Books like Ghost Bird — picked by fans

Three worlds in one book! There’s the not-so-important world of the Ancelstierre, roughly Edwardian or early-20th-Century-ish, and there’s the Old Kingdom, basically medieval, where Charter Magic wars with Free Magic (and how well Nix thinks through the workings of his forms of magic).

But the third world is the one that takes the cake! An underworld of the dead, with its different levels, gates, and sills. Sabriel discovers her own special inheritance and powers—OK, that’s standard fantasy fare, except that Sabriel’s powers are those of an abhorsen. It’s the Abhorsen’s role to make sure that the dead stay dead, and journey on down into the deeper levels of death. Of course, the dead who keep coming back are the ones who drive the narrative!

The book is centered around an FBI trainee (Clarice) sent to interview an imprisoned, sophisticated, cannibalistic psychiatrist (Hannibal Lecter) to help her catch an active serial killer.

Their meetings are brilliant and tense exchanges within a psychological game in which Lecter will only offer clues if Clarice reveals deeply personal details about herself. The tone of these conversations, using dialogue to navigate an intellectual and emotional battlefield, was brilliantly crafted.

"I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti."  In lesser hands, this single spoken sentence might have been replaced with several paragraphs of exposition to describe Hannibal Lecter.

36 Streets by Australian author T.R. Napper is a cyberpunk thriller set in a futuristic noir Vietnam that tackles identity in a unique way.

The protagonist, a woman born in Vietnam but raised in Australia, grapples with her sense of belonging—deported from her adopted country due to racist government policies, her body language and command of English is as an Australian, and she is painfully aware that her Vietnamese is heavily accented and uncertain, and that her body language doesn’t match the locals of her birth nation.

Add to that the ability to edit human memory and to experience VR so realistically that you can live as someone else, and you have a story that questions the very fabric of identity.

The Ancient Future by Australian author Traci Harding is a flawed gem that takes readers on an enthralling journey through time and identity.

The protagonist, a young Australian woman (and black belt), is exploring the UK alone when she's abruptly hurled from the 1990s into 6th Century Wales. Guided by the High Merlin Taliesin, she undergoes a transformative experience that shatters her previous understanding of reality and self. As she navigates this ancient world, she's forced to confront and redefine her identity, constantly challenging her preconceived notions.

This book is a compelling read for anyone intrigued by characters who must adapt and evolve in the face of extraordinary, even supernatural, circumstances. It's a story that resonates with themes of identity, time, and the malleability of reality.

Indigenous populations too have had a raw deal: from settlers who took their land and from those who felt they knew what was best for them. Although among the lesser sinners, sports historians have disregarded their traditional sports and focussed on their participation in sports imposed on them by invading powers. In contrast, Australian Aborigines feature in Roy Hay’s book as sportspersons in their own right. Hay shows that they were human beings who performed a constructive role in Australia’s sporting history. He does this not as a woke, bleeding heart academic but as a historian determined to unearth the ‘true’ story of Aboriginal participation in Australian Rules Football. As an Australian citizen I wanted to read this story.

Poetry like this is crucial to telling the other side of the story. It’s a counternarrative, and that’s why Oodgeroo’s work has shaped my thinking and experiences in life-affirming ways.

Oodgeroo sees her work as an extension of the songkeeping and oral storytelling so intrinsic to Indigenous social life and survival. Her poems are not simply about a bygone past, as every line is relevant today (but hush, you mustn’t say so, Oodgeroo teases). That’s why I treasure her wit and writing – they give me life, a lifeline to a reality often denied us in Western thought.

It is written with so much beauty, elegance, and hope. Full of love for her people and full of grace, passion, and rage. Because there is so much to rage about (but that is another story)…

I think the librarian at Alice Springs Hospital in the Australian Northern Territory ordered this by mistake. It is about Canadian First Nations, not Australian ones. I read it when I was working there as an intern back in the 1990s and bought my own copy to keep forever.

Any modern doctor will be either working in a colonized land or meeting patients who have known oppression and/or dispossession and are, therefore, suffering from the effects of that trauma, often passed down the generations. This book opened my eyes to a totally different way of seeing right and wrong, of judging—or not judging—community sexual, alcohol, or drug abuse.

I worked with remote area Aboriginal people in Australia and with many tribes in African countries, and the perspective this book gave me allowed me to be effective in ways I would otherwise have missed.

This pioneering masterpiece, first published in 1954, carefully documents, among other things, the compelling similarities between experiences of ESP between Westerners and the Aboriginal Australians. As a student of psychical research, I couldn't help but be fascinated by the similarities, right down to very particular and idiosyncratic details that lead me to believe that a fundamental human faculty is what was being studied and described here.

I particularly enjoy how the author hones in the kinds of cultural window dressing that may characterize a psychic experience and yet shows the fundamental experience itself as being indistinguishable despite the time and space between the cultures in question. Essential!

I have a deep admiration for the art of indigenous Australians with their connection to nature and mother earth. I grew up in outback Australia near a pre-historic sacred site with an awe-inspiring cave drawing of a giant serpent. This book, written by several scholars, is a comprehensive resource on Aboriginal art. The illustrations cover traditional bark paintings and cave drawings, some dating back more than 30,000 years. The authors’ analysis of symbols is informative. I consider Aboriginal artists to be the first anatomists. Long before Leonardo, they were drawing the inner structures and organs of humans and animals. 

Folklore and nature conservation is a subjects close to my heart. When I met my husband, an ecologist, many of our first conversations were on the importance of narrative to get people interested in conservation efforts. Folklore is the perfect tool.

This book does that job beautifully. As a piece of narrative nonfiction, it collects fairy tales, personal memoirs, and natural history in a lyrical journey through the forests of England. Maitland centers each chapter on an English woodland and the stories associated with it, be they fairy tales or history. More importantly, she discusses not only how myth shapes culture, but how landscape shapes myth. I reference it time and again not only as an academic, but as an author who creates worlds rich in landscape and folklore.