100 books like Walking Shadows

Australian author Kirsty Eagar’s love of surfing and the ocean comes through in every book she writes.

Here, she combines quintessential Aussie surf culture with vampires. Not sexy, heart-throb vamps, but soulless killers with an unquenchable thirst and increasingly disturbing plans for themselves and humanity. This novel is equal parts edgy contemporary Aussie coming-of-age story and skin-crawling horror. It’s no mean feat, and Kirsty hits it tone-perfect.

As always, there are well-written, believable characters (teen protagonists, unhinged vamps, and dodgy adults), plus a tense plot that builds to a frenetic pace with high stakes. Kirsty gives us classic mythology, refreshed and transplanted into a sun-drenched beach setting, underpinned by a reimagining of the brutal real-life story of the Batavia shipwreck in 1629.

I first read this over a decade ago and I loved it even more the second time around.

This is one of my all-time favourite novels. It’s a deeply moving coming-of-age story, set in a future Australia ruled by vampires known as The Masters.

It’s the story of Mark, and the monster who teaches him to be a man. Mark’s voice is perfect and the world building is totally original. The plot, with its dark undertones, moves at a measured pace towards a series of life-changing, violent moments.

I love how Australian this book is, and the fact Trent never once uses the 'v' word.

Day Boy is gentle and wild. It offers a rare and surprisingly moving study of manhood and masculinity, and the relationships between boys and father figures. The writing is sublime. This is a novel to be savoured.

This witty young adult novel cleverly up-ends the traditional vampire mythology.

These Australian urban vamps are sickly, socially isolated, and barely able to defend themselves. Fifteen-year-old Nina has been a vampire since 1973. She’s part of a group of vamps who meet once a week for therapy sessions to help them refrain from attacking humans.

When one of their members is murdered, they decide to track their enemy, assuming that once the slayer sees how pathetic and harmless they are they’ll be left alone. Ill-equipped for danger, Nina and her fellow vamps stumble into a world of guns, thugs, werewolves, and vicious humans.

This is a fun read, packed with plenty of suspense, a clever plot, and a nice sprinkle of understated romance.

This is a great read. It’s fast-paced, has interesting characters, and plenty of action and intrigue.

It features an Australian teen (Sadie) who finds herself caught in the middle of an ancient conflict nearing its final battle. I enjoyed the Perth setting, the dynamic between Sadie and the people she cares about, and the brilliant way Myke brings a fresh twist to some creepy ancient mariner myths.

There's a great sense of menace and mystery as this story unfolds, and the last third book is hard to put down as Sadie races to save her city—and the world.

Australian women won the right to vote decades before their British and American sisters. In 1893 the colony of South Australia was the second place to grant it, after New Zealand the year before, and the first to give women the right to stand for parliament. Many Australian women joined the international suffrage crusade as activists, agitators, and intellectuals. This is their story, as they marched, organised, lectured, and staged amazing stunts, like dropping handbills from a dirigible on the procession of King Edward to open the winter session of the British parliament in 1909. 

My next book is by far the least well-known of my authors, and it’s by far the least well-known book. It’s by my friend and colleague, Samuel Alexander, with whom I’ve co-written a couple of books now, including This Civilisation is Finished.

It’s a splendid read. For philosophers, it’s charming, because Sam is continually bringing in implicitly, and most explicitly, the great philosophers. He’s quoting or talking about Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and the rest. His characters sometimes offer lines of one of them to each other. And, in that sense, it’s very much a novel of ideas in the tradition of utopias and dystopias.

I love this novel for its beautiful imagery, its character development, and its deeply sensitive portrayal of the clash of civilisations that was to prove so devastating to the countryside as well as to its original inhabitants. Salt Creek tells the story of the European settlers’ incursion in the mid-1850s into a remote coastal region of South Australia, and it focuses on one particular family’s struggles with establishing themselves in a land that already belonged to others. 

I knew from the blurb this was going to be my kind of book. I really loved the post-apocalyptic Australian setting and the way the desert wasteland society is structured. The concept of dirt farmers is particularly genius.

As well as the excellent world building, there’s page-turning action, an epic zombie battle, and a clever setup for the next installment. This is the first in The Territory trilogy, which follows the increasingly important role of Squid and Lyn, two teenagers caught up in a battle against ghouls and who learn secrets about themselves and their society as they trek across the Outback.

Although The Territory was published in the 1940s, the book is as vivid as if it came out last year. Neither a novel nor a history, it is an evocative account of Ernestine Hill’s extensive travels around Northern Australia, the Aboriginal and white people she met, the stories she came across, and the joys and hardships she faced. I view it as essential reading for anyone planning to visit the Top End of Australia. I first read it while I was mapping out the plot of my own book, and was blown away by Ernestine Hill’s evocation of The Territory. 

'Original, provocative, and witty, Australia is the most comprehensive single-volume history of Australia yet published.' This is the blurb on the back cover of the paperback but it echoes my own views of this marvellous book completely. It covers everything: from the plight of the convicts to the Europeans’ experiments with farming and land grabs; relationships with the Aboriginal people, and especially the virtues or otherwise of respective Governors and their often spiky relationships with the government back home. All of it written with authority and a wonderfully wry wit.