Books like A Famine of Horses — picked by fans

When you turn the pages of this book, you feel you can see, smell, and hear the dark streets and alleys of Tudor London. This book inspired me to place my books in Tudor England and start The Tudor Rose Murders Series.

It is Tudor Crime at its best. I was so captivated by the characters, the detail, the pace, and the plotting that I could not put it down and felt wretched when I turned the last page. 

It is difficult to imagine a list of great novels about the Middle Ages that does not include this book.

I read it first when I was in graduate school, and it brought so much of what I was studying to life – the monastic world of its setting with all its contradictions and spectacular architecture; fights over religion and the true nature of spirituality; the non-linear nature of medieval literature. 

I love how it can be read on one level as a page-turny murder mystery and on another as a post-modern novel that explores the nature of signs and meaning. Its mystificatory preface reveals the distance between the medieval world and what we can say about it.

I love learning how people lived in other times via historical fiction, and Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who practiced healing arts in England in the 1100s, is one of my favorite characters.

I like hearing his opinions about the civil war that raged at that time and the church’s role in it. I like the fact that he’s a bit of a maverick who pushes beyond the bounds of his role as a monk to solve mysteries.  

I was immediately caught by the novel’s premise: a medical examiner mystery set in the Middle Ages!

When King Henry I faces threats to the Jews under his protection because of a spate of murders of young children, he sends to Italy for a “master of the art of death,” only to receive Adelia, a woman. I was enchanted by Adelia’s courage, intelligence and wry humor as she searched for the killer.

I wallowed in the lush description, the tight plot, and the often contentious exchanges between Henry and Adelia. The final confrontation with the killer has all the stark graphic horror of a well-constructed film, and the fate of the killer’s accomplice is a masterpiece of terrible justice.

I do want to warn you, though; once you finish reading this, you’ll want to binge every following text in the series!

I am fairly convinced that Grace Burrowes is a time traveler, for I have never seen a modern author get period-specific language so right. Unlike all the other books on my list, the Lady Violet series does not include any murders.

Instead, Lady Violet’s penchant for solving “puzzles” made for a nice break from the more macabre. I got lost in the twisty details and adored the Agatha Christie-style reveal at the end of the book.

I love a good re-imagined fairytale, and Tidbeck delivers...except it's more like she took all the fairy tales, smashed them, and reassembled them in a mosaic that's both familiar and alien at the same time.

Dora and Thistle are two among many children trapped in the Garden, servants to the fairy-like overlords who, when those children grow up, will eat them. Dora and Thistle escape, but so does one of the wicked overlords....

The prose is gorgeous, and the story is all the things fairytales should be: magical, terrifying, fantastic, with journeys and helpers and—well. I won't tell you if the ending is happy or not. Read to the end and find out. 

This book is a literary novel set in part on the Moon. That’s not a sentence you’ll read often, which is a big part of why I love this novel—it’s not what I expected, even though there’s a big hint in the title.

Like many readers, my introduction to Emily St. John Mandel was her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. In that story, the most interesting characters aren’t concerned with simple survival…if they are going to fight to live, they want a culture worth fighting for. When I picked this book up, I deliberately chose not to read the story summary and was completely caught off guard by how the novel unfolded. Typically, stories questioning time and our perception of reality do so by sending the protagonist on a dangerous quest looking for answers.

Like all my favorite novels, the scope is intimate and vast in this one. The story… show more.

This book proved what I already knew: that the world of books is real, and there’s an organization keeping the characters and props in good shape. Small details fascinated me. Like, there is only one piano in all of literature, and a team moves it around to whatever piano scene is currently being read.

I never would have known had I not read this book. I identified best with the mad scientist uncle, but that’s me.

Another book set amidst the colour and vibrancy of Elizabethan theatre – but I enjoyed this book particularly for its featuring of William Shakespeare himself as a character!

A young American actor comes to contemporary London to perform at the newly-built Globe theatre – and finds himself transported back in time to the first Globe theatre and the world of Shakespeare and his players. A plot against Queen Elizabeth I drives the action forward in this unusual time-slip adventure.

My new book features a solitary time traveler in a key supporting role, so I feel well-equipped to say that Man in the Empty Suit is the pièce de resistance of absurdly trippy time travel stories.

A time traveler celebrates his birthday every year at an abandoned hotel in the year 2100 or so, with all his fellow time-traveling past and future selves in attendance – nobody else is ever invited. This year, however, he discovers the murdered corpse of next year’s instance of himself.

This makes him the lead detective in the case of his own murder, which ideally he’d like to prevent; and the only suspects are either younger versions of himself, although you’d expect him to remember committing the crime, or elder versions of himself, who somehow managed to survive the murder of their younger self – for the time being, anyway.

Twisty and mind-bendy goodness.