Books like Hope — picked by fans

The whole storyline is unique.

It’s not a typical paranormal romance, it’s a vampire book without it. It’s well written, and I love how the author takes the reader on a journey around the world not based in one location.

There is suspense but with a historical factor driving it and that’s what makes it such a unique book.

I definitely recommend this book for the audience who is steering away from the paranormal romance tropes and wants to sit down to read a unique book. 

I love Pratchett’s work so much in general that it’s really hard to pick just one. His work was side-splittingly funny but also the very best kind of satire. He had pointed things to say about society while also making you care deeply about his characters and making you laugh until your face hurts. Do you know how hard that is?

In this book, the protagonist is a con man forced into trying to resuscitate a dying postal service. He’s petty evil, the kind of selfish who has never thought about what happens to his victims. By the end, you can’t help but root for him to triumph over the much less petty but equally hidden evil of systems and big money. But you also can’t look away from the chaos of ravening stamp collectors, hapless wizards, and a literal avalanche of dead letters.

Friendly tip: I do not recommend reading this novel while isolated from your family due to travel and illness, because this book hits hard in all the right ways.

It invites both the protagonist and the reader to explore the deepest wells of regret and the branching infinities that our life choices produce. In doing so, the novel beautifully confronts the seductive lure of “what could have been” while reminding us of the quiet beauty in what is.

As someone whose mind is often lost in the past or gazing into the future, this ultimate lesson of the book provided a much-needed sense of clarity.

Lemony Snicket is no stranger to unfortunate events, but this standalone book contains perhaps the worst of all: the news that he, the author, has consumed poison while eating the first meal of the day. Of course, this being a Snicket story, there’s more going on. This book is a bit mystery, and a bit philosophy (or is it the other way around?). More importantly, it is also a meditation on the wonderfulness of books and reading, a part of life that remains important even if one is quite sure one has been poisoned and now has an indeterminate amount of time to discover the truth of what happened.

All of the Singer Brothers are excellent tales of village life and struggles. Isaac Bashevis Singer could spin a yarn with no seams showing, drawing readers in to personal and social straits. Scum, Meshugah, Shosha, and the rest capture the strife and insanity of the times. Isaac Singer often called his brother I.J. a better writer. Better shmetter; I.J. wrote beautiful tales of folksy subjects, easing as well to the verge. The Brothers Carnovsky will linger for years.

The Cloister: A Novel by James Carroll (Anchor, 2019) is a gripping, magical novel that dramatizes the connections between the medieval and modern worlds. Father James Kavanaugh meets Rachel Vedette at the Cloisters, the famous museum and gallery in upper Manhattan dedicated to the art of the Middle Ages. He is a parish priest with doubts and worries; she is a Holocaust survivor; and their relationship brilliantly conjures up the forbidden love affair between the medieval philosopher and “rock star,” Peter Abelard, and Heloise, an immensely talented nun. James Carroll, a former priest, is also the author of Constantine’s Sword, a memorable non-fiction book about the history of the Church and the Jews. The Cloister paints convincing pictures of Abelard and Heloise and creatively blurs the line between modernity and religious tradition.    

Though it is set just after the war, the characters in this novel cannot escape from their memories of the Holocaust or guilt at having survived. Yet they are also stuck in a comic scenario—through a complex series of events, the Jewish protagonist Herman has wound up with three “wives,” his first wife from before the war who he mistakenly assumed dead, the Polish Catholic peasant who hid him from the Nazis and he married out of gratitude, and his mistress and fellow survivor he met upon relocating to New York. The novel is both hilarious and heart-breaking—a potent reminder of the impossibility of ever leaving behind the worst horrors of this war.   

The son of the protagonist wrote this book. His father Harry Haft was born in Poland under a different name, fought against the Nazis, got deported, and became a boxer in a subcamp of Auschwitz.

He won almost all of his fights, his nickname became The Beast of Auschwitz. Harry Haft survived the war because of his boxing skills, emigrated to the US, and made a name for himself as a professional boxer. Incredible story about determination, luck, and surviving. 

Set at the end of WWII, when the UN authorized the founding of the State of Israel, I thoroughly enjoyed the merging of historical facts with fictional characters to depict the birth of a nation from the Jewish point of view.

I loved the diverse characters, including an American gentile female nurse and teenage Jewish children orphaned during the war as they settled in a hostile land.

It was eye-opening to see what it means to be constantly under attack, on the one hand, fighting militants physically and, on the other hand, fighting various countries politically in order to be acknowledged worldwide.

I also love that the author gives me an authentic look at the behind-the-scenes decision-making by British officials during this chaotic time. 

What I appreciate about Hunter's novel is that it takes a new approach to the subject of the Holocaust. With the outbreak of WWII, the Kurcs, a Polish-Jewish family, find themselves driven into another diaspora, with their family members cast to the four corners of the globe. Hunter touches on the plight of Poland during the early years of the war when the country was torn asunder by Germany from the west and the Soviet Union from the east. The plot follows the various family members as they struggle to survive the Holocaust in Poland, in Stalin's Gulag, and as one member tries to flee to South America. A big, sprawling, family epic filled with tragedy and humanity, brutality and heroism.