92 Books Like Man In The Empty Suit

I love how weird and dark this book is. Carolyn and her siblings were raised by their abusive, adopted father, who trained them each in a single portfolio of magic.

When their father goes missing, Carolyn and her allies explore the truth of his disappearance. I was with Carolyn every step of the way of her journey to claw back her identity from her abusive past. And I can’t stop thinking about the explosive ending, even years after I first read the book.

Quite simply, Erin Morgenstern’s book is the finest example of urban fantasy I have ever read. Besides a plot rich in sorcery and romance, with a circus (think Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes) that appears mysteriously, vanishing just as suddenly and the shadowy game of two great sorcerers playing out their competitiveness through the lives of their young apprentices, this is a beautifully written book. The writing is elegant, rounded, and rich. What a writer! The imagery is transporting without clobbering the reader over the head. The characters are each fully drawn, but in slow increments as the story steams inexorably ahead like the mysterious train that carries the circus from locale to locale. 

This book showed me that you do not need blazing dragons or drooling werewolves to create menace, sinister characters, and mystery. Morgenstern places this world of circus magic just out of reach but so… show more.

This book is my favorite indie sci-fi novel. It starts with a broken and jumpy storyline that coalesces inwardly as the characters fight a cataclysmic horror. The premise is there are ideas, like those randomly generated passwords, that are simply very hard for a person to remember.

I read this during the COVID craziness. It was precisely why I write, as an escape from the media trying to drag you down with infinite worry. Rest, relax, and enjoy a fun story of someone else’s trials.

This is indie sci-fi at its best. It was a major inspiration and may have gotten a nod in my novel (I can’t remember.) What is great is that the second read-through differed from the first but was still just as enjoyable. 

My new book features the classic “book within a book” trope as a key plot mechanic, but I think Moxon is going for the gold medal in the category of “books within books within books,” with multiple competing characters claiming to be authors and demonstrating unnatural control over their domains, while bemused but frequently baffled readers attempt to decipher what nested reality is foregrounded and what the hell it all means regardless.

It starts off as a spiritual quest for inner-city redemption, starring the inmates of a forgotten asylum and the local parish that tries to tend to them; then an inmate reveals a deeper story of solipsistic villainy that blows away their current problems, and then at least one if not multiple authors involved throws all the cards up in the air and reshuffles them into a multiverse-spanning road movie.

All this, plus the prose is dense and thoughtful… show more.

This book is in a similar vein as Oona finds herself time jumping within her own life, suddenly living it out of sequence as she jumps to a different period in time with each birthday, forcing her to look within and realize what is important and worth holding on to and worth fighting for. I am a sucker for books where characters get the opportunity to experience alternate versions of their personal realities, and I could not put this one down. I’m all about my characters understanding that the choices they make create their ultimate realities. The ultimate messages about the importance of love and family and the choices we make really resonated with me.

With the backdrop of medieval Scotland, this sweeping tale of lairds, kilts, and castles is no ordinary time-travel romance. This carefully-researched tale brings a courageous heroine and a fierce hero together to face enemies neither dreamed existed. My first in a long line of Kurland romances, this story has all the elements of how characters can evolve and love conquers all. 

I loved this book for its innovative approach to time travel. It’s not concerned with altering history but about time travel on a granular level. Alice travels back to her 16th birthday, which her 40-year-old self knows was a pivotal night. 

In the present day, Alice has remained friends with her high school best friend, Sam. I suspect many authors would have had them lose touch as adults and I loved that the novel is not predictably about Alice revisiting their high school friendship.

I also appreciated how Alice is entranced, at first, by the freedom of being a teenager again, but she’s soon caught up in the same struggles. Sam is her through-line, her confidant, helping her decide what in her life should change and what should not.

This book did something amazing to me. I was mesmerized by Finney’s narrative of the past, which negated the method of self-hypnosis he used to bring the protagonist from the future to the past, so it no longer seemed far-fetched.

The narrative recreation of the late 19th century captivated my imagination, enabling me to feel the protagonist’s awe at seeing, feeling, and smelling the past as actual reality. Isn’t this every writer’s dream?

Although this book is only 16 pages long, it tells a story that could easily have been a novel, which is that she is capable of condensing something so dense down to so few words without making it feel like anything was left out. Here we see a rather fantastical time travel tale, but one that, although at first seems quite light-hearted, ends up being one of the darkest of such tales I've ever read...and the most thought-inducing.

I loved this book and have a very difficult time reviewing it without giving too much away, but if you've got a spare thirty minutes (you know, for you slow readers), I'd highly suggest you pick this one up immediately.

The first thing I noticed when I started reading Jasper Fforde was how funny and clever he was. This is what I’m looking for, I thought, smiling broadly. The heroine of the series of which this book is a part is a literary detective named Thursday Next. Need I say more? You know immediately the kind of humor you are getting into.

I am not easily entertained by stories with average complexity and imagination. When I find a writer like Fforde who can push my boundaries, I am so grateful. In this book, he creates a delightful alternate world in which real and imaginary figures interact and sometimes exchange places. And always a good crime to solve here.