Here are 61 books that Wilderness fans have personally recommended if you like
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I love books about everyman/everywoman characters facing danger, puzzles, and romance with a sense of humor. I love the suspense that builds throughout a whole book and the tension that can develop in just a paragraph. It’s easier for me to imagine I’m the protagonist and lose myself in the pages if I’m not reading about a superhero or a serial killer. With so many choices out there, it’s easier to find another person who’s seen the same TV show, for instance, but books are my true love because they are limitless and offer so many choices. It’s a privilege to be able to share some favorites.
I love surprises and characters who are not what they seem, and I enjoy a high-tech backdrop when it fits the story. When a character thinks he sees evidence of a crime in what’s basically Google Street View, he will not let go of it and drags our unwilling protagonist into danger.
I loved the emotional core of a man dealing with his brother’s mental health issues and the blossoming romance in his life.
What would you do if you witnessed a murder - but no one believed you . . .?
Another masterful suspense novel from the bestselling author of the Richard & Judy summer read winner, NO TIME FOR GOODBYE and FIND YOU FIRST
Map-obsessed Thomas spends his days and nights on a virtual tour of the world through his computer screen, believing he must store the details of every town and city in his head. Then one day, while surfing a street view program, he sees something that shouldn't be there: a woman being murdered behind a window on a New…
I love books about everyman/everywoman characters facing danger, puzzles, and romance with a sense of humor. I love the suspense that builds throughout a whole book and the tension that can develop in just a paragraph. It’s easier for me to imagine I’m the protagonist and lose myself in the pages if I’m not reading about a superhero or a serial killer. With so many choices out there, it’s easier to find another person who’s seen the same TV show, for instance, but books are my true love because they are limitless and offer so many choices. It’s a privilege to be able to share some favorites.
I love a good hook and sympathetic characters. Early in this book, the protagonist is inexplicably dumped by his college girlfriend, who tells him to leave her alone. Six years later, he sees an obituary for the guy she married. But when he crashes the funeral, the grieving widow is not his ex-girlfriend.
For me, the book was constantly engaging, with characters I really cared about, a huge puzzle to solve, frequent tension to move the action along, a strong love interest, and digging into an interesting character’s past to understand the present danger.
The bestselling author and creator of the hit Netflix drama Fool Me Once explores the dangers of obsession in this #1 bestselling suspense thriller.
Six years have passed since Jake Fisher watched Natalie, the love of his life, marry another man. Six years of hiding a broken heart by throwing himself into his career as a college professor. Six years of keeping his promise to leave Natalie alone, and six years of tortured dreams of her life with her new husband, Todd.
But six years haven't come close to extinguishing his feelings, and when Jake comes across Todd's obituary, he…
I love books about everyman/everywoman characters facing danger, puzzles, and romance with a sense of humor. I love the suspense that builds throughout a whole book and the tension that can develop in just a paragraph. It’s easier for me to imagine I’m the protagonist and lose myself in the pages if I’m not reading about a superhero or a serial killer. With so many choices out there, it’s easier to find another person who’s seen the same TV show, for instance, but books are my true love because they are limitless and offer so many choices. It’s a privilege to be able to share some favorites.
A precocious thirteen-year-old girl with a sense of humor gets into big trouble and has to deal with it without adult help. What’s not to love? Ingrid is a vivid character in a great small-town setting with believable characters and plenty of tension.
And I loved the fact that she has to deal with obstacles adults don’t generally face, like not being able to drive. First of an outstanding trilogy, for my taste.
"My all-time favorite. Astonishing." (Stephen King)
Down the Rabbit Hole is the first book in the Echo Falls mystery series by bestselling crime novelist Peter Abrahams. Perfect for middle school readers looking for a good mystery.
Welcome to Echo Falls, home of a thousand secrets. In Down the Rabbit Hole, eighth grader Ingrid Levin-Hill is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or at least her shoes are. And getting them back will mean getting tangled up in a murder investigation as complicated as the mysteries solved by her idol, Sherlock Holmes.
I love books about everyman/everywoman characters facing danger, puzzles, and romance with a sense of humor. I love the suspense that builds throughout a whole book and the tension that can develop in just a paragraph. It’s easier for me to imagine I’m the protagonist and lose myself in the pages if I’m not reading about a superhero or a serial killer. With so many choices out there, it’s easier to find another person who’s seen the same TV show, for instance, but books are my true love because they are limitless and offer so many choices. It’s a privilege to be able to share some favorites.
I’m always a sucker for a well-done amnesia mystery. A character discovering he might not have been the best person before whatever incident triggered the memory loss is particularly vulnerable. As he tries to start over with a wife who is nearly a stranger, someone is trying to kill him, making for a terrific recipe of empathy and tension.
When you add the possibility of salvaging his relationship with his son, the result for me was a series of sequences with great emotional payoffs and a very satisfying ending. I’m glad I found the book before the movie because I enjoyed the book a lot more.
Here is a gripping story of a man in pursuit of himself--a man suffering a psychological blackout who decides, instead of running way, to face his forgotten life and the riddle of his own character.
Charles Bancroft--although at first he does not know his own name--is the man who, in New York, surfaces from the depths of blankness. He is well dressed, his clothes are disheveled and wet--and his face is startlingly the face of a stranger.
And in the agonizing search for his identity he comes to realize, with compassion and terror, his failures and…
My passion is writing crime fiction and more. William J. Warner is my name. I am a retired FBI Agent who worked violent crime cases. I developed a wealth of experience interviewing seedy people around the globe. As such, I love writing their dialogue and incorporating it with those of good intentions. I’ve written seven books. My degrees are in business, forensic psychology, and law. My novels include Holdup Number Six, Appalachian Impasse, Gold Line to Lenox, Going Knee to Knee with FBI Polygraph, Ohio Boys, Hoosier Fields, and Jewels In The Sand where I digressed into a love & war saga with a tear-jerking finish.
Having worked bank robberies as a former FBI Special Agent, I have a keen sense as to what makes these people tick. Most are quite ignorant, however, occasionally clever planning takes place by those as brazen as Hogan has portrayed here. A true masterpiece, Chuck Hogan does a splendid job bringing his characters to life in all the real-life depictions you will enjoy. This is a gut-wrenching roller coaster mixing crime with romantic infatuation to the point you can’t stop reading. I’ll admit, once the movie came out, I had to get the book and now it’s one of my all-time favorite crime thrillers.
From the author of The Strain comes a tense, psychologically gripping, Hammet award-winning thriller.
Four masked men—thieves, rivals, and friends from the tough streets of Charlestown—take on a Boston bank at gunpoint. Holding bank manager Claire Keesey hostage and cleaning out the vault were simple. But career criminal Doug MacRay didn't plan on one thing: falling hard for Claire. When he tracks her down without his mask and gun, their mutual attraction is undeniable. With a tenacious FBI agent following his every move, he imagines a life away from his gritty, dangerous work—a life centered around Claire. But before that…
With every book we read, we engage in a complex act of telepathy and empathy. We are entering another human’s thoughts, interpreting them with our own, and come out changed from this colossal encounter. These five books I mentioned, with their extraordinary kindness, insight, humor, wisdom, warmth, compassion, and wholeness—many of them fantasies, many of them focusing on communities—have informed the writer I am today: a World Fantasy Award Winner. But I wouldn’t be without all the books that helped make me. These books are some of the best that built me, and keep building in me: the kind of books I try to write myself.
Here If You Need Me is a non-fiction memoir I read years ago on a whim. It still sticks with me. A woman with four children is happily married to a State trooper training to be a minister. When he dies suddenly, she goes on to become a minister herself, working with search and rescue missions in the Maine woods while raising her children. Her intimate knowledge of grief, her vulnerability, and compassion, coupled with a life of service and family, moved me so deeply that I often call upon the memory of this book in my life to metaphorically “get down on the floor with those who weep, and give them tea if they want it.”
HERE IF YOU NEED ME is the story Kate Braestrup's remarkable journey from grief to faith to happiness - as she holds her family together in the wake of her husband's death, pursues his dream of becoming a minister, and ultimately finds her calling as a chaplain to search-and-rescue workers. It is dramatic, funny, deeply moving, and simply unforgettable--an uplifting account offinding God through helping others, and of the small miracles that happen every day when a heart is grateful and love isrestored.
I’ve always been a fan of horror because a good scare makes the adrenaline flow. Personally, I don’t think ghosts and demons are real, and they don’t scare me. But humans…humans can be downright evil. This is why I gravitate toward serial killer and slasher fiction when I’m looking for a scare. Sometimes I just want to test my endurance for the dark side of human nature. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to write a really depraved book without taking the time to make the reader care about the characters, which is why these novels are my favorite works of darkness. These are great, disturbing books with genuine pathos.
Ketchum’s classic survival horror novel about cannibals attacking a cabin of vacationers is pure 80s slasher goodness. It was perhaps the darkest book of its kind for a long time and pulls no punches with the intensity of its chase scenes. Ketchum’s economical writing style makes it a very easy read, one where you will root for the good guys, and be left emotionally drained by the end.
September. A beautiful New York editor retreats to a lonely cabin on a hill in the quiet Maine beach town of Dead River―off season―awaiting her sister and friends. Nearby, a savage human family with a taste for flesh lurks in the darkening woods, watching, waiting for the moon to rise and night to fall…
And before too many hours pass, five civilized, sophisticated people and one tired old country sheriff will learn just how primitive we all are beneath the surface…and that there are no limits at all to the will to survive.
I’m a native of Texas who loves bluebonnets, big skies, and barbecue! With 25+ books in print, I write about imperfect characters who discover their inner strength as they lean on God and learn to trust each other and themselves. I’m fascinated by the dynamics of personalities and relationships, as well as the backstories that made the individuals who they are now. If you’re looking for stories of true-to-life characters growing deeper in faith while dealing with all the messiness human relationships entail, here are some novels you may enjoy.
I love a good sisters novel—maybe because I always wished for a sister of my own? This cast of unique and engaging characters quickly drew me into their lives as these young women with very different personalities found ways to accept their widowed dad's plans to reopen the summer camp where he’d met their mother. I also enjoy a good plot twist, and the one at the end of this book was just right, a touching way to tie everything together. This book was primarily the eldest sister Cam's story, which means more books to follow with insights into the other sisters’ lives. Have I mentioned I love sequels? Once I connect with a set of characters, it’s hard to let them go!
Sometimes love hurts--and sometimes it can heal in the most unexpected way.
Camden Grayson loves her challenging career, but the rest of her life could use some improvement. "Moving on" is Cam's mantra. But there's a difference, her two sisters insist, between one who moves on . . . and one who keeps moving.
Cam's full-throttle life skids to a stop when her father buys a remote island off the coast of Maine. Paul Grayson has a dream to breathe new life into the island--a dream that includes reuniting his estranged daughters. Certain Dad has lost his mind, the three…
I’ve long been intrigued by what makes a woman a hero in her own life. My three novels feature characters who are not obvious heroes—they are trying to shed a difficult past, they may run towards risky second chances, and they eventually stand up to their history and heal it and themselves. A lot of my inspiration for my stories comes from my mother, who was a pilot in World War II. I grew up with the legacy of women as heroic; it fostered an intense curiosity about female ambition and morality, women who would risk personal freedom and safety to find something greater than they expected.
Olive is not a likable character, yet so many readers related to her in the first book, as I did. Strout took a completely different approach in this sequel, which appealed to me even more. We see the larger community in Olive’s life, looking at her through her interactions with friends, neighbors, and a lover who becomes her second husband.
Strout weaves present and past using these different perspectives, showing the rare kindnesses that Olive allows herself. By the end, she was a hero to me because of her changes as a person—the increased compassion tempered her frankness. A brilliant and realistic exploration of aging, illness, and death.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Number One New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton
'A terrific writer' Zadie Smith
'A superbly gifted storyteller and a craftswoman in a league of her own' Hilary Mantel
'A novel to treasure' Sunday Times
Olive, Again follows the blunt, contradictory yet deeply loveable Olive Kitteridge as she grows older, navigating the second half of her life as she comes to terms with the changes - sometimes welcome, sometimes not - in her own existence and in those around her.
As a born and bred Mainer, there are dozens of great books I could recommend set in the Pine Tree State. But the five I’ve curated capture, for me, the diversity of the Maine culture, from the long-gone loggers who made their living from the woods to the often-overlooked Indigenous communities to the mill towns struggling to survive. When a non-Mainer thinks of our state, what usually comes to mind are quaint coastal villages, lighthouses, lobster… And while those things are part of what makes Maine the place it is, there exists, both on and off the page, plenty of other experiences and histories to discover here.
Even though Jewett wrote the stories in this book in the late 1800s, there is a timeless feeling to her prose that reverberates today.
I love Jewett’s attention to and reverence for the natural beauty that surrounds the fictional town of Dunnet Landing. Her descriptions of the Maine coastline—a blend of craggy rocks, forest, meadows, and sea—are visceral, sensory, and alluring. Jewett also nicely captures the hardworking, humorous, quietly resilient spirit of the year-round residents of Dunnet Landing, with a particularly keen and kind eye toward her female characters.
Her care for the everyday rituals of life, the small moments that make up an existence, are lovingly rendered and evocative. There’s a reason this is a Maine classic.
A rich collection of classic American literature potraying the beauty of a 19th-century New England town.
A female writer comes one summer to Dunnet Landing, a Maine seacoast town, where she follows the lonely inhabitants of once-prosperous coastal communities. Here, lives are molded by the long Maine winters, rock-filled fields and strong resourceful women.
Throughout Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel and stories, these quiet tales of a simpler American life capture the inspirational in the everyday: the importance of honest friendships, the value of family, and the gift of community.
“Their counterparts are in every village in the world, thank heaven,…
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