Here are 100 books that Devotion fans have personally recommended if you like
Devotion.
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I didn’t sit down to write Carried Away with a personal sermon in my back pocket. No buried lessons or hidden curriculum—it was just a story I wanted to tell. But stories have a way of outsmarting you.
So when I chose these books, I wasn’t looking for perfect comparisons—I was looking for echoes. Some of these books will drag you through POW camps or strand you on a lifeboat with a tiger; others will lean in and whisper that you’ve been running a program and calling it personality. A few say the quiet part out loud—about grit, meaning, and purpose. Others ring you up with fable, abstractions, or science, but they leave their mark just the same.
Hell, I think I actually wore the pages out, if that’s even possible. When I was younger, I went back to it like a lab rat hitting the lever for a pellet—each parable connecting another dot. To me, the mystery was life, the teacher the universe, and I was the student—albeit a lousy one.
The Alchemist is one of those rare novels that feels both timeless and uncomfortably personal. At its foundation, it’s about following your own path—trusting the itch of intuition and chasing something bigger than yourself, even when it feels a little foolhardy in the moment.
What I love is how Coelho cuts through with fable-like simplicity: those who love walking go farther than those who love the destination—and they usually learn a hell of a lot more if they’re paying attention.
A global phenomenon, The Alchemist has been read and loved by over 62 million readers, topping bestseller lists in 74 countries worldwide. Now this magical fable is beautifully repackaged in an edition that lovers of Paulo Coelho will want to treasure forever.
Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. This is such a book - a beautiful parable about learning to listen to your heart, read the omens strewn along life's path and, above all, follow your dreams.
Santiago, a young shepherd living in the hills of Andalucia, feels that there is…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I was brought up spiritually, believing our souls are here for a limited time and for a specific purpose before being reincarnated. But my “knowing” about spirituality was tested when my best friend found her 12-year-old son hanging. As I tried to make sense of this heartbreaking tragedy, I began journaling. Not long after, I began to hear her son’s voice. He explained that my writing was a jumping-off point for a novel. I listened and Winter of the Wolf was born. Researching and writing this novel helped me realign with my beliefs and grow in new and profound ways and it will do the same for readers.
As you open this book, prepare to go on a sacred, experiential journey unlike anything you’ve ever imagined. It’s truly that powerful and life changing. Rasha began a profound conversation with the universal presence, “Oneness” – the Divinity we all share. These teachings empower the reader to take a quantum leap into their own inner depths to harmonize with the powerful energy around us so that our wildest dreams can be realized. If you’re someone who often wonders what life is all about and what our purpose here is, take this journey with Rasha.
Every now and then a book comes along that is so powerful that words cannot describe the experience people start having when they read it. These rare, life-changing books always seem to show up at the perfect moment in time, exactly when we all need it the most. Oneness is such a book--one that will change your life.
In February 1998, Rasha began a profound dialogue with the universal Presence, "Oneness"--the Divinity we all share. Word for word, she transcribed the principles for a new understanding of the mystery we call "life." These teachings empower us to take a quantum…
What makes some people, communities and countries happier and healthier than others? I’m a personal growth author, speaker, and therapist with an A.B. in Biology from Harvard, M.D. from UCSD, and M.Phil. from Cambridge. For the past 12 years of calling myself a Happiness Engineer, I’ve traveled to 30+ countries and read 150 books a year to answer that question. The result: “The 5 Pillars of Human Thriving”, the irreducible requirements for health and happiness, namely Robust Relationships, Meaningful Work, Sound Sleep, Mental Fitness, and Physical Fitness. These books, drawn from a pool of thousands, represent the best works I’ve found for each Pillar. May you find them transformational!
This is the book I've re-read the most. It’s also the book I’ve gifted the most. Why? Because amongst the hundreds of personal growth books I’ve read, none laid out for me a clearer path to lasting inner peace and transcendence.
Singer identifies the central problem of human existence: we don’t feel right on the inside, so we rearrange the outside world to feel better on the inside. That ain’t ever gonna work. Instead, Singer guides us along the path of spiritual growth towards what does work: unclenching our way to true liberation from our own thoughts and blockages.
I try to re-read a chapter of this book daily as a reminder to apply its principles. It has profoundly enriched my life. Can’t recommend it highly enough.
Who are you? When you start to explore this question, you find out how elusive it really is. Are you a physical body? A collection of experiences and memories? A partner to relationships? Each time you consider aspects of yourself, you realize that there is much more to you than any of these can define. In this book, spiritual teacher Michael Singer explores the question of who we are and arrives at the conclusion that our identity is to be found in our consciousness, the fact of our ability to observe ourselves and the world around us. By tapping into…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
In 2010, Sandra A. Miller began hunting for a chest of gold coins buried in New York City soil. In her late forties at the time, she was mired in the process of helping her ailing mother to die, her teenage children to fly, and her writing career to survive the beating it had taken in the Great Recession and beyond. Soon enough, Sandra realized she was not just hunting for a treasure chest full of gold, but rather a different kind of riches. She had lost herself and needed to find a spiritual path that would lead her back home.
The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell is probably best known for A Hero with a Thousand Faces, but it’s another book—Pathways to Bliss—that I turn to like a travel guide to my own spiritual journey. In prompting readers to explore archetypes to help them create their personal mythology, Campbell believes that life should be a journey to finding our bliss. This is a book about personal growth for people who want to self-discovery in a larger—mythical—context.
Joseph Campbell famously defined myth as “other people's religion.” But he also said that one of the basic functions of myth is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a sort of travel guide or map to reach fulfillment — or, as he called it, bliss. For Campbell, many of the world's most powerful myths support the individual's heroic path toward bliss.
In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell examines this personal, psychological side of myth. Like his classic best-selling books Myths to Live By and The Power of Myth, Pathways to Bliss draws from Campbell's popular lectures and…
For my first 18 years, I slept in the same room (opposite my parents) in the same house (116 Monticello Avenue) in the same city (Piedmont) in the same state (CA) in the same country (USA), but soon after leaving for college in Evanston, IL, I pined for elsewhere and ended up peripatetic. That peripateticness plagued me, as a woman/wife/mother. While growing our family, my French husband and I moved: Israel to France to California to New York to Israel to New York to Israel. Finally, in my early fifties, I understood home is more about who you are than where you live.
The Part That Burns is not a linear narrative but a memoir in fragments. Each essay or chapter is different, interesting, engaging like scattered pieces of a puzzle that the writer—and reader—are trying to put together.
It's about a childhood wrought with abuse and rejection, about trauma and epigenetics, home and roots. It's about a girl who grows up to become a teenager who becomes a young woman who becomes a wife and a mother and every step of the way, she yearns for what we all yearn for: acceptance and love.
My memoir is as slim and sparse as Ouellette’s and some might consider my chronological story as fragmented because of its tiny chapters and missing connective tissue from one chapter to the next.
"I love this book and am grateful it is in the world." —Dorothy Allison, New York Times best-selling author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller "Simply beautiful. Precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid." —Joyce Carol Oates "A textured remembrance of a traumatic childhood that also offers affecting moments of beauty." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In her fiercely beautiful memoir, Jeannine Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically to witness each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself. Caught between the dramatic landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfather’s groping…
For my first 18 years, I slept in the same room (opposite my parents) in the same house (116 Monticello Avenue) in the same city (Piedmont) in the same state (CA) in the same country (USA), but soon after leaving for college in Evanston, IL, I pined for elsewhere and ended up peripatetic. That peripateticness plagued me, as a woman/wife/mother. While growing our family, my French husband and I moved: Israel to France to California to New York to Israel to New York to Israel. Finally, in my early fifties, I understood home is more about who you are than where you live.
This book combines compressed prose with nonfiction truth-telling but it isn’t linear or a complete story as much as a snapshot of Fennelly’s childhood, home life, and keen observations.
This book showed me that the quality of writing trumps the quantity of words. Short and sparse, when well written, can find a place on a bookshelf and shine.
The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of non-fiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer and deeply original observer of life's challenges and joys.
Some pieces are wistful, some wry and many reveal the humour buried in our everyday interactions. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments and awakens us to…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
As a bestselling ghostwriter, I spend a lot of time reading what everyone’s reading—the chart-toppers and book club favorites. But when I stepped out of the shadows to write my own memoir about love and loss, I leaned on less obvious writers to inspire me forward. I believe that everyone has a story to tell and a unique way to tell it, and one of the more magical aspects of being a reader is discovering those voices that speak directly to you, who make you laugh when you want to cry, and allow you to breathe again. I hope my favorites list similarly lifts you up!
This exquisite memoir validated for me what I already know but sometimes resist in my own writing: let it bleed onto the page. The grief, the heartache, the anger, the resolve.
I read this book nestled safely in bed and caught myself thinking: Yes! Do more of this. Throw off the damn blankets and tell the truth! That’s how we heal.
"[Smith]...reminds you that you can...survive deep loss, sink into life's deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new." -Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author
The bestselling poet and author of the "powerful" (People) and "luminous" (Newsweek) Keep Moving offers a lush and heartrending memoir exploring coming of age in your middle age.
"Life, like a poem, is a series of choices."
In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins…
I was born in a log house in Alberta, Canada. I was nineteen months old in August 1939 when my parents decided we should visit my grandmother in Germany and thirteen when we returned. I have been deeply affected by the stories of ordinary families and the trauma they experienced after WWII. To this day, like thousands of others, I feel tremendous inherited discomfort from Nazism and the Holocaust. Our parents' generation did not talk about their wartime experiences, so we must preserve this important part of history and help to relieve the guilt many innocent individuals still harbor while raising awareness of this immensely damaging aspect of war.
I don’t usually read graphic novels, but this book struck a chord with me. Because of its unique style, I expect it will help create an awareness of the impact WWII had on generations of Germans who were born too late to have had any part in it.
The author's graphic memoir describes her journey back to Germany in search of her family’s politics during the war. Even though she finds that her maternal grandfather, like my father, was exonerated of war crimes, she does not feel she can accept forgiveness for the unforgivable suffering of millions.
* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators *
* Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, andLibrary Journal
This“ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany.
Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city…
I’ve been fascinated with the subjects of forgiveness and reconciliation most of my life. I’ve spent years researching people of the Old Testament, and as I read their stories, I see their need for these things in their relationships. It is a universal need of humans. Because I write about people who actually lived, I read books that deal with the things we all face. Truth is, time may change, but the human heart does not. I’m an amateur theologian and avid reader of books that will help me grow as a person and allow me to understand these ancient people who walked before us.
It’s far too tempting when we go through rough patches in our lives to want to give up. When we long for something and pray for years and still wait, quitting sounds like the best option. I nearly quit writing after twenty years of trying to break into publishing because I didn’t think I could take any more rejection.
In this book, Idleman points out that some people come to Jesus expecting Him to make life easier. But life is hard. Idleman says, “One way we know we’re running the race marked out for us is the presence of regular, unexpected challenges.”
Joseph could relate to that all his life. I can too.
The parent with the wayward child. The couple whose marriage is in jeopardy. The man who is out of work. The woman stuck in crushing debt. The patient with a bad diagnosis. The student who can't get a fair shake. People hanging by a thread, losing faith and short on strength. What do they all need to hear?
Don't give up.
Our lives are minefields of challenges that take their toll on our courage, our conviction, and even our faith. But God whispers to the weary, Don't give up. Drawing from inspiring biblical stories and first-person testimonies of perseverance, bestselling…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Books have been an important part of my faith journey. I set aside time each morning to read scripture, and devotional material, to meditate and pray. As I read about the experiences of others my faith increases and I know God better. As a writer I express my own faith through words and invite others to know God better by experiencing Him with time set aside in the mornings. More Love is part of a series of small books that I have created to give readers experiences to connect with God and to know His love.
Mark Batterson writes, “If you press into God’s presence like never before, you will experience God like never before.” This small book has led me back to a richer prayer life again and again. I’ve prayed through it many times and have given away countless copies to others. Each day Batterson invites a new way to look at prayer and a practical way to start a morning devotion time all grounded in scripture. As a writer I love the focus on creativity and honoring ideas. He writes, “I don’t type on a keyboard, I pray on one.”
Your 40-day guide to experiencing more passionate, persistent, intimate communication with God.
Do you pray as often and as bravely as you want to? Are you looking to strengthen your relationship with God and experience a deeper, more intentional prayer life? Mark Batterson, New York Times bestselling author of The Circle Maker, is here to teach you all about a new, life-changing way to pray.
After the release of The Circle Maker, thousands of readers quickly became many tens of thousands, and soon enough, true stories of miraculous and inspiring answers to prayer began to pour in. Draw the Circle…
