Books like Animal Dreams

I first loved Rebecca for its atmosphere, but what stayed with me was something more unsettling: how completely another person’s version of the past can shape the present.

I remember finishing it and thinking about how easily we accept a story when everyone around us seems to believe it. As a writer, I keep returning to that idea.

Du Maurier showed me that an absence can dominate a novel as powerfully as a living character, and that what people refuse to say can matter as much as what they reveal. That has stayed with me in my own writing about memory, silence, and family secrets.

In 1953, a working-class Jewish couple from Brooklyn was executed for allegedly selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Their two young children were orphaned. E. L. Doctorow’s novel about the Rosenbergs is an excruciating examination of these events from the fictionalized perspective of one of those children. Daniel’s point of view—naïve, angry, traumatized—brilliantly illustrates the absurdity and cruelty of American culture when it turns against those who, for reasons of class, race, or religion, have never been fully included in it. I’ve read it a dozen times and still find myself sobbing at the realization of how all the country’s history, all its dreams and delusions about itself and its destiny, were stacked up against this poor pair of nobodies. Their real crime lay in demanding that the United States live up to its ideals, something it has never been able to do.

I’m sure I’ve never laughed out loud so many times while reading a book that explores the effects of deep trauma.

What I love here is that we barely know the extent of Eleanor’s childhood trauma until the very end. What we experience instead is the increasingly interesting life of someone who doesn’t at all fit into the social world as we know it but is about as endearing in her innocence and brute honesty as they come.

The way Eleanor Oliphant sees the world made me appreciate how ridiculous so many of our social rituals can be. I rooted for her every step of the way and came away almost wishing I could wear her particular goggles when walking through my own life.

This book made me fall in love with Puglia, the hot, dusty “heel of the boot” with its lemons, olives, and cactus, its boxy farmhouses. Not that the story, bouncing from Paris to New York to a long-gone Rome, doesn’t deliver—the narrator, Alina, talks about a family secret passed from woman to woman, disintegrating memories, a past she must understand before the movers arrive and the house with its mural of a naked woman painted on a patio wall is no longer theirs. Present and past, the known and the unknown combine, and all of it is tied to alluring, sensual Puglia. As a storyteller, Marciano demands your attention, painting the life story of a family whose Italy is unlike the one you think you know.

The masculine voice in this novel is absolutely masterful. It’s tender, nuanced, earnest, and intelligent. Stegner offers a sweeping, unflinching story about friendships, marriage, the human ego, and the passage of time with a set of characters who are flawed, fragile, and therefore, very believable.

I’ve read this book more than once, and discover something new and lovely each time. This book honors a reader’s intelligence and heart. Again, the complexity in the characters and how they relate to one another gets me every time.  

This book is one of my favorite mysteries of all time. It addresses one of the great unsolved mysteries in English history: Did Richard III kill the princes in the tower? Tey’s sleuth, Alan Grant, is a dogged investigator, and, in the hospital with a broken leg, he treats this historical mystery like a contemporary murder. His step-by-step investigation pulled me in and convinced me that Richard Plantagenet has been mistreated by history.

Miss Tey is so convincing that she inspired me to write the (very innocent) ghost of Richard III into one of my own mystery novels after the monarch’s body was found under a Midlands car park in 2012.

Written and set in the 1950s, this is the 4th in the Felse detective series.

Peters is more famous for the Cadfael mysteries, with their wonderful depiction of England at the time of the civil war between Stephen and Maud. However, the Cadfael books need to be read in order and the first is far more successful in the BBC adaptation.

Dated in some ways, and with prose that’s functional rather than beautiful, Peters has a brilliant eye for capturing a period. The clever trail of clues means it’s possible to work out the mystery so the reveal is satisfying and doesn’t cheat the reader.

If you like Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (the 1974 film is dated but still brilliant), you’ll probably enjoy this too.

Vivid, surprising, and psychologically astute, The Wicked Girls stands out among a plethora of books with a similar premise.

There are no easy answers or pat solutions here. This is a book that asks interesting questions and offers a range of answers, through the characters, for readers to ponder. On the police procedural side, Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories treads a similar line, but Marwood’s protagonist is a journalist, which offers a less common ‘way in’ to the investigation along with a less familiar set of challenges.
[If you love Children’s fiction, check out the phenomenal Diana Wynne Jones’ Eight Days of Luke to match this theme (then, if you love it, Charmed Life and Howl’s Moving Castle), plus Jenny Nimmo’s The Rinaldi Ring and Berlie Doherty’s White Peak Farm.]

The Flight Girls captivated me from the first page and never let go. Salazar’s writing is lively and fresh, as we ride shotgun with a cast of memorable characters, an epic love story, and a powerful tale of courage and sacrifice by the Women Airforce Service Pilots during WWII. This book is on the lighter side, but still packs an emotional punch. A spectacular first novel!

This book feels profoundly important to understanding the crisis of church culture. KJ forced me to look at the church and understand the implicit ways that power and control can be misused by leadership. I think KJ’s story is not unique, and yet it is rarely talked about in Christian circles. 

I do believe we need to be willing to look at our motivations when in roles of leadership, especially how we can inadvertently misuse our power and control. KJ’s use of scripture to help us see the servant heart behind leadership is truly magnificent.