Books like Ghost Hunter

This is a wonderful blend of magic, history, and romance that completely swept me away. I loved how Harkness created a world where science and magic coexist, and the way she weaves historical references into a modern love story stole my heart.

The relationship between Diana and Matthew feels real, complicated, and deeply emotional, and I found myself fully invested in their journey. What really hooked me was the rich world-building, with its intricate details of witches, vampires, and daemons, making it feel like a universe I could dive into again and again. This is an annual reread for me. Book 1 in a wonderful series.

I loved this book because it is another time-slip novel, but mostly because of the characters that Gabaldon has created. Claire is a strong woman both in the present time zone–post-war Britain–and the Scottish Highland time zone of the seventeenth century and the uprising. You sense immediately that she is in danger as the story is told from her point of view. 

I loved learning about the lives of the Scottish highlanders, how the story moves from one-time zone to another, and how the characters overlap.

Anne Rice is a wonderful poet disguised as a novelist who creates dreamy and eerie landscapes in this book. She paints backdrops of multiple settings and weaves those landscapes with the mood of her characters: modern and bustling San Francisco to mysterious and moody New Orleans.

The plot involves an analytical science girl who is suddenly immersed in a mysterious past that includes witches and other supernatural beings. It explores the roots of societal misogyny by recapping the history of the Mayfair clan and an unleashed demon spirit that haunts the family, all with a romance lurking in the subplot.

It is written like a dark fairy tale that weaves a contemporary world with supernatural elements. Don’t miss this!

This was a Plot Twist book club pick, and it turned out to be one of my favorites of the last year. Based on three different women from the same lineage, one from the 1600s, one from the 40s, and the third in our current time, it follows their unique struggles with who they are against what society and the people around them expect.

Altha, in the 1600s, has been shunned from society for being different and is then accused and tried for witchcraft. She's thrown in jail and starved to the brink of death, but she perseveres through the trial, doing what she needs to do to survive. Violet, in the 40s, has her life torn apart at just sixteen, the fall out of those events leaving her cast out, pregnant, and terrified. But somehow, she gets up, carries on, and forges a new path for herself. Kate, in… show more.

I loved this atmospheric debut, often described as a collection of interlinked short stories. Set on an isolated group of islands off the coast of Virginia, the stories span more than two centuries of the same family’s history: from the 19th century and far ahead into a post-apocalyptic, post-pandemic future. There are intimations that a supernatural ‘second sight’ runs in the family and the book’s Southern Gothic vibe is nothing short of intriguing. But for all the hints of magic realism, the focus on female characters contending with obstacles of class and gender at different points in history is rooted in an understandable reality. Beautifully written descriptions of the natural environment, poignant characters, and local color all demonstrate Taylor’s imagination to be visionary and impressive. 

As a writer, I’m no stranger to complex friendships that can emerge between creatives, which is just one of the reasons I love this delightfully dark gothic thriller about estranged best friends trapped at a writing retreat run by an enigmatic bestselling author.

With publication (and maybe their lives) on the line, the stakes couldn’t be higher, but Bartz still tells a compelling story about professional jealousy and two women who have hurt and been hurt by the other.

Jill is a little-known but fascinating novel from 1884 about a young woman who, bored of her upper-class life, runs away from home to become a maid.

Jill is everything Victorian women weren’t meant to be: ambitious, scheming, brave, happy to lie, and much more interested in money than marriage. She’s also a bit in love with the woman she works for, which Victorian women certainly weren’t meant to be either.

There is so much I love about Jill, but one of my favourite things about it is how it turns Victorian tropes and expectations on their head, taking the set-up of a typically male adventure narrative and giving it to the character of Jill. It’s a wonderfully proto-feminist Victorian classic and well worth a read.

A short but beautiful book, full of wisdom, personal reflections, and compelling truths about men and masculinities.

This was one of the first books on men and masculinities to be published in the UK, and I read it in the early 90s. I found it profoundly helpful in guiding me to become a profeminist man. I particularly appreciate Tolson’s gentle but persuasive arguments wherein he deconstructs what it means to be a working-class British man, showing how ‘patriarchal masculinity’ gets created through, for example, family, relationships, institutions, work, and peer-group pressure.

The book is part autobiographical and throughout Tolson is openly reflective on his own masculinity and the contradictions it creates in him. I recently reread this book and was so impressed at how Tolson’s insights into the state of men over 50 years ago remain relevant to this day. 

A grimdark fantasy in the tone of Abercrombie, Moss’s The Worthy is a brilliant debut that explores a fractious sibling relationship between brother and sister Prince Barsten and Princess Ailith, both of whom are battling to become heir to the kingdom of Crell. Ailith herself is hiding her lover, Lady Avalon, at the same time as trying to protect the kingdom when it quite literally begins to tear itself apart due to a mysterious magical entity. The book explores issues of patriarchal oppression, historic abuse and trauma, sexuality and homophobia. Despite the grim world and morally grey characters, I found myself drawn into this story because of the important themes it considered. 

I had been designing and delivering gender training for many years and was researching it for my Phd when this book came out. Its publication was akin to finding an oasis in a desert. Even though gender training has become, as the editors Maria Bustelo, Lucy Ferguson, and Maxime Forest point out in their introduction to this collection of essays, the most widely used tool for gender mainstreaming worldwide, remarkably little has been written about it.

This smart and expertly curated book is one of the first to fill this gap. Featuring writing by both professionals involved in gender training and academics researching it, it shows that the concerns of feminist pedagogy reach beyond formal education, into spheres of public policy through adult learning and training practices.