14 books like Children of the Last Days

This book is a masterful mix of mystery and the miraculous!

Set in Paris, in the early twentieth century, the author will take you on a wild ride, something like a cross between Indiana Jones and National Treasure – and it’s not a long book, so it’s a great way to introduce yourself to this prolific author.

If you’ve never heard of Davis Bunn, he’s more famous than you would guess, and a best-selling author. Do yourself a favor, and introduce yourself to his work.

The setting is Rome, in the year 50 AD, when Christianity was not yet even on the radar of the Romans.

And yet, to be a Christian meant going against the grain of the culture, and it could get you fired from your job, or worse.

Meticulously researched (the author is a professor – but the book is not dry and boring), the book tells a compelling story about the early Christians in Rome, and includes info boxes to tell you all about Roman culture, life in Rome, and other stuff you’ll want to know.

The story is fiction, but the setting, and all the historical details are spot-on. If you want to know what life was really like for the earliest Christians, you need to check out this book.

This is another one I have re-read because I love the fantasy aspect. I didn’t come across C.S. Lewis’ books until I was a young adult, and then it was his adult writings. Now, I’m loving catching up on his Narnia series.

Written in 1950, this classic tale lives on, never becoming out of date, and I love that it is currently a stage production.

As a Christian, I also love a classic tale of good versus evil, with the drama between the white witch and the lion hero, Aslan, who overcomes death to save Narnia from the witch’s evil spell. For me, it’s a truly inspirational allegorical tale that stands the test of time.

The action in this book just keeps pumping.

Each of the heroes is a deep, fully realized person, plagued with flaws, some of them almost unforgiveable. Each character must face their own demons in this fast-paced, mysterious adventure. This book has espionage, swordplay, constant danger, friendship, even romance, everything you could wish for.

It is a swashbuckling tale following the impetuous and brave-to-a-fault D’Artagnan as he grows from an idealistic boy to a man, chasing his calling to fight among the hallowed ranks of the King’s musketeers. 

For me, Sheridan’s new book was a riveting read – a mind-opening reminder of how early Christians, unbelievably, converted a good part of the classical world and spread Jesus’ radical teaching of love, forgiveness, human equality, and fraternity in a world in which they were total nobodies, scorned, persecuted, tortured, and killed.

Attractively, the book also shows some modern countercultural Christian lives, based on the same Gospel teachings, still capable of acting as a leaven and a sign of hope in the spiritually disoriented Western world.

I found this book extremely refreshing and encouraging, and I have recently given it as a birthday present to a seventeen-year-old granddaughter to inspire her to set herself challenging and God-oriented goals worth living and dying for.

This is another big book that my autistic grandson read aloud to me, with enthusiasm, when he was still in his teens.

It is St Paul’s acclaimed biography “by his greatest living interpreter” (so says historian Tom Holland, the author of Dominion). It is a gripping adventure story, following Paul from Tarsus to Rome (“Three times I have been beaten with rods, once I was stoned; three times I have been shipwrecked, a night and a day I have been adrift at sea”) as well as a journey into Paul’s mind and heart.

I loved the scholarship, the narrative mastery, the outer and inner drama of St Paul’s life, so vividly, empathetically, and thrillingly offered to the reader.

My autistic grandson, as a teenager, read this book to me aloud twice; and now, at twenty, he is reading it to me, at my request, but once again with gusto, for the third time.

It is a meticulous and loving chronicle of Jesus’ life, his doings and sayings. I have read many “biographies” of Jesus, but, along with Aleksander Men’s The Son of Man, this is my favourite. The reading of this long book aloud, chapter by chapter, is a joy.

It is dramatic in style, very reliable in details, and sound and insightful in their interpretation. At the same time, the author’s heart is in it, and so is the reader’s. It is nourishment for the soul, as well as for the mind. A splendid book.

I have read this book three times. 

As a Christian and a lifelong reader of historical fiction and of books on Christianity, I loved this book and couldn’t put it down.

“Theophilos” is the mysterious addressee of Luke’s Gospel. O’Brien imagines him to be the adoptive father of Luke. In the novel, Luke becomes deeply absorbed in the stories that people who knew Jesus personally tell him and decides to chronicle them as a historian. Theophilos travels to Palestine to try to rescue Luke from the “madness” of Christianity.

The book is an extraordinary feat of historical and psychological imagination. While replete with breathtaking episodes, it is, generally speaking, not fast-paced – one often stops to ponder a sentence, or a reflection – yet it is also a thriller.

My experience shows that this book can be a lifesaver for anyone living with depression, chronic anxiety, or a troubled heart. 

It offers a Christian take on how to achieve interior freedom and preserve it in troubled times. A friend of mine told me that there was a period in her life when she wouldn’t leave her house without taking this book with her.

In fact, I have often done this myself. The sense of freedom from external circumstances that I could find when reading a page from this book in hard places, at hard times, was extraordinary.

The author, Jacques Philippe, a member of the Community of the Beatitudes, has a special appeal to modern readers, and many say he has helped them to attain a peace of heart.

Where my book, Fighting Terror, zooms in on the Allied Council, and its encompassing security culture, Christine Haynes’ rich and detailed book reconstructs the interactions between occupying soldiers and the occupied in Paris and across the French countryside. She meticulously details how these interactions involved violence, but also promoted cultural exchange (vernacular, songs, dances, fashion, food) and reconciliation between the French and their former enemies. Her book reads as a narrative on how to transform former enemies into allies, a unique blueprint for fraternizing-through-occupying on the ground.