Books like Cows Can't Jump — picked by fans

I loved this book. This is the tenth book I’ve read this month and I haven’t had a bad one yet, so either I’m really good at picking, or the standard of writing out there is improving all the time. I would give this book 9.5 out of 10. I couldn’t wait to get my day finished so that I could settle and read in the evenings. Can’t praise this highly enough.

The plot was riveting, the pace built well, the characterisation is up there, and his description is powerful and draws you right into the visuals and meaning of the story.  What really captured me with this book was the child’s voice. It was so damned subtly done. If anything, the boy is written in an understated way—but before it ever got sinister, you just knew with that creepy little kid’s voice that it was going to. The ‘out… show more.

I loved this book. If I had to describe this novel in one word it would be intelligent. Set in Celtic Ireland in the Iron Age, the language is rich and expressive and Merrigan takes you into his world until you feel you belong there. You are drawn into a time where everything is governed by the gods. The story takes you through the training of the young warriors and druids. With the ongoing conflict over land, and with the people’s lives steeped in superstitious beliefs, we come to care that the outcome falls well with our tribe.

Fionn is born into a simple rural tribe. His life is sweet as he grows to double figures playing with his sisters in the fields. At the age of ten, he is called to serve, and the boys of fighting age are gathered from across the land, taken from their families, and… show more.

This book was recommended to me by a friend and didn't appeal to me at all. However, it’s incredible. Two genres I don't usually read are sci-fi and special ops. This takes the two and binds them together in a plait of intrigue, underground government departments, humour, and special operations. By the end of the first chapter, it had me. I was blown away by this book. 

I loved the characters and the way they gelled. It is intelligent and well researched. The author's knowledge of weaponry and how Special Ops teams work is extraordinary. Johnson makes the extrasensory elements of the book believable. It pulls you into the characters' lives and makes you care about the outcome. It's witty which, lightens the tension at appropriate times and encourages you to like the characters by adding another layer to the action. One of the best books I have ever… show more.

This is an intelligent vampire story. Some of the phraseology is just beautiful. Ms. O'Malley takes period, setting, costume, culture, etiquette, and language into consideration, and the book's tone-setting is just stunning. 

This vampire genre lends itself to forgetting about the myth being seeped in folklore and history. It's morphed into a general excuse for writing—and I use the term in its loosest form—some of the worst sex scenes ever to come from sticky keyboards. Okay, some of them probably have some well-written sex—I've just never read one. I am delighted to report that this isn't that book. There isn't a ripped bodice in sight. It is, however, a touching love story, sensitively written. The male and female leads are likable and easy to connect with. 

I loved several things about this book. We are introduced to many different species of merna. I enjoyed reading about their various traits… show more.

Damon Galgut recently won the Booker Prize for his riveting, satirical The Promise, but, much as I admire that novel, Galgut’s earlier (also Booker-nominated) semi-autobiographical novel, In a Strange Room, remains my favourite. It comprises three long short stories, all centred on a character called Damon, alerting us to the autobiographical element of the stories. And yet Galgut resists the total identification of autobiography, partly by his device of switching disconcertingly between first and third-person narration (sometimes ‘Damon,’ sometimes ‘I’), and present and past tenses. But the novel is more than technical trickery: the shifting perspectives allow us different angles on the complex relationships depicted in the different sections, rather as a cubist painting affords us a multifarious perspective on its subject. And like other books on this list, this one features a protagonist who travels: something of a trope in South African writing.  

I was so overwhelmed by the perfection of this American masterwork that I sought out the founder of The Thomas Wolfe Society, the greatest Thomas Wolfe collector who ever lived and who will ever live, and became his very close friend.

This is a huge book, with the music of pitch-perfect prosody from beginning to end, and yet it's only part of a much greater whole—every one of Wolfe's books connect together in some way, forming a massive cadency of music in words. If you examine them, there's only two main branches (Eugene Gant as the protagonist in one, and Monk Webber as the protagonist in the other). But it's really all one big expanding fable. This volume has, in my opinion, the richest writing, from the opening proem to the tiny diamond-sharp moving-picture painting of the final line.

To me The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe was a brilliant, terrifying discovery.

Like everyone, I was aware of Poe’s famous short stories. But this full-length novel flung me into its deadly world in a way no short story, even one by Poe, ever could. Reading it, I was disoriented, at sea, with no control. So much so that, even now, just remembering the story makes me feel stranded. And struggling vainly for freedom. And the ending...[I won’t tell.]

This book is probably the most out-of-place of the five novels on this list. Where the others make their high-concept elements obvious early, the author chooses a different route in this one.

Like so many of his novels, Bret Easton Ellis opens his story with shallow and vapid characters behaving in absurd ways and uttering dialogue so outrageous I wondered if the entire enterprise was a joke. But despite the hilarious parody of substance-free celebrity and the inane repetition of idiotic phrases like “baby,” this story ultimately has more to say than, ahem, less than zero. It’s a takedown of capitalism and a bankrupt culture, so biting it would make Philip K Dick proud.

The second half of the novel, in fact, reads like PKD himself.

The Moviegoer was the first novel I read which had little plot and a great deal of meaning. Basically, it’s about one man’s search for meaning in a world which values shallowness and consumerism above all else. It’s as relevant today as it was when written and the prose is amazing!

First up in Fante’s famous quartet of Bandini novels—The Road to Los Angeles is a literary—Tour De Force. The central narrator—Arturo Bandini—is stuck out in Boulder Colorado, where it is freezing cold, and nothing ever happens. Not surprisingly a young Arturo is keen to escape to warmer climes, and pursue a writing career in Hollywood. Immediately I could relate to the books central idea, as I was keen to do exactly the same at exactly the same age, albeit on the other side of the world. This novel introduces Fante's alter ego Arturo Bandini who reappears in Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), Ask the Dust (1939), and Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982). It’s an important first novel by an important American author.