Books like In a Far-Off Land — picked by fans

I first read this book as a kid, and it’s one of the reasons I became an avid reader. It's set in Puritan New England and features romance, intrigue, and suspense. It has great historical detail, a fun story, and well-written characters.

The protagonist, 16-year-old Kit from Barbados, arrives in the harsh world of early colonial Connecticut and doesn’t fit in—and society punishes her for it! I found myself angry and outraged for her–I just wanted everything to be fair. This story is a light-handed look at how life isn’t fair. Frustration comes from expecting or demanding it to be. There will always be circumstances and people making things difficult. Can it be endured? Yes!

I love the main characters, Kit and Nat (the son of the boat Captain who brought Kit to the colonies). They are cute together. This is still one of my favorite books.

Catherine Marshall’s masterpiece Christy is revered for a reason. This Edwardian-era coming-of-age story about a young teacher in an impoverished Appalachia village is not only a romantic page-turner, but also theologically rich, psychologically astute, and honest about the effects of poverty, violence, and social injustice. I’ve read Christy multiple times and continue to find it engaging and thought-provoking.

I rarely experience “book hangover” after finishing a novel. The Passion of Mary-Margaret was a notable exception. The story centers on a religious sister (nun) and mystic, Mary-Margaret Fischer, who, before taking final vows, gives up religious life in order to marry her troubled childhood friend. The Passion of Mary-Margaret delves unflinchingly into difficult themes—abuse, prostitution, racism and bigotry, absentee parents, and self-sacrifice—with an eye toward grace. After finishing the book, I thought, “Yes. This is what love looks like.” It was so good, I couldn’t pick up another novel for weeks.

Few topics rouse people’s ire faster than women’s issues. Within Christianity we find a wide range of theologies, left and right. Lynn Austin’s Fire by Night, about a Civil War nurse, takes up questions of gender roles and woman as man’s “helpmeet” (cf. Genesis 2:18) and threads the needle between the various schools of thought in a faithful, mature, real-to-life way.

Hardboiled specialist Horace McCoy made his mark as an unsparing chronicler of Depression-era despair with his 1935 masterpiece They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. His 1938 novel isn't nearly as good, but it feels so lived-in and sordid that it tells major truths about the dreamers, users, and big talents who populated '30s Hollywood. In it, Ralph and Mona, two modestly talented beautiful losers, hit Tinseltown hungering for stardom. But Ralph, 18 years before the doomed screenwriter hero of Sunset Boulevard, winds up providing stud service to a wealthy older woman and Mona finds her own private hell. The novel is a bleak meditation on exploitation, failure, and corruption in a town where, as one character observes, “Morality never crosses the city limits.”

I always like books that trace the origins of a political movement, because they almost always go farther back than we think.

This one follows the suppression of radical activity in Hollywood from the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a time that also saw the founding of the Writers’ Guild, a union that gave writers some actual power in an industry that ran on power and often regarded writers as disposable. But even the Writers Guild couldn’t defend those accused of communist sympathies by their government.

It is significant in our current era that no Hollywood Communist, even the real ones, was ever linked to espionage or sabotage, and that evidence of the supposed subversive indoctrination planted in films was nonexistent. 

The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson is another book that will make you laugh and cry. What I love most about it is its wondering tone which makes me feel like I’m trying to figure out twelve-year-old Revie Bryson’s world right along with him. Why did his mother make up lost episodes of the Bible that made him feel like he just might be the second coming, why did she leave him and his dad in Paris, Indiana to pursue her dreams of Hollywood—and where is God, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be able to count on Him to make things right? 

After Bram Stoker and Vlad the Impaler, the real person most closely associated with vampires has to be Bela Lugosi—so why not write a horror novel with him as the villain? This book underscores the important role that unsettling and dramatic occurrences can play in shaking us out of our own accustomed vices, as well as the difficulty we often face when trying to discern the difference between the works of evil and the truly mundane. After all, Bela Lugosi is nothing more than a tired, sad old man still pining for his glory days on the silver screen—isn’t he?

This book opens with an absolutely breathtaking passage, one of my favorite openings in any book ever. One imagines Niven narrating his memoir poolside, gripping a cigarette and a martini in the same fist, his pince-nez mustache dancing up and down while he describes, in sordid detail, old-school Hollywood at its most louche. If you want a book that brings alive the atmosphere of a bygone era, this is it.

Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning Eleanor Perry put her training as a psychiatric social worker to extraordinary use writing now-classic films including the hypnotic David and Lisa and The Diary of a Mad Housewife. She brought the same dramatic skills and insights to examining her own life as a writer at a time when women faced nearly impossible challenges in Hollywood. The result was this deeply felt, authentic, often autobiographical novel. My wife Loraine Despres, herself a highly regarded novelist and TV writer, gave it to me when I first confessed an interest in screenwriting. The book, now unjustly out of print but hopefully available from libraries and at a price from rare book dealers, has haunted me ever since.