77 books like The Wrong Child

I’m fascinated by lighthouses. This interest was fostered by my late father, a merchant seaman whose life depended many times on their guidance. So, it was easy to love this book, where I learned about their inner workings through Tom, the meticulous lighthouse keeper.

When he was joined on his remote island by his wife, Isobel,  it was the inner workings of their minds that captivated me as they struggled with an ocean that had offered them a longed-for child and a crisis of conscience that was exposed in its searing complexity by the illuminating lighthouse beam.  

I’m a radio buff. First thing in the morning and last thing at night, I listen on my phone to voices from around the world. It’s a far cry from the scenario that unfolded in The Watch House, which is why I love this book about the early days of wireless.

Set on Rathlin Island, where Guglielmo Marconi conducted his wireless experiments, it explores an era where technology and superstition clashed head-on. I’m familiar with old Irish superstitions and the fate of children whose origins were suspect. Throughout this beautifully written novel, I was on tenterhooks as the young, unhappily married Nuala learned a new language from one of Marconi’s engineers. A language transmitted by air through codes, signals, and numbers, and also through secret glances and whispered forbidden words.  

This is a book that lingered in my memory long after I finished reading it. I could identify with the challenging behavior of a teenage daughter and also with the fraught preparations involved in creating the perfect Christmas dinner. From the opening page, I was totally engrossed in the interaction between Holly and her daughter, yet filled with uneasiness as the often banal exchanges between them gave way to a darker, more sinister reality involving Tatiana’s adoption.  

This book chilled me as much as the snow that fell throughout that dreadful Christmas Day but also consumed me until the very last page.

In this wonderful, multi-layered novel, the author delves into the shameful history of mother and baby homes where babies simply ‘disappeared’ and were given new identities while their mothers were working in the laundries or still nursing their newborns. 

I’m familiar with the stories of women like Eileen, Maeve, and Joanie and their lives after they left such institutions. I liken this book to a tapestry that pulled the strands of many stories together. It weaved through four generations to reach an era when society can look back in horror at what went on behind high walls. And, yet, as Aimee, a confident child of Generation Z, discovered on a night out with friends, the path that women take is still fraught with danger. 

Where did the Templars get the resources to build and maintain castles in the Holy Land and carry on their warfare against the enemies of Christendom? This book focuses on the Templars’ extensive properties in Lincolnshire, England, to show how the Templars generated wealth from their vast estates across Europe.

Using the Templars’ own record of their English holdings in 1185 and the English government records from the Templar trial period, 1308–13, Jefferson produces a fascinating study of Templar land- and people-management, showing that the Templars were at least as effective as farmers and managers as they were as warriors. He then takes the story on through the Hospitallers’ administration of the estates until the sixteenth century.

If you want to get to grips with real Templar life, read this book.

No author is more famous for writing locked-room mysteries than John Dickson Carr. Hag’s Nook is the first of Carr’s novels featuring Dr. Gideon Fell, who went on to become Carr’s most well-known detective. It features a family curse and an isolated English countryside home with a view of prison ruins on “Hag’s Nook,” a site where witches were once hung—and where the family curse is about to play out once more when the eldest son is required to spend an hour inside the prison to inherit the family fortune. Spooky and brilliant, this is a great introduction to Carr. I hope you’ll fall in love with it and go on to read many more of his books.

This has to be the most original and influential book ever written on landscape history – indeed it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Hoskins invented landscape history. 

He shows us that beneath the lineaments of ordinary, everyday landscapes, a fascinating past can be discerned. A few bumps and hollows in a grassy field can indicate the site of a vanished medieval village; a double line of hedgerows might signify the boundary of an Anglo-Saxon estate. With this book in hand, we can all become landscape historians! 

Most of all, I love Hoskins’s distinctive voice, eloquent and passionate in defence of the landscapes he cherishes, deploring the violence inflicted on them and those who lived in them by the ruthless forces of industrialization and modernity.

Having grown up in rural Aberdeenshire, surrounded by wide open spaces, I’m a sucker for a remote setting and the Lincolnshire landscape forms a formidable backdrop in Black Valley Farm.

Add in some strong women, a sinister community living in isolation, and a podcaster who’s not been entirely truthful and I was hooked.

A decade ago, the bodies of nine people were discovered at Black Valley Farm. The only suspect vanished without a trace. But then a true crime podcast brings new attention to the old mystery. With politics weaved into the storyline, this tale feels fresh and relevant – it twists and turns very satisfyingly.

The complex female characters and relationships are particularly engrossing. I was lucky to get a proof copy of this and tore through it. 

Beautifully written and masterfully crafted, the story of Anne Askew, the real central character in Prize for the Fire, brings us to the brink of understanding the power of belief and commitment in a medieval world turned up-side-down by politics and religion.

To the brink, but it would be impossible to get closer than that to Anne’s personal core principles she would rather die for than not relinquish. Questions about faith, fidelity, and fealty are woven across Anne’s short life, exposing the chasm between conviction and practice in the world controlled by fear of power and doctrine.

As we’ve established, you can’t have an 80s/90s mixtape without The Smiths, so it’s a good thing that they’re acknowledged early on in My Mad Fat Diary. However, since this story is set in the mid-90s in Lincolnshire, the majority of the musical mentions are BritPop. An A side of this mixtape would include Blur, Pulp, and Suede, while the B side would just be repeated recordings of “Wonderwall” by Oasis—except for the last track, which should be whatever 90s song you view as your personal mantra for self-love and congratulations.