Here are 100 books that Child of Light fans have personally recommended if you like
Child of Light.
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I have read thrillers for as long as I can remember reading adult novels. I can chart my life of reading from Robert Parker to David Baldacci to Jeffery Deaver and today’s luminaries such as Sarah Pekkanen, Mary Kubica, and all the authors listed below. While I love a good beach or airport read, the novels that stick with you—that make you want to clear your schedule because you need to sit and think about what you’ve just read—are my favorites.
A forced emotional bond between an extraordinary 12-year-old girl and an ex-special forces soldier underscores the flat-out action and pace of this read-in-one-sitting thriller from Patrick Lee.
With a hint of the supernatural, it is a little outside the normal, grounded thrillers I tend to gravitate toward, but the way Lee connects his characters and makes their journey into ours is incredible. The best thrillers can improve with each re-read, and I keep being drawn back to this story.
"Breathless, involving, smart, and completely convincing."-Lee Child In Patrick Lee's Runner, Sam Dryden, ex--Special Forces, lives a quiet life in a small town on the coast of Southern California. While out on a run in the middle of the night, he encounters a young girl on the seaside boardwalk. Barefoot and terrified, she's running from a group of heavily armed men with one clear goal: to kill her. Dryden learns that the twelve-year-old can only remember the past two months, during which she's been kept in a secret prison by forces within the government. Beyond her own name, Rachel, she…
Hodder and IVP had already published two of my earlier books—during my three decades as a Royal Air Force pilot and another one leading a conflict resolution NGO—when my journey as a WW2 author began. It all started with my wife's book about her German mother and British Intelligence Corps father (The Bride's Trunk). That got me interested in the links between 'the Corps' and the Special Operations Executive. Three SOE books later, I’m following the organisation into Austria. I've barely scratched the surface of undercover operations and I’m always finding new niches to discover.
I am sure that the authenticity of someone who has ‘been there and done it’ is unchallengeable. Airey Neave, who tragically died in 1979 at the hands of the Irish National Liberation Army, was one such. After successfully escaping from the PoW camp at Colditz, he joined MI9, the War Office section that supported escaping PoWs and downed aircrew. This strikes a chord with me as a former pilot. In this book, he tells the stories of French men and women of all ages and backgrounds, who, at great personal danger, formed the backbone of secret escape lines. The narrative is not over-dramatised and the matter-of-fact style is one I respect, but the courage of those who harboured escapees or acted as couriers comes through clearly.
Saturday at M.I.9 is the inside story of the underground escape lines in occupied North-West Europe which brought back to Britain over 4,000 Allied servicemen during World War Two.Airey Neave, who in the last two years of the war was the chief organiser at M.I.9 gives his own unique account. He describes how the escape lines began in the first dark days of German occupation and how, until the end of the war, thousands of ordinary men and women made their own contribution to the Allied victory by hiding and feeding men and guiding them to safety.There isn't a page…
Imagine World War II—with frequent chemical warfare attacks on cities and battlefields. Before and during World War II, laypeople and leaders held the widespread conviction that poison gas would be used in the next big war more destructively than in World War I. Churchill considered using gas if Germany invaded Britain. Roosevelt promised retaliation if the Axis used gas. Canada tested gas in Alberta’s fields. Fear and preparation for gas attacks permeated multiple countries, from laypeople to the top, from civilians to the military, but few talk about it. This is a hidden story of World War II, but one worth knowing. Just the threat of gas influenced the conflict.
This is the story of Allied POWs who dug escape tunnel after escape tunnel. Simultaneously, they plotted to drive their captors crazy while stealthily equipping successful escapees to evade the enemy as they fled across hostile territory. Although the story has been told several times, including in a movie with the same name, this version was written by a journalist who had been in the camp.
The book is alternately laugh-out-loud funny to awe-inspiring, heroic to tragic. While entertaining, it also raises questions about human strengths and weaknesses. What would you do in the same situation? This has been one of my favorite books since I first read it.
They were American and British air force officers in a German prison camp. With only their bare hands and the crudest of homemade tools, they sank shafts, forged passports, faked weapons, and tailored German uniforms and civilian clothes. They developed a fantastic security system to protect themselves from German surveillance.
It was a split-second operation as delicate and as deadly as a time bomb. It demanded the concentrated devotion and vigilance of more than six hundred men-every one of them, every minute, every hour, every day and night for more than a year.
The epic saga continues. Jarnland is in a frenzy of excitement. After the eccentric demise of Old King Wyllard, his co-Majesty, young Queen Esmeralda, announces a Royal Tournament to celebrate the return of our heroes from their perilous quest. The Main Event will be a duel between the legendary warrior…
I had a friend that I knew since junior high. He was a straight-A student. He had both parents in the home. His future was bright. He spent the last minutes of his life hiding under a car after being shot several times during a drug deal gone wrong. He made poor decisions that cost him his life. I wanted to write about people who took the wrong path and found their way out.Growing up in a single-parent household, I turned to the streets and gangs. After incarceration I decided to not only turn my life around but to write fiction inspired by criminal activity that I had engaged in during my youth.
This was the first book I read about street culture. It was real. It was graphic. It was intense. I could relate. Goines is known for capturing the urban struggles and the challenges of young men and women growing up in the ghettos. The main character Chester Hines gets caught up in one bad decision after another until he ends up in jail trying to survive. It’s a fantastic story and Goines himself is a classic storyteller who paved the way for endless black authors to pen their street-life experiences.
The godfather of urban lit, Donald Goines knows life on the streets is a one-way ticket to life behind bars, where suffering is the one and only daily bread. For the first time in over a decade, his classic White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief is now repackaged and reissued with a whole new look to attract new listeners, as well as long-time fans of the legend himself.
Barely out of his 20s, Chester Hines knows the score. He's just another bug crawling through the streets of Detroit, waiting to be squashed under the heel of a system meant to…
I've written books about Jewish subjects before. A few years ago I published a biography about a Jewish Dutch actress named Jetta Goudal who invented a new life story for herself and became a Hollywoodstar. Before that I wrote a book about my Jewish great-grandfather Emanuel Brouwer who traveled to London in 1908 to compete in the Olympics. He traveled to the UK by boat with his best friend Isidore Goudeket, who was murdered in a German deathcamp. My great-grandfather did not win a medal in Londen (63rd place!), but he had a lot of fun in London, with loads of beer, whisky, and cigars. In 1943 he was sent to a camp as well.
This moving memoir is written in 1945, right after the evacuation of Auschwitz and the start of the Death Marches.
It is considered the only book written inside the camp. Eliazer ‘Eddy’ de Wind hid himself in the camp in January 1945 to escape the Death Marches. He wrote about the daily life in the camp while it was still fresh in his memory. The memoir was published in 1946. Nobody was interested and it bombed, but it was rediscovered in 1980 and became a semi-classic.
'The ultimate Holocaust testimony.' HEATHER MORRIS, author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka's Journey Afterword by JOHN BOYNE, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas _______________
Eddy de Wind, a Dutch doctor and psychiatrist, was shipped to Auschwitz with his wife Friedel, whom he had met and married at the Westerbork labour camp in the Netherlands. At Auschwitz, they made it through the brutal selection process and were put to work. Each day, each hour became a battle for survival.
For Eddy, this meant negotiating with the volatile guards in the medical…
I’m a paranormal romance and fantasy author who fell in love with fantasy as a young girl. My journey as a reader started when I was four, but what changed me entirely was Russian Tales woven with magic. I’m passionate about Lycans, Werewolves, Witches, Vampires, and everything that’s magical. I like to write sizzling tales of love and betrayal.
I haven’t read many Phoenix shifter books, but this book is just so good. As you can see I like to read different books containing all sorts of shifters and tried to include one from each type I enjoyed so much. Subject Thirteen aka Cain O’Connor is locked in a secret lab and is tortured until he is freed by Eva Bradley. With bad guys on pursuit, the couple must take refuge and while on the run they uncover several secrets and face danger head on. This entire series will keep the readers on their toes because of the suspense and mystery element.
Eve Bradley was undercover looking for a story, not a cause. But something about the man they called Subject 13 got her involved. The scientists said he was a devil, and they had a decent case: Terrifying power. A bad attitude. And looks that could lead anyone to sin....
Cain O'Connor knows the minute he catches her candy scent that Eve could drive him wild. But she's a threat - in a way no one has been for him in years. She's safer away from him, too. But with a powerful conspiracy determined to shut Eve up for good, there's…
Are you free to walk your own path, or are your choices nothing more than a clever illusion?
Three strangers—Flynn, Vurax, and Ellianna—embark on separate journeys of self-discovery as they search for answers to that very question through their unique experiences. When they uncover a shocking secret that shatters not…
I am a presidential historian with a particular focus on their deaths, public mourning, and the places we commemorate them. My interest in what I like to think of as “the final chapter of each president’s amazing story” grew out of frustration with traditional biographies that end abruptly when the president dies, and I believe my books pick up where others leave off. More than a moribund topic, I find the presidential deaths and public reaction to be both fascinating and critical to understanding their humanity and place in history at the time of their passing and how each of their legacies evolved over time.
April 1865 was one of the most consequential months in American history. After the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender to effectively end the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was tragically assassinated while Jefferson Davis attempted to escape to keep the war effort alive.
I was riveted by the dual history of the American and Confederate presidents, as Swanson’s storytelling matches the drama, tension, and uncertainty of the moment.
On the morning of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, received the telegram from General Robert E. Lee. There is no more time - the Yankees are coming. That evening, shortly before midnight, Davis boarded a train from Richmond and fled the capital. But in two weeks time, John Wilkes Booth would assassinate the president, and the nation was convinced that Davis was the mastermind of the crime. No longer merely a traitor, Davis became a murderer, a wanted man with a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. Over the course of several weeks, Union cavalry led an…
When I first visited Central Asia in 2008, little did I know that it would become the focus of my life and work. I now advise the World Bank and national governments on economic development, with a particular focus on tourism, and I’m the Chairman of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs. I am Uzbekistan’s Ambassador for Tourism, a co-founder of the Silk Road Literary Festival, and I’ve written and updated guidebooks to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the Silk Road.
Tragically little Central Asian literature has been translated into English: Hamid Ismailov’s books are notable exceptions. The Devils’ Dance won the 2019 EBRD Literature Prize, and it was the first time an Uzbek writer was awarded a major international prize. It is the desire to see more writers like Hamid be able to bring their books to global audiences that prompted me to co-found the Silk Road Literary Festival.
On New Years' Eve 1938, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy is taken from his home by the Soviet secret police and thrown into a Tashkent prison. There, to distract himself from the physical and psychological torment of beatings and mindless interrogations, he attempts to mentally reconstruct the novel he was writing at the time of his arrest based on the tragic life of the Uzbek poet-queen Oyhon, married to three khans in succession, and living as Abdulla now does, with the threat of execution hanging over her. As he gets to know his cellmates, Abdulla discovers that the Great Game of…
I've been a social justice activist all my life. In my younger years, I turned to violence to bring about liberation. That landed me a federal arrest warrant which I avoided for 27 years by living as a fugitive. I spent most of that time in southern Africa, joining freedom movements against apartheid and colonialism. Arrested and extradited to the U.S. in 2002 I spent 6 1/2 years in California prisons while observing the impact of mass incarceration. I vowed to direct my energy to end mass incarceration through grassroots organizing. Since then I've been a writer, researcher, and activist in my local community of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois as well as being partner and father to my two sons.
As public awareness of mass incarceration has grown, reformers, and even law enforcement, have attempted to build alternatives, policies, and institutions they argue are alternatives to prisons and jails. These alternatives include policies like electronic monitoring, drug courts, halfway houses, lockup mental health facilities, and court supervision. In this book, Law and Schenwar systematically demolish the notion that such initiatives do anything more than widen the net of incarceration. In their view, these “alternatives” create programs and institutions based on the notion that altering the form or style of punishment will eliminate mass incarceration. Instead, they argue this requires the elimination of the paradigm of punishment and the establishment of programs outside the criminal legal system that provide freedom and opportunities for targeted populations.
With a new afterword from the authors, the critically praised indictment of widely embraced "alternatives to incarceration"
"But what does it mean-really-to celebrate reforms that convert your home into your prison?" -Michelle Alexander, from the foreword
Electronic monitoring. Locked-down drug treatment centers. House arrest. Mandated psychiatric treatment. Data driven surveillance. Extended probation. These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost effective substitutes for jails and prisons. But in a searing, "cogent critique" (Library Journal), Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law reveal that many of these so-called reforms actually weave in new strands of punishment and control, bringing…
Royce Melborn, a skilled thief, and his mercenary partner, Hadrian Blackwater, make a profitable living carrying out dangerous assignments for conspiring nobles—until they are hired to pilfer a famed sword. What appears to be just a simple job finds them framed for the murder of the king and trapped in…
I spent 20 years in the US Army with 10 of those years in Korea. Everybody thought I was crazy. Why would you like being stationed in such an odd country as Korea? Whenever I tried to explain, their noses would crinkle and they’d stare at me as if I were mad. I started collecting books that explained better than I did. To supplement it I purchased a manual Smith Corona typewriter at the PX and to assuage my angst began writing mystery stories about two 8th Army investigators in Seoul, Korea. Fifteen novels and over 50 short stories later I’m still attempting to explain the odd beauty of GI life through the eyes of a GI.
In the early 1970s, when I was a Buck Sergeant in the US Army stationed overseas in Korea, I received a small package from my cousin. He was a year older than me and in the Navy and stationed at Subic Bay in the Philippines. What was odd about the package was that he seldom mailed me anything, and certainly nothing that would be more trouble than a brief letter. I opened the package and therein lay a paperback copy of The Last Detail.
The story starts out with Petty Officer First Class William Buddusky, better known as Billy Bad-Ass, passed out drunk in the Day Room in the barracks, still in dress uniform with an almost empty bottle of cheap wine next to him. Immediately, I recognized a kindred spirit. A lifer, an enlisted man, and somebody who lived in the real world of the military as I…
The Acclaimed Novel That Was the Basis for the Classic Movie Starring Jack Nicholson
Unlike other branches of the armed services, the Navy draws it police force from the ranks, as temporary duty called Shore Patrol. In this funny, bawdy, moving novel set during the height of the Vietnam War, two career sailors in transit in Norfolk, Virginia Billy "Bad-Ass" Buddusky and Mule Mulhall are assigned to escort eighteen-year-old Larry Meadows from Norfolk to the brig in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he is to serve an eight-year sentence for petty theft. It's good duty, until the two old salts realize…
