49 books like Out of Africa

Highly recommended!

What’s not to love about a collection of true animal stories? From the moment I first read this memoir, I was captivated by James Herriot’s fresh, engaging writing and the warmth with which he describes his early days as a country vet in Yorkshire.

His encounters with tough, no‑nonsense farmers and the animals he treats—from pampered pets to semi‑feral cattle—are funny, touching, and endlessly absorbing. This classic is filled with charm, drama, and genuine heart.

I return to it often, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who loves animals.

I was blown away by the genius of telling a story ostensibly about the end of an era and an empire while the real story, a love story, runs just below the surface. I confess that I am not otherwise much of an Ishiguro fan, but this book is perfection.

I am old enough to have known members of a generation who valued loyalty and propriety above personal desires, and this novel made me both nostalgic for a time when self-sacrifice and self-control were so respected and sad about the happiness forfeited because of these social standards.

I’m fascinated by the role fiction plays in helping us understand one another, the power it has to evoke empathy and awareness, and its place in teaching us humanity and helping us heal. After all, as Nadine Gordimer said, "Fiction uses metaphor to help us see the truth."

If I were a literary doctor, I’d prescribe this book, set during Zimbabwe’s economic collapse, as obligatory reading. You might consider it a vitamin. Dosage and directions for use? Read it once and, if you’re still unmoved, read it again...and again until you get it. Or read it simply because it’s an excellent book, and reading fiction is good for you.

I’ve loved Andre Brink’s books ever since I discovered them in my late teens. He’s a celebrated South African author of protest literature, and his historical fiction, Philida, is one of my favourites. 

It’s a tender and yet powerful story about a woman born into slavery to a white family, who becomes the mother of four children by the son of her master. Although it reveals the sordid past of the country, much of Philida’s power lies in how personal it is.

I love how nuanced and intimate the story is and how one woman’s story says so much.

I loved how this book, set in an unnamed southern African country featuring the turbulent times of colonialism, civil war, and the HIV virus, combined historical facts and magical realism to captivate and charm me.

I was mesmerized as I followed Genie as she travelled through time, experiencing high adventure, heartache, and beauty. The characters are unforgettable, and the writing exquisite. It’s an incomparable novel.

I was completely bewitched by Nabokov’s language in the book–it’s sarcastic, funny, even hilarious, but it sowed deep the seeds of pathos that brought a faint pain to my heart. I read many paragraphs over a couple of times, but still felt I couldn’t get enough out of his sentences with layers of hidden meaning, intention, etc.

The book enchanted me while leaving me a bitter aftertaste, just like love sometimes is a double-edged treasure that makes you laugh and cry.

Elisabeth Elliot’s approach to faith and to missiology was heavily influenced by 19th-century Irish missionary Amy Wilson Carmichael. Carmichael moved to India in her twenties and spent the rest of her life there, working to rescue children from exploitation and abuse. She also wrote poetry, biography, meditations on missiology, and books about her experiences.

Elliot was introduced to Carmichael’s writing by the headmistress of her high school, and over the next several years, she devoured everything of Carmichael’s that she could get her hands on, even writing to Carmichael to thank her for her work. Carmichael died at age 83, when Elliot was 25. More than three decades later, Elliot traveled to India to research and write this book, the story of the woman she called her spiritual mother. 

Flannery O’Connor is one of the great writers of the 20th Century. She was also a lifelong Catholic. Among the themes she explored in many of her letters to friends are the relationship between Christian faith and art and how a writer might share her vision of reality with an audience that didn’t necessarily want to see it.

Like O’Connor, Elisabeth Elliot wrote fiction to explore the action of grace in the darkness and chaos of human life, and like O’Connor, Elliot received harsh criticism of her work from many of her coreligionists. Elliot’s marginal notes in her own copy of O’Connor’s collected letters show how much O’Connor’s thoughts and experiences mirrored her own. 

Elisabeth Elliot considered Katherine Mansfield not only a literary role model, but a person with whom she had so much in common that reading Mansfield’s letters helped explain Elliot herself.

Thus, this moving collection of letters between Mansfield and her husband sheds important light on how Elliot saw herself, reflecting her challenges in her relationship with her parents, her deep connection with her brother Tom, her passionate love for her husband, her strong and deeply private emotions, her determination to face her own mortality, and her dedication to excellence in her work.  

Blake: an indispensable visionary of poetry—whose multi-media approach to poetry—his art, visual designs, words, images, mythic stories, lyrics, dramatic monologues, polemics on behalf of opening the doors of perception—continue to haunt and provoke, inspire and lift, perplex and illuminate, prophetically anticipate and speak from the frontiers of the wild, countering imagination. Blake is the Romantic poet par excellence, whose vocation of finding inspiration and vision through poetry itself goes beyond his time and place, reaching to us in our troubled, sometimes disabled pandemia times, ecological catastrophe times. With Blake's books, one work opens to another, and to another: and we see worlds in his words. He helps us to apprehend the whorling fluidities, emanating energies, in our circuit cosmos.