100 Books Like Outside the Frame

I loved Lioness because it took such incredible inner strength for the daughters of Zelophehad to stand before Moses, as judge, and argue their case for equal rights for women regarding inheritance laws.

The characters and time period became so real to me that I read through this novel series, following the daughters to Canaan. The author spun a fiction tale around the biblical account and filled it with deep historical background, plus touched on the emotional core of Mahlah and her sisters.

I love Britton’s writing, too; it reminds me of Joyce Landorf’s fiction style.   

I attended a Bible study where the male leader had the “Marys” in the New Testament mixed up. Once home, I sorted the women out. It can be confusing.

Such as, there are two different accounts of women anointing Jesus’ feet and wiping them with their hair—Mary from Bethany and an unnamed sinner woman. Salome (Virgin Mary’s sister) is sometimes called Mary. There were three Marys at the tomb. 

In Women Who Followed Jesus, author Dani Daley Mackall dramatizes nine women (including four Marys) in narrative (historical fiction) accounts of their encounters with Jesus. Before each woman’s story are scriptures. After each first-person biblical account are questions for reflection and a prayer.

This book clarified the women and gave insight into how they may have felt. I also learned about Jewish customs because of the deep research. 

As a journalist, author Shannon Bream did not disappoint by applying her skills to deep research of the 16 women she wrote about in this nonfiction book.

I have studied the Bible nearly my entire life and hadn’t realized Hagar was the first person to see an angel and the first to give God a name – El Ro-i, “the God of seeing.” Bream sets this book up in an unusual manner by pairing two women per chapter. Very unique!

After my poetry book about Bible women released, people kept asking if I had read The Women of the Bible Speak. (Our titles are even similar.) I had not read her book. (It is common to not read what you are writing about so as not to be influenced.)

Once I read Bream’s book, it was evident why people saw mine as a companion. I am a fan now,… show more.

Francine Rivers has always been a master at writing biblical fiction.

As a teen my daughter read many of Rivers’s novels. But I never took the time to do so until another best-selling author recommended to me A Lineage of Grace. It is a collection of short stories, nearly the length of novellas, following five women in the lineage of Jesus Christ. 

The story that captured me most was Tamar’s. I had never thought about her viewpoint as a Canaanite, or why she went to the extreme measure she did, pretending to be a prostitute, to hold her father-in-law Judah to his promise and bare his children.

I love books that make me see something on a slant, from a different viewpoint. There are also Bible study questions at the end of each woman’s story.

I couldn’t put this book down! Anything Judas, in my mind, is interesting. I believe Judas is the most misunderstood of all the disciples, and this novel does a great job of telling the story from his own perspective.
Written in 1977, it was definitely ahead of its time. It was published shortly after a papyrus document called the Gospel of Judas was discovered near Beni Mazar in Egypt.

Although the novel confirmed some of what I already knew about Judas—e.g., that he was more of a victim than a villain—I also learned a lot about the politics and daily life of the era Jesus and the disciples lived in. This novel is truly remarkable, and Taylor Caldwell is one of the best writers I have ever read.

When I started writing biblical historical fiction in the early 2000s, I found only one or two novels about Moses. Shadow Women was especially helpful because it spanned Moses’s whole life, which meant it also encompassed the biblical narrative from Exodus to Deuteronomy. It was like Cliff Notes for four Books of the Bible! As my writing friendships have expanded over the past two decades, I’ve come to know Angela Hunt personally and discovered that she holds a PhD in Biblical Studies, which gives me even more confidence in the historical and biblical accuracy of her many biblical novels. She continues to be one of my favorite authors. 

The true identity of Diana Tutton remains uncertain. She published three idiosyncratic novels in England in the 1950s, all of which have now fallen into obscurity. Of those, Guard Your Daughters is the best: it describes a loving family dedicated to protecting the children’s mother, whose poor health has led to an insular, overly sheltered lifestyle for her many daughters. Each of the girls is distinct and vividly drawn by Tutton, who has a keen eye for the traditions, tensions, and excitement of siblings in their teenage years. Over the course of the novel, the sisters gradually forge more connections with the outside world and discover not only their own larger desires but also the hidden truth of their family life.

I absolutely love thrillers and stories filled with suspense.

The problem with that is, all I can ever seem to find are thrillers about washed-up detectives, which are fine and all, but sometimes I want to read a suspenseful story in a different genre. If a story can do that and weave in history, war, and the Bible, I’m in.

Ted Dekker checks every box with A.D. 30, and he’s just a master of storytelling. Dekker keeps you on the edge of your seat and brings together unlikely worlds in unexpected ways that are just so much fun to read.

Even better, this book really made me think about different cultures and the things we all have in common. 

I loved Miriam—one of many of Mesu Andrew’s novels of Old Testament women—because this aged woman brings a fresh perspective to the well-known story of the Exodus from Egypt. Her lived experience from slavery to freedom—and from despair to hope—as she searches for the God of her brother, Moses, is both familiar and utterly new. Mesu Andrews weaves a beautiful tapestry of a story that breathes new and fascinating life into a familiar story.

Using state-of-the-art scholarship and his own vast erudition, Calasso reveals the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament)—the foundational text of Judaism and Christianity—in a whole new way.

You will time and again be shocked by this book, and swear that he must be making things up, that these wild tales can’t possibly be in the Bible… yet indeed, all of them are there. A revolutionary book on a revolutionary religion.