Books like Deity — picked by fans

I find this book to be an unsettling but impactful read, both thought-provoking and complex. We Need to Talk about Kevin follows the mother of a troubled teenager responsible for a school shooting.

It’s about nature versus nurture, the relationship between mother and child, and deeply seated guilt. It draws inspiration from real events, including the 1999 shooting at Columbine, which wasn’t the U.S.’s first mass shooting at a school, but it would become one of the most infamous.

Shriver’s novel raises unsettling questions about a mother’s guilt and self-justification and a community’s heartache and blame. I consider it to be a captivating and moving book.

I love love love an unreliable narrator! Especially when that narrator is a beautiful, elegant woman who turns out to have the ugliest soul imaginable. I think as a whole, our society tends to be extra afraid when they see conniving evil existing in a female’s mind, especially when she’s physically beautiful and well spoken.

At certain points in this book, I found myself weirdly rooting for Amy and chomping at the bit to see how far her “crazy” would take her. The twists and turns kept me racing through this book and left me wondering at the end, “What happens to them now?!”

This book really hooked me because mass hysteria is such a rare and bizarre psychological phenomenon, and Abbott portrays the creepiness and weirdness of it perfectly!

Perhaps also because my own teenage years were so turbulent and I still feel so connected to my younger self, I love to read and write about teenage friendships—in all their dark, obsessive intensity.

The Fever takes you there perfectly, and my fourth novel, A Guilty Secret (which is set in a remote Scottish boarding school), took special inspiration from Abbott’s brilliant tale.

I first read this YA novel as a teenager and have never forgotten it.

The book has long been out of print in the UK, but a few years ago, I laboriously tracked down an Australian ex-library copy to re-read. I was fascinated to realise the book actually falls into the (psychological) horror genre (having thought I hated horror after being traumatised as a kid by Nightmare on Elm Street!). I could also now see how, at heart, it is also a heartbreaking family drama.

Del-Del later became a huge inspiration for my debut novel Little White Lies, a psychological thriller about a family desperately struggling with the miraculous return of their teenage daughter Abigail following her abduction seven years previously.

One night, eleven-year-old Effie (a recent orphan) is dropped off at her aunts’ house.

She doesn’t really want to be there until she discovers that her aunts are witches and she may be one too! This female-driven graphic novel is full of colorful characters who help Effie find the magic within herself.

Graphic novels tell half the story through the art and Witches of Brooklyn beautifully rendered with lines that communicate energy and grace.

I loved the television play based on this novel, and the novel itself is equally good as a sensitive but somewhat mordant commentary on marriage, widowerhood, wartime memories, and the English class system.

I found it amusing in parts but also quite sad, and empathized with both main characters—two men who had served in WW2 as squadron leader and sergeant, respectively. They meet fifty years later in the Tonbridge Wells hospital when both their wives are dying, and develop an unlikely friendship.

As we learn in another classic, Primed to Perform by Doshi and McGregor, play is the most motivating activity there is.

I read this book for the first time during a dark period early in my career – where I did not feel inspired, engagement nor fulfilled. This book provided me with the framework to find meaningful activities – those where I was both skilled yet challenged to improve. Those activities where I would lose myself – where time would stand still.

Better yet, this book, framework, and philosophy have better helped me coach others to find play, engagement, and meaning in their activities at work and in life. 

There is no better place to start learning about attention than from The Principles of Psychology.

I have always been captivated by the writings and deep insight of William James, known as the father of psychology. This is not a pop science book by any means—it was written in the 19th century, and you’ll see how gorgeous the language is. If you don’t want to plough through all 720 pages, I suggest you start with Chapter VIII on Attention. As James says, “Everyone knows what attention is.” But do we really? You will find some amazing gems in it.

It is available for free by Project Gutenberg.

This is one of the first books that “blew my mind” when I was a young university student: it remains the one I constantly return to because it seeks to understand the psychoanalytic foundations of racism under French colonialism.

Fanon was only 27 when his book was first published in 1952, but his reflections provide a stunningly passionate and layered view on how anti-Black racism (de)forms the subjectivity of both white and Black people, locking them into constructions of whiteness/blackness that require constant questioning.

His arguments on the psychoanalytic and political underpinnings of racism remain as relevant today as they were in his time.

The title appeals to me, and the list of books I love is overwhelming. I’m rounding out my recs with this out-of-print, self-help book published in 1939 that I came across it in a second-hand bookstore. You can open the guide to almost any page and find something simple and deep, or if not, old phraseology like, Preventing Unwholesome Behavior Due to Tedium, is amusing. Technology may be changing the way people meet and how we process information, but we have most of the same emotional needs as before.