Here are 77 books that Indigo Field fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been fascinated with the extraordinary ever since I read Madeleine L ’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time in middle school.I was also enchanted by Dorothy’s trip from black-and-white Kansas into colorful Oz. I once heard Neil Gaiman mention the “hyperreality” of life, and I thought, Yes!That’s how I want to see the world—the magic everywhere.I voraciously read not only magical realism books but also fantasy. These stories heighten my awareness of the wonder in everything and in everyone, and they deepen the richness of the stories I tell and write.
I love the idea that secrets can be baked into pies and that there’s a chance I could stumble upon a place where wishes come true.
The gift of second chances is highlighted in this story, and as someone with a romantic, hopeful heart, I wantto live in this story while eating a slice of Catch’s famous peach pie.
26 year old Rachel Monroe has spent her whole life trying to keep a very unusual secret: she can make wishes come true. And sometimes the consequences are disastrous. So when Rachel accidentally grants an outlandish wish for the first time in years, she decides it's time to leave her hometown and her past behind for good. Rachel isn't on the road long before she runs out of gas in a town that's not on her map: Nowhere, North Carolina also known as the town of "Lost and Found." In Nowhere, Rachel is taken in by a spit-fire old woman,…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
Some places hold our memories with a grip that never lets go. These five books explore the weight of inheritance—of land, trauma, and stories passed down in whispers and sighs. With lyrical prose and unflinching emotional honesty, each illuminates what it means to belong to a place that both nurtures and devours.
Joy’s work is always deeply ethical, asking not only what his characters will do, but what they should do—and what it costs them to try.
In this novel, a hunting accident spirals into violence, loyalty, and impossible decisions in the North Carolina mountains. It’s a taut, morally complex thriller with the soul of a Greek tragedy, written in prose that sings.
An accidental death, and the cover-up that follows, sparks a dark series of events that reverberates through the lives of four people who will never be the same again.
When Darl Moody went hunting after a monster buck, a kill that could make the difference between meat for the winter and an empty freezer, he never expected he'd accidentally shoot a man digging ginseng. Worse yet, he's killed a Brewer, a family notorious for vengeance and violence.
With nowhere to turn, Darl calls on the help of the only man he knows will answer, his best friend, Calvin Hooper. But…
I'm a horror writer based in Colorado, and I spent my childhood in a variety of wild, untamed places. Horror that uses location as its antagonist is one of my favorite things because I understand how quickly–and easily–a beautiful place can become sinister. It’s not enough to go to a scary place; these books are about what happens when the scary place starts to grow roots inside you, how it changes you. I have written two books that deal with this to some extent, the first about an abandoned coal mine, and the second about Antarctica, and if you like any of these, I hope you’ll consider trying one of mine!
The Hollow Places follows Kara, who has returned to her childhood home in North Carolina, as she takes over running her uncle’s museum of eccentricities after he’s injured. If you love nature-based horror as much as I do, this is a must-read–when a portal opens up in the museum, Kara goes through it into a willow-filled, marshy world of rivers and doors and terrifying, hungry creatures. She has to find a way to protect her home from this new world, which seems desperate to spill into hers and consume it, leaving it hollow.
Recently divorced and staring down the barrel of moving back in with her parents, Carrot really needs a break. And a place to live. So when her Uncle Earl, owner of the eclectic Wonder Museum, asks her to stay with him in exchange for cataloguing the exhibits, of course she says yes.
The Wonder Museum is packed with taxidermy, shrunken heads, and an assortment of Mystery Junk. For Carrot, it's not creepy at all: she grew up with it. What's creepy is the hole that's been knocked in one of the museum walls, and the corridor behind it. There's just…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I have a passion for this topic because I too am a South Asian author. I read these books to stay informed about the latest ideas shaping our understanding of the South Asian young adult, both within and outside of the geographical boundaries of South Asia. I want to see more stories out there with South Asian themes, characters, settings— contemporary stories in particular. I’d like to see South Asians in ordinary life and not stereotypical situations like The Indian Wedding. We have so many stories to tell! I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have!
Even though today's South Asian families are extremely progressive when it comes to issues relating to their daughters, this was not always the case. Up until very recently, the choice between education and marriage was a very real one for a South Asian young woman. Devi captures this issue beautifully in her story which is set in the 80s. Devi captures this beautifully in the story of her protagonist, Heera, whose experience presses up against the expectations not only of her family but of what it means to be a brown woman in America in the 80s.
For fans of The Burning Girl by Claire Messud and Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi, a stunning, gut-punch of a novel that follows a young Indian American woman who, in the wake of tragedy, must navigate her family's expectations as she grapples with a complicated love and loss.
On the cusp of her eighteenth birthday, Heera and her best friends, siblings Marie and Marco, tease the fun out of life in Raleigh, North Carolina, with acts of rebellion and delinquency. They paint the town’s water towers with red anarchy symbols and hang out at the local bus station to pickpocket…
Paul Bass is the co-author with Douglas W. Rae of Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of A Killer. Paul has been a reporter and editor in New Haven, Conn., for over 40 years. He is the founder and editor of the online New Haven Independent.
Robert F. Williams may be the most influential, inspiring, and entertaining leader to be written out of popular American civil rights history. Tyson rescues him and his story, showing how one man can combine writing and organizing talent to outwit the Klan, the FBI, change his community, challenge movement orthodoxy, and then have unforgettable and unpredictable encounters with Castro, Mao — and Nixon, at the dawn of a new foreign policy era. This book, like Williams himself, forces us to wrestle with the nuances of arguments about social justice, racism, violence, and ideology. It’s also an unforgettable story in and of itself.
This classic book tells the remarkable story of Robert F. Williams (1925-1996), one of the most influential black activists of the generation that toppled Jim Crow and forever altered the arc of American history. In the late 1950s, Williams, as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP, and his followers used machine guns, dynamite, and Molotov cocktails to confront Klan terrorists. Advocating ""armed self-reliance,"" Williams challenged not only white supremacists but also Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights establishment. Forced to flee during the 1960s to Cuba-where he broadcast ""Radio Free Dixie,"" a program of…
I’ve been a fan of horror and dark fantasy for as long as I can remember. There’s something irresistible about slipping into stories that could happen, however unlikely. The closer a tale inches toward reality, the more thrilling it becomes. As a writer in this genre, my appreciation has only deepened. I’ve learned how delicate the balance is walking that fine line between realism and fantasy, all while keeping the darkness close enough to unsettle, but not so overwhelming that it drives the reader away. These books walk that line better than any I’ve read.
It starts off ordinary, familiar, even as the unease builds slowly. The fear isn’t loud or in-your-face; it’s quiet, creeping, and emotional.
I found myself questioning what was real, what was imagined, and whether it even mattered once the darkness started closing in. What really got me was the sense of something just out of sight, something you can’t quite explain, but you know it’s coming.
Grief and fear twist together in a way that feels inescapable. You try to run, to reason, to fight, but in this story, none of that may be enough. It’s the kind of horror that doesn’t scream. It whispers, and somehow, that’s so much worse.
'Card has exceeded his own high standards ... The man's versatility makes him unique.' - Anne McCaffrey
For Step Fletcher, his pregnant wife DeAnne, and their three children, the move to tiny Steuben, North Carolina, offers new hope and a new beginning. But from the first, eight-year-old Stevie's life there is an unending parade of misery and disaster.
Cruelly ostracized at his school, Stevie retreats further and further into himself - and into a strange computer game and a group of imaginary friends.
But there is something eerie about his loyal, invisible new playmates: each shares the name of a…
Resonant Blue and Other Stories
by
Mary Vensel White,
The first collection of award-winning short fiction from the author of Bellflower and Things to See in Arizona, whose writing reflects “how we can endure and overcome our personal histories, better understand our ancestral ones, and accept the unknown future ahead.”
Racial violence has been on my mind for decades, ever since I encountered the Freedmen’s Bureau Record of Murders and Outrages as a grad student. I didn’t know what prompted the government to gather such data. Later, as a professor directing a Civil War-era research center at Penn State, I sponsored a teacher-training initiative, “Breaking the Silence,” a UNESCO project on the Atlantic Slave Trade. I became starkly aware that most white Americans, myself included, had a poor sense of the brutality enmeshed in our history. This is not meant as a condemnation: without a fuller recognition of this racial past, we will have problems reconciling such issues in our own polarized times.
I taught this book years ago while an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Written like a novel, although a serious work of history, it is not your usual book on Reconstruction. In compelling prose, Evans details the struggles of the Lowry Band of Lumbee Indians who clashed with Confederate officials in southeastern North Carolina during the Civil War. Henry Berry Lowry managed to escape after killing a rebel official. He took to the swamps, eluding capture with the help of local African Americans and Native Americans. It is a little-known story among people outside of that region and shows the complicated nature of putting the country back together again after a Civil War. I had never heard of this tribe until encountering the book and found the story unlike anything else in Reconstruction literature.
The dramatic and exciting story of Indian guerilla warfare against the Confederates during the Civil War. During the Civil War many young Lumbee Indians of North Carolina hid in the swamps to avoid conscription into Confederate labor battalions and carried on a running guerilla war. To Die Game is the story of Henry Berry Lowry, a Lumbee who was arrested for killing a Confederate official. While awaiting trial, he escaped and took to the swamps with a band of supporters. The Lowry band became as notorious as their contemporaries Jesse and Frank James, as they terrorized bush-whacked leaders of possses…
I’ve always been fascinated by the “what if” of how humanity would survive a worldwide disaster. While many post-apocalyptic tales depict a bleak world where the apocalypse brings out the worst in everyone, my favorite stories—both to read and to write—have always been ones where people hold on to their humanity and band together against the darkness. That’s why I like the ones on this list.
This is the granddaddy of all EMP stories—the one that arguably kicked off the entire genre and the one that got me interested in EMP disaster books. So grounded that it has been cited as a cautionary tale in Congress, the story doesn’t shy away from the grim realities of a world where technology suddenly stops working.
Retired army officer John Matherson suffered his share of hardships, but I liked the way he never lost hope or stopped fighting for his family and community.
A post-apocalyptic thriller of the after effects in the United States after a terrifying terrorist attack using electromagnetic pulse weapons.
New York Times best selling author William R. Forstchen now brings us a story which can be all too terrifyingly real...a story in which one man struggles to save his family and his small North Carolina town after America loses a war, in one second, a war that will send America back to the Dark Ages...A war based upon a weapon, an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP). A weapon that may already be in the hands of our enemies.
I was the kid who always had a fantasy novel in her backpack. Fantasy required I stretch my imagination, be open to possibilities, and understand different concepts of reality. This curiosity fueled my academic career, steering me from philosophy to Jungian psychology and, eventually, many years later, to an apprenticeship with a traditional healer in Ireland where I put my hands in the dirt and learned things that touched my soul, like how the growth of plants relates to the moon, ways to alchemize medicine making, and the psycho-spiritual aspects of healing…. You know, magic. I hope reading through this list brings you as much joy as putting it together did for me.
I have bought this book so many times because I must always have it in the house, and I keep giving away my copies. This is the hot chocolate of books. It goes down sweet and easy.
Two sisters, a strong-minded apple tree, a catering company that’s just a little bit magical… It’s a modern-day fairytale. And, like a fairytale, little lessons are hidden in its page that will help you re-see the wonder of the world. It might feel light and frothy, but it feeds the soul.
Welcome to Bascom, North Carolina, where it seems that everyone has a story to tell about the Waverley women. The house that's been in the family for generations, the walled garden that mysteriously blooms year round, the rumours of dangerous loves and tragic passions. Every Waverley woman is somehow touched by magic.
Claire has always clung to the Waverleys' roots, tending the enchanted soil in the family garden from which she makes her sought-after delicacies - famed and feared for their curious effects. She has everything she thinks she needs - until one day she waked to find a stranger…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
Jennifer Bean Bower is an award-winning writer and native Tar Heel. A passionate student of North Carolina history, Bower seeks to document the lesser-known people, places, and events of her state's past. She is the author of four books: North Carolina Aviatrix Viola Gentry: The Flying Cashier; Animal Adventures in North Carolina; Winston & Salem: Tales of Murder, Mystery, and Mayhem; andMoravians in North Carolina.
Once the first page has been turned, Judge Whedbee’s book (much like Roberts’ and Wellman’s) cannot be put down. His lively tales of shipwrecks, pirates, murders, and ghostly occurrences, are a must-read when visiting a North Carolina beach. In his book you will learn about ships like the Crissie Wrightthat sank near Beaufort, North Carolina, and a ghost ship that sails the waters of Ocracoke. After my first read of the book, I visited the common grave of the Crissie Wright victims inside Beaufort’s Old Burying Ground and it was there that Whedbee’s words—and my imagination—truly brought the story to life. I can’t imagine going to a North Carolina beach and not being aware of these intriguing tales.
Every September, on the first night of the new moon, there are those who vow they see a flaming ship sail three times past the coast of Ocracoke. No matter the direction or velocity of the wind, this fiery vessel moves swiftly toward the northeast, they say, always accompanied by an eerie wailing sound. The story of this ship is but one of the colorful legends intrinsic to the charm of North Carolina's historic coastland. From the northern tip of the Outer Banks to the lower end of the sweeping shoreline, there are stories to be found . . .…
