Books like Mind of Winter — picked by fans

I’m fascinated by lighthouses. This interest was fostered by my late father, a merchant seaman whose life depended many times on their guidance. So, it was easy to love this book, where I learned about their inner workings through Tom, the meticulous lighthouse keeper.

When he was joined on his remote island by his wife, Isobel, it was the inner workings of their minds that captivated me as they struggled with an ocean that had offered them a longed-for child and a crisis of conscience that was exposed in its searing complexity by the illuminating lighthouse beam.  

I’m a radio buff. First thing in the morning and last thing at night, I listen on my phone to voices from around the world. It’s a far cry from the scenario that unfolded in The Watch House, which is why I love this book about the early days of wireless.

Set on Rathlin Island, where Guglielmo Marconi conducted his wireless experiments, it explores an era where technology and superstition clashed head-on. I’m familiar with old Irish superstitions and the fate of children whose origins were suspect. Throughout this beautifully written novel, I was on tenterhooks as the young, unhappily married Nuala learned a new language from one of Marconi’s engineers. A language transmitted by air through codes, signals, and numbers, and also through secret glances and whispered forbidden words.  

As a writer, I'm intrigued by collaborations between authors. It must be an exhilarating experience to co-write a book, but are there also difficulties as the authors merge their different genres and styles into a seamless narrative? 

This book had a theme that interested me, and I was keen to see how two minds could work in creative tandem. Did the authors develop different characters? Did they write alternating chapters? Did they disagree over elements of the plot? Curiosity as well as sheer enjoyment carried me through this colorful and nail-biting story about a stolen child and the earth-shattering effects it had on the lives of two very disparate women.  

In this wonderful, multi-layered novel, the author delves into the shameful history of mother and baby homes where babies simply ‘disappeared’ and were given new identities while their mothers were working in the laundries or still nursing their newborns. 

I’m familiar with the stories of women like Eileen, Maeve, and Joanie and their lives after they left such institutions. I liken this book to a tapestry that pulled the strands of many stories together. It weaved through four generations to reach an era when society can look back in horror at what went on behind high walls. And, yet, as Aimee, a confident child of Generation Z, discovered on a night out with friends, the path that women take is still fraught with danger. 

Dostoevsky’s central character is Nicholas Stavrogin, a Russian aristocrat, around Hamlet’s age. He has the aura of the mysterious stranger, arriving from beyond, haunted, solitary, fearless, and living outside all normal social bounds and conventions. He carries direct Christ allusions, stavros meaning ‘cross’ in Greek. Everybody from his own generation is in love with him, male and female. A few years earlier, adoring disciples travelled the world with him. He taught them that if it could be mathematically proved that the truth excludes Christ, he would choose Christ.

But Stavrogin lost his faith, and thereafter plunged into a life of violence and debauchery, seducing a number of women in the town, even, it is rumoured, raping a twelve-year-old girl. Without faith, he is equally without passion. Having lost the one indispensable thing, he kills himself.

You’re soon going to notice that I like clever variations on a common theme.

This book is a really fun mishmash of possible ways for possession to happen: a person can be possessed by a friendly ghost, a malevolent demon—or both at once! The heroine travels back in time (unusual for fantasy) and possesses the ghost when she was still alive. Two good guys can occupy the same body without surrendering their autonomy; but one can also take over when the other’s strength fails.

I also like the interweaving of the protagonist’s adventures in both the past and the present with chapters from a thousand-year-old journal. The temporal complexity works well with the way the characters fold into each other.

Due to the financial success of The Exorcist film, a sequel was ordered (The Exorcist II: The Heretic) which had no involvement from the original writer and director and was universally panned. William Peter Blatty then wrote a screenplay for what would have been a sequel to the original film that ignored the second entry. William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist, was attached but backed out. Blatty turned his inactive script into what became the novel, Legion, which he eventually re-adapted and directed in 1990. The majority of the book is dialogue, so it’s easy to see its origins as a screenplay, but that does not make it any less effective.

This story takes a minor character from the original novel, Detective Kinderman, and chronicles his confrontation with a patient in a mental institution claiming to be possessed by the spirit of a dead… show more.

This book revolutionized the possession subgenre.

I love how the story isn’t a typical paint-by-numbers possession and doesn’t go straight into the belief of a demonic presence. The author focuses on building the varying characters up before the exorcism begins, and I enjoy how Reagan is treated by doctors first, worried she’s ill due to family stress.

My favourite part of The Exorcist is how much focus is given to the exorcism once it starts. Plenty of other exorcism stories may only use the exorcism as a quick fix in the third act, but William Peter Blatty made it an integral part of the story.

I’ve spent much of my adult life searching for media that gives me the same feeling as sitting down to my favourite Halloween movies as a kid. The gorgeous, autumnal crunch of Hocus Pocus, the spooky-but-not-scary atmosphere of Tim Burton’s 90’s offerings, the magic and adventure of Willow and The Dark Crystal. It was a big, specific ask, and yet I found it so perfectly in Frances Hardinge. 

My favourite of her books (so far) is A Skinful of Shadows. A twisting, turning, spooky adventure about a girl harboring the spirit of an abused circus bear who must save herself, her doofus brother, and said bear from being hollowed out and used as hosts by their horde of ghoulish ancestors. It’s cozy, clever, spectral perfection.

I’ve read countless books set in New York City or its boroughs, and I’m going to confess that sometimes they can feel a little generic. Not A Girl's Guide to Love and Magic.

The plot in this book is driven by Cicely’s quest to save her aunt through a scavenger hunt of sorts that is all tied into the excitement and action of the West Indian Parade on Labor Day in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

I also love how while this is technically a young adult book (Cicely is a sophomore in high school), it can be a great read for most older middle-grade readers, especially those who want to read up.