75 books like Bois Sauvage

I loved this book because it brought me into a the heart of Ward’s culture.

She brilliantly depicted the discrimination African-American men experience in America. Her love for her brother was endearing. I cried when she wove in the story of his death, and the deaths of other men she knew while growing up. 

This 1937 novel centers on a Black woman in the contemporary American South seeking to find freedom and love as she leaves her grandmother's farm to explore three romances.

In the process, she finds herself—and recovers it as a dark, shocking twist at the end creates a stumbling block she triumphantly surmounts.

I am a die-hard Tim Winton fan, but I only recently picked up The Shepherd’s Hut. True to form, Winton produced yet another Australian masterpiece: I can still call myself a Winton fanatic. 

Like always, I loved Winton’s distinctly Australian voice and setting and the delicate care with which he approached Jaxie’s character. Not a single sentence nor word is wasted; every moment is brimming with Australianess. 

The transformation of Jaxie’s remoteness to rough tenderness is where this book is at its best. In Fintan McGillis, Jaxie finally finds a parental figure who sticks by him, who leads with love, even when he’s tough, and who doesn’t leave first.

This novel defied my expectations and didn’t end where or how I thought it would. I thoroughly enjoyed embarking on this derailed journey with Jaxie. 

This was one of the first books I read at university. I admired Marie Munkara’s gruff voice and the way she delicately balanced satirical humour and dark truths.

Juxtaposing the voices of colonial guards and officers with 16-year-old Aboriginal mother, Sugar, lends this novel a messy complexity which is always compelling.

At the beginning, I found it easy to mock and deride the white colonial officers: the overtly racist Drew, the well-meaning but exploitative Ralphie, the bumbling, inadequate Hump with his mistaken ambitions of grandeur. I thought I’d figured it all out, that I’d grasped all of Munkara’s meaning. 

But as Sugar’s fate is revealed, and more significantly, she recognises the inevitability of her downfall, I was humbled. Munkara’s book taught me to look beyond the seemingly obvious characters and literary devices to the nuance within. 

This was my first introduction to Richard Flanagan’s writing, and it was the beginning of a deep, ongoing love affair.

I adore and admire Flanagan’s prose and the small, often invisible truths it contains. What I loved about Wanting was how it delved into and distinctly portrayed the innermost thoughts and feelings of multiple characters.

When interviewed, Flanagan describes this book as his attempt to understand passion, desire, and wanting. I can attest that Wanting is a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of what motivates human behaviour and how this process can become incredibly twisted and rife with ill intent. 

In Mathina’s story, there is little light or hope. An indictment of what happens to the discarded when the powerful don’t want them anymore, her downfall is tender, devastating, and utterly important as an emotionally charged, narrative account of Australian history.

I like a good fiction anthology, and this one, which focuses on the future if we do nothing to stop human-caused climate change, is really good. It focuses on the rising seas, looking at the future in a drowned world, both good and bad. There are a number of excellent speculative fiction writers here, including my favorites, Ken Liu and Stanley Robinson.

As bad as things are getting and will get, I like to be reminded of human resilience, and most of these stories do that. Some are apocalyptic, but I need to be reminded of that as well; what happens if we’re not resilient?   

Sure, people objected to pandemic mitigation measures in other countries. Only in the United States were objections partisan.

This book elegantly relies on public opinion surveys to demonstrate the costs of partisanship in the pandemic. The authors discuss the economy, immigration, and voting. They document the Trump administration’s efforts to make mitigating the pandemic partisan. Masks are not inherently partisan. Our friends in medicine wear them all the time. In parts of Asia, many have used them to limit viruses’ spread.

Even before the pandemic, in the United States, partisanship had become at least as much about personal identity as policy differences. Every personal decision could signal partisanship. By meticulously capturing the pandemic and partisanship, the authors warn of the ongoing difficulties of managing disasters in a divided country.

Painfully and beautifully relatable.

All My Puny Sorrows had a profound effect on me as I was wrestling with the loss of someone I loved fiercely and who wished to die. And while this story examines the intricacies of a tragic family dynamic, it’s also very funny—a contrasting combination I adore. 

Laughing in the face of heartbreak is my favorite strategy for healing, and this book delivers both.

Though I have read and relished all of Alice McDermott’s novels, Child of my Heart is my favorite. Theresa, age 15, is East Hampton’s most sought-after babysitter when her favorite cousin, eight-year-old Daisy, comes to spend the summer in this gorgeous coming-of-age novel. Though Theresa and Daisy share a magical world, Theresa eventually realizes the ongoing bruises on Daisy’s feet and body mean she is seriously ill. While the cousins intuitively conceal Daisy’s condition, Theresa becomes aroused by and wary of her sexual attraction to the father of Flora, a toddler she babysits. Through the haunting presence of death and her dawning sexuality for a much-older man, Theresa crosses into adulthood. 

Ah, these juvenile narrators: they think they know it all. Lucille Odem has it all figured out. She can fix her broken family and heal her parent’s broken hearts—because of course she can. For me, the pleasure of a great young adult narrator is watching as even the smartest of these smarty pants comes to learn that we all have blind spots and that it’s often the things we can’t see or don’t know that are the most important part of the equation. What a sweet book this is.