Books like Glory Road — picked by fans

This book was my introduction to Kristin Hannah, and she has had me hooked ever since.

The novel follows two sisters in occupied France during World War II. They live separate lives, make impossible choices, but each finds a way to resist. Just when you think the story cannot demand more of these women, it does. I read with my heart in my throat.

The book feels achingly current. Authoritarianism, the fear it manufactures and the humanity it tries to grind down, is as recognizable now as it was in 1940s France.

I loved that the characters weren’t passive victims. They push back at great cost, and the book makes a quiet, powerful argument that will stay with me: resistance is always possible, and that love has a way of outlasting even the worst of what human beings do to each other.

Nothing is accidental. Every word that you think is throwaway is part of the character build. Nothing is told. You have to link it. You have diverse characters without commentary. You have an understanding of motivation. You have illicit love. You have a challenging protagonist. What you think is true may not be true. You may glimpse real people, but you cannot say for sure. Unspoken truths. Secrets. Sex. Glamor.

Written from alternative viewpoints, it rounds out the real-life aspect that there is no truth because everyone’s truth is colored by their own bias. Again, it's unexpected and a fast read–and just like with my last recommendation–you don’t like her, then you do.

This is a short book of fiction whose main character I remember by name decades after first reading it: Robert Kincaid, a photographer, a traveler, going it alone.

I’ve thought back on this book while discovering, first-hand, that all sorts of great loves don’t always end in the happy-ever-after we might wish for. But we’ve been blessed to have experienced them nonetheless. His was a haunting dedication: "For the peregrines."

I’m a sap for a cute romance story, and this one is as cute as it comes. What I really loved was Weston. He chose to keep helping Tessa work through her grief and temporary blindness because he loved being treated like a “normal” person because normal for him is people taking one look at him and feeling sorry for him.

Since Tessa is blind, she wasn’t aware of Weston’s disability, and this allowed Weston to show a level of quiet strength in the face of someone who completely hates his presence because she could only think of all the things she couldn’t do now that her eyesight is gone.

William James Edward is the grandfather of the author Donald Stone. The author does a great job of highlighting the importance that William J. Edward placed on lineage at the beginning of the book. The author shows the forgotten legacy of Edwards as one of Tuskegee’s first graduates. Edwards goes on to start a secondary school in Wilcox county Alabama, following the legacy of Booker T. Washington. The school was called the Snow Hill Institute and in its prime employed over 20 teachers and had over a dozen buildings on the campus. The curriculum was like Tuskegee, where the students learned trades and received a formal education. Under the leadership of William James Edwards, the school thrived until it was forced to close in the 1960s. Donald Stone mostly uses primary sources to paint a picture of the opposition that Edwards faced in trying to operate a school outside of… show more.

I moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama for graduate school in 1986, eleven years after this book was published, thirteen years after Nate Shaw’s death.

Reading the life of a man whose parents had been enslaved, a cotton farmer and sharecropper who bravely joined a union and stood up for other Black farmers, opened my eyes to the reality of life in the twentieth century for Black farmers in the state I now called home.

Told in expert storyteller Nate Shaw’s (a pseudonym for Ned Cobb) voice, based on interview transcripts, the book introduced me to a person and a way of life unlike anything I had encountered growing up in the city of Little Rock, Arkansas.

I grew up in the 1960s and '70s, during a time when segregation ended, but racial strife continued, particularly in the South, so this book hits somewhat close to home.

Byron Woodfin sheds a meticulous inside light on how some people of privilege believed to be above the law and speaks to a time that all should remember so as not to repeat past mistakes. I found the storyline to be captivating, from the investigation of the attempted murder car bombing to the dramatic legal proceedings that later ensued.

This book is a real page-turner for those who enjoy true crime set in what one hopes to be a bygone era of racially motivated bigotry.

Tales of enemies who become lovers – whether from warring families or rival gangs – are as old as Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, and Tony and Maria.

Setting this story during an actual war heightens the tension. This book will draw you in from the start.

Josef Landermann sails aboard a German U-boat, hunting Allied supply ships in the waters of the Gulf Coast. Helen Mason is the embittered Alabama widow of a US Army Air Force pilot killed by the Luftwaffe. How Josef and Helen come together is a remarkable, enchanting true story.

Woven around themes of love and forgiveness, The Heart Mender is a thrilling page-turner that will touch your heart.

Author Jefferson Cowie focuses on Barbour Country, Alabama to illustrate how over the last 200 years, white Americans have used the battle cry of freedom to seize “Native lands, championed secession, overthrew Reconstruction, questioned the New Deal, and fought against the civil rights movement.” 

Barbour Country was also the home of George Wallace, who lead the charge of freedom and state’s rights. An insightful and eye-opening book, Freedom’s Dominion won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in history.

I used this adult coffee table book as a main reference for writing my children’s book of the same title. The amazing reproductions of the quilts are beautiful. The colors glow. I could see the bits of patterns –flowers, triangles, plaids – ingeniously composed like abstract paintings. Captions give the names of the quilters. And there are photos of them as well as vintage pictures. Quotes from the quilters tell their histories. One of the most touching stories was by Missouri Pettway who told that when her Daddy died her mother took his old work clothes to make a quilt “to remember him, and cover-up under it for love.” I have seen this extraordinary quilt displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and remembering the story behind it, was deeply moved.