Books like In the Dark Spaces — picked by fans

This is a great dystopian young adult novel with red herrings and revelations that kept me reading to the end.

Kwaymullina draws on her Aboriginal heritage to create a world in which people have lost touch with nature and digital technology is forbidden because it led to disconnection of society.

Citizens with special abilities are called Illegals and are assessed and locked up because government officials view them as a threat, with the treatment of Illegals symbolising the mistreatment of Indigenous people by the Australian government.

It reads like a prophecy about our possible future with themes of environmental destruction due to climate change even as it stands as a testament to the scars left by Colonisation. This is a perfect dystopian novel with all the tropes that readers love: the young female inspirational leader, a heartfelt romance, and found family.

Fast-paced action, adventure, humour, combat, and brilliant world building: The Last City has it all. The female characters fight alongside — and against — the male characters in this action-packed sci-fi novel, set in the multi-layered city of Scorpia. I loved immersing myself in this fictional world inhabited by a legion of post-human species. The struggles of the main female characters, including Sihlo, whose history means she’s a target for the bad guys, and object-morphing Diega, are drawn with clarity and depth that meant I really cared for these oddball creatures and cheered for them to defeat the enemy. This book is such a lot of fun, and I loved it from start to finish.

Valentine is the first in a three-book urban fantasy series, and I’ll be honest: Pearl, the heroine, annoyed me at times. That doesn’t make her a bad character. Quite the opposite. Author Jodi McAlister gives her heroine room to grow over the course of the trilogy and I really enjoyed watching Pearl’s character develop and mature. She has a lot to cope with when the Unseelie comes looking for the fairy changeling that was swapped for a human at birth. Is it Pearl? Or one of the three others in her group that share the same birthday? I loved the way Pearl’s teenage suburban life contrasts with the terrifying and unpredictable Unseelie. It makes the menacing evil within the book all too real. I read it with one eye on my garden in case of invading evil faeries!

There’s nothing I like more than fast-paced action adventure with a gutsy heroine. Add a bit of electricity — and by that I mean an uncontrollable electrical undercurrent that surges beneath the heroine’s skin — and I know I’m going to be hooked. This YA sci-fi-romance is peppered with intrigue and activism as the novel’s heroine, Julianne, crosses Australia from the city to the outback to investigate who caused the explosion that trapped her and the attractive but secretive Ryan in a city elevator. She encounters activists, suffering farming families, greedy corporations, and the military in her quest to uncover the truth, and kicks quite a few butts along the way. If you love action-adventure with real heart as much as I do, check out The Undercurrent.

I enjoyed the pacing of this action-packed book.

Cuban-descended protagonist Eve Innocente is trying to rescue her kidnapped sister from a galactic crime syndicate known as the Fridge. What really carried me through the story were the whacky shenanigans along the way, including a cargo hold full of psychic cats. This book had such a fun feel!

Aimee Baker’s Doe is a diptych: poems in the first section focus on missing women, while those in the second section reimagine the lives of unidentified women.

Baker creates recurrent, multiple patterns of imagery that celebrate the beauty and dignity of each woman – in argument, essentially, with the ways true crime sometimes exploits and objectifies victims’ lives. At the same time, Doe is about North America as a captivating space of the imagination: the poet creates a geography by turns intimate and vast, familiar and strange, beautiful and terrible.

The finely-crafted textures of the poems in Doe, as well as the apparent dedication to investigation and research in the work overall, make for a rare combination.

Okay, I’m a big fan of Lovecraftian lore, but who needs me to recommend Lovecraft? I might as well recommend White Castle to stoners.

While this book (which was also an HBO series) isn’t as funny as Ruff’s Sewer, Gas, and Electric (a wonderful spoof of Atlas Shrugged), I reread it after watching the series and found it as thrilling and exciting as the first read. It plays on science fiction as well as horror, and the chapter depicting Hypolita Freeman’s discovery of a portal to other universes in an observatory has haunted me since I first read it.

I’ve never read a book that weaves horror and science fiction so seamlessly. (Note: I love the irony of writing a book about a closely-knit black family tackling the horrors inspired by the openly racist Lovecraft.)

I’ve read this book three times, which is rare for me. I have such a daunting TBR pile that I rarely reread books. But as one of the first urban fantasy stories I ever read, it holds a special place in my heart, and every time I read it, I wish there were more.

The amount of world-building Mckinley achieves in a single, stand-alone book is phenomenal. Within the first few pages, I fell in love with the world’s history, the characters, and the social conflicts present in this book. The depiction of vampires and other magical races was so well done. When the book ended, I was hungry for more, which is why I keep coming back to this exceptional read.

Although this is my fun pick, it is also a serious book that I use in the classroom. There have been countless attempts by modern authors to retell biblical stories. Horn’s book creatively transfers the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers to the modern period, with a feminist twist. This book is engaging and coherent enough that it can be read and enjoyed without any knowledge of the Bible or Jewish history, although such knowledge makes it all the better!

This memoir is both haunting and oddly inspirational.

On 10 June 1991, eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard was abducted from a school bus stop within sight of her home in Tahoe, California. It was the last her family saw of her for over eighteen years. In 2009 an investigation discovered her living in a tent behind her kidnapper’s house.

I love this memoir for a whole lot of reasons, but in large part because there’s not a trace of self-pity in her account—despite her having had so much of her life “stolen” from her—and because of her determination to find faith in humanity again.