts traditional sexual power dynamics, and is sexy as hell both inside and outside the bedroom.
After completing a psychology degree, I became an interventions facilitator in a prison and worked with offenders who'd committed serious violent crimes. It was while I was in this role that my fascination for criminal psychology grew. Once I left the profession, I put my experiences to good use in fiction, going on to write The Serial Killer series of three psychological thrillers. With the most recent, The Serial Killer’s Sister, I incorporated my love of puzzles and games into a twisted story of a serial killer who uses a childhood game known to his sister as ‘The Hunt’ to track her down and torment her.
Who doesn’t enjoy an escape room experience? I’m a sucker for games where you have to solve clues under pressure – but only a time pressure – not the life-or-death kind!
This story delves into the dark and twisted world of corporate greed and through a supposed team-building escape room challenge we are taken on a suspenseful journey with the trapped investment bankers as they realise it’s not your standard game. The stakes are high, and the tension is almost unbearable!
This novel features some truly unlikeable characters, but as they are forced to confront their own secrets and inner demons, I was completely entertained and enthralled by them.
Welcome to the escape room. Your goal is simple. Get out alive.
In the lucrative world of Wall Street finance, Vincent, Jules, Sylvie and Sam are the ultimate high-flyers. Ruthlessly ambitious, they make billion-dollar deals and live lives of outrageous luxury. Getting rich is all that matters, and they'll do anything to get ahead.
When the four of them become trapped in an elevator escape room, things start to go horribly wrong. They have to put aside their fierce office rivalries and work together to solve the clues that will release them. But in the confines of the elevator the…
I'm a mom of two daughters who is fascinated with reading nonfiction parenting books and listening to parenting-related podcasts. My absolute favorite, though, is when fiction authors take a dense parenting topic and turn it into a relatable and engaging story so that readers can explore the same important issues and challenges in a more enjoyable way.
Somebody’s Daughter is a thought-provoking read for parents on how you might handle an inappropriate video of your child being shared over social media. One of the most intriguing parenting aspects of this book is how the mom and dad dealt with their daughter’s dilemma so differently. Especially since the mom almost viewed the dad’s way of handling it as detrimental. It offered an invaluable gut-check on what I would do if I were put in the same situation.
From USA Today bestselling author Rochelle B. Weinstein comes an emotional novel for mothers, daughters, and anyone who has ever felt imperfect.
Emma and Bobby Ross enjoy a charmed life on the shores of Miami Beach. They are a model family with a successful business, an uncomplicated marriage, and two blessedly typical twin daughters, Zoe and Lily. They are established members of a tight-knit community.
Then, on the night of the girls' fifteenth birthday party, they learn of Zoe's heartbreaking mistake-a private and humiliating indiscretion that goes viral and thrusts her and her family into the center of a shocking…
I’m a journalist whose work is often heard on NPR's national news magazines, and read in publications such as The New York Times, New York Magazine’s Vulture, BBC Culture, Wired, and Bandcamp. I'm most interested in stories about people, communities, and scenes that have been overlooked, forgotten, seen through a distorted lens, or perhaps never seen at all. I’m on a mission to get to a deeper understanding of what’s at stake in the way we see music and art- and the way we see ourselves.
Nashville-based singer-songwriter Margo Price is the real deal.
Her beginnings were humble, and her struggles have been many. Her memoir takes you on the road with her through bad low-paying, low-attended early gigs, drinking, and drugs. Price's marriage/creative partnership is tender and beautiful, yet becomes fragile as it shoulders the unbearable loss of a newborn son.
Through it all, you can feel Price’s grit and determination to survive with her soul intact, making it in an industry that pressures artists to conform to its priorities and sets them up to fail when they resist- or simply try to be themselves.
Price’s music is the soundtrack to her courageous story in progress. In the best possible way, this book reads like the liner notes: honest, heartfelt, and profound.
"[An] engaging and beautifully narrated quest for personal fulfillment and musical recognition...This is a fast-paced tale in which music and love always take center stage...A truly gifted musician, Price writes about her journey with refreshing candor."-Kirkus, starred review
"Brutally honest...a vivid and poignant memoir."-The Guardian
Country music star Margo Price shares the story of her struggle to make it in an industry that preys on its ingenues while trying to move on from devastating personal tragedies.
When Margo Price was nineteen years old, she dropped out of college and moved to Nashville to become a…
As a parent, I’ve been struck by the fierce sense of justice my children have, from the unfairness of one getting more screen time to bigger injustices, like bullying or discrimination. Kids have an innate sense of what’s right, of what’s fair, but they can also lack a sense of nuance and have rather Byzantine notions of what justice requires. I wrote Wayward Creatures to explore a different way of thinking about justice and accountability. Restorative justice practices seek to bring the offending party together with the people hurt by their actions to acknowledge the harm caused and find a solution together. These five books explore other aspects of what it means to seek justice.
As the title suggests, this book asks readers to think about how to tell when action is required to bring justice to a situation. Mila finds herself on the receiving end of unwanted attention from boys in her class, but her friends tell her she’s overreacting. What’s a hug or a touch from a boy? It’s all just playful flirting, right? But it doesn’t feel playful or fun to Mila. In the end, Mila sets the record straight and makes her feelings heard. The ending features a restorative circle, which is an in-school version of the restorative justice process Gabe goes through in my own book.
2019 The Washington Post Best Children’s Book of the Year (Erin Entrada Kelly Pick) A 2020 ALA Notable Children’s Book
“The novel’s all-too-familiar scenario offers a springboard for discussion among middle schoolers…Easily grasped scenarios and short chapters help make this timely #MeToo story accessible to a wide audience.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Realistic and heartbreaking.” —BCCB
Barbara Dee explores the subject of #MeToo for the middle grade audience in this heart-wrenching—and ultimately uplifting—novel about experiencing harassment and unwanted attention from classmates.
For seventh-grader Mila, it starts with some boys giving her an unwanted hug on the school blacktop. A few…
I started keeping a journal when I was fifteen. Ten years later, I had the raw material for Fugue, a portrait of the artist as a young woman (I had read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) that ends in celebration, rather than suicide (I had also recently read Plath's The Belljar). It did not get published. Thirty years later, I had so little, far too little, to celebrate. The portrait had become one of relentless frustration and persistent failure, despite my continued effort ... so much effort ... And so I wrote This is what happens, dedicating it to all the passionate, hard-working, competent women — it's not you.
Although this novel focuses on the world of investment banking, I list it here because it shows the difference between being a female working in finance and being a male working in finance; like This is what happens, it shows the impact of sexism on one woman's professional life, her dream, her ambition, her failure to achieve the former despite the latter.
I read it quite a while ago but was reminded of it while reading recently about the recent Martin/Nicole thing (wherein they switched email addresses, so Martin experienced what it was like to be Nicole for a couple of weeks) ("Folks, it sucked" was his summary).
"A job at Cray McKinley is whatever you make of it. For the real high flyers, there's no limit to what you can achieve."
Abby is a high flyer. But she's not your average banker. Driven by something other than money and status, she has her own reasons for climbing the ladder.
And so does Mike. An ambitious young graduate with an equally impressive CV, Mike is in it for the six-figure salaries and fast cars. He's got the skills, the grades and the swagger to make it all the way to the top.
