Here are 100 books that Sarah Canary fans have personally recommended if you like
Sarah Canary.
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Growing up in Philadelphia, with school and family visits to landmarks like Independence Hall and Betsy Ross’s house, I’ve long been interested in American history. That led me, eventually, to graduate school and my profession as a historian. At the same time, I have greatly enjoyed reading American novelists, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willa Cather, and James Baldwin, as well as the works of thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. DuBois. The sweet spot combining those two interests has been American intellectual history.
This is my candidate for the Great American Novel. Read it for its storyline and its fascinating chapters on whales. Along the way, you’ll encounter discussions about race, religion, friendship, and the virtuous life.
Some of my students ask, “Why does Melville digress so much?” My response: persist in reading this work. What at first seems extraneous becomes vital. You’ll discover a masterpiece.
Melville's tale of the whaling industry, and one captain's obsession with revenge against the Great White Whale that took his leg. Classics Illustrated tells this wonderful tale in colourful comic strip form, offering an excellent introduction for younger readers. This edition also includes a biography of Herman Melville and study questions, which can be used both in the classroom or at home to further engage the reader in the work at hand.
A quiet, unsettling literary fiction novel about damaged outsiders finding each other. Ideal for fans of Never Let Me Go, Atonement, or The Virgin Suicides. From a BAFTA-winning screenwriter, now returning to novel writing.
In 1986, with Chernobyl smouldering on the news and the Cold War casting a…
I’ve always been attracted to strange things. When I was a kid, I loved to picnic in graveyards and make up stories about the people buried there. I think I gravitate toward the strange because it’s an escape from the gray every day. The best horror writing fills readers with wonder, opens the door to that magical question, ‘what if?’ But being truly engaged depends on caring about what happens to the characters in a book. That’s why I chose Horror with A Heart as my theme. I like horror with well-developed characters, people that matter to me. People who I could imagine as my friends.
I was already writing stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft but I wasn’t sure I had a place in the genre. Then Victor LaValle took one of Lovecraft’s most racist works, The Horror At Red Hook, and produced an alternate version.
Black Tomtouches on the events of Lovecraft’s original story but tells the tale from the point of view of a black musician named Tommy Tester. LaValle’s reimagining of Lovecraft is a revelation.
He showed me that I didn’t have to be like Lovecraft to write in his world. And LaValle perfectly captures the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a world that Lovecraft’s racism prevented him from seeing, even though he lived in New York City at the time.
People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there.
Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic…
I have been hiking up mountains all my life. From Long’s Peak in Colorado to Mt. Washington in New Hampshire to the Cairngorms in Scotland to the Laugavegur in Iceland, I have always drawn strength and inspiration from thin alpine air. As a midwesterner, when I can’t go to the mountains, I love finding new stories about them, particularly on the page. I wrote Above the Fire in 2020 during the pandemic, when I desperately wanted to leave home and climb something. But quarantine and family responsibilities meant I had to do the next best thing, by setting a novel in the mountains instead!
A life in the wild entails sacrifice in addition to romance.
Few readers would think of Wallace Stegner’s 1971 Pulitzer Prize winner as a book about the mountains. Its narrator is an elderly man confined to a wheelchair who spends his days researching a biography. Yet his fascinating subject is his frontier-era grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, who gave up a life among sophisticates on the East Coast to follow her husband, a geological engineer, into the mountains of the West. There she found beauty and adventure, but also isolation from the culture and society she had left behind. Are the mountains enough to sustain us without such things?
I read this book in the year after my father died; it was one of his favorites and tied together many of his own interests: genealogy, research, books, family, and the outdoors. Angle of Repose is a long novel and the characters…
The novel tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease, Ward embarks nonetheless on a search to rediscover his grandmother, no long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier.
A quiet, unsettling literary fiction novel about damaged outsiders finding each other. Ideal for fans of Never Let Me Go, Atonement, or The Virgin Suicides. From a BAFTA-winning screenwriter, now returning to novel writing.
In 1986, with Chernobyl smouldering on the news and the Cold War casting a…
For as long as I can remember, I have been deeply interested in how people understand and use the past. Whether it is a patient reciting a personal account of his or her past to a therapist or a scholar writing a history in many volumes, I find that I am consistently fascinated by the importance and different meanings we assign to what has gone before us. What I love about Herodotus is that he reveals something new in each reading. He has a profound humanity that he brings to the genre that he pretty much invented. And to top it all off, he is a great storyteller!
Michael Ondaatje’s novel is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. It is not a study or analysis of Herodotus’ history, and yet Herodotus’ spirit infuses virtually every page. Taking place during World War II, it explores the intertwined lives of four characters, including the unnamed English patient, who has survived the shooting-down of his plane, although he is severely burned.
He has nothing with him but his annotated copy of Herodotus’ Histories. I loved Anthony Minghella’s 1996 film adaptation of the novel, and it is no criticism of the film to say that it treats only one of the many strands one finds in the book. Meditating on space, time, identity, and truth, The English Patient is a book that I think Herodotus would have loved.
Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death, and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent, Caravaggio; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper - each is haunted in different ways by the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies in an upstairs room. His extraordinary knowledge and morphine-induced memories - of the North African desert, of explorers and tribes, of history and cartography; and also of forbidden love, suffering and betrayal - illuminate the story, and leave all the characters for ever changed.
As an American Southerner, I know things that can be the most nurturing ever, but there's always a cost—emotional, physical, or other. The landscape and nature are where I can always go when I feel heartbroken. And my heart is renewed. Always. Being in tandem with nature calls me. It might be time to look a little closer. If we don't, we might lose more habitat and humanity. This topic or theme haunts me every day. This won't be all I write about, and I hope to have at least another five decades to see more. How amazing to have a sense of history while looking to the future? That walkabout is such a blessing.
What can pain be when you are trying to be free? Who is safe from that when you are trying to be a compassionate person? This book will quell your questions. A girl with scares and scars. Do not be faint of heart on this one. And especially stay away from wells. Really. But also know there is that light that might free us all.
George and Serena Pemberton arrive in the wilds of the North Carolina mountains to build a life together in a rural logging town. But Serena Pemberton is unlike any woman this town has ever seen: overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes and even saving her husband in the wilderness. So when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she is determined that her intensely passionate marriage will not unravel. A course of events unfolds that will change the lives of everyone in their rural community and bring this riveting tale of love and revenge to its shocking reckoning.
Author Greil Marcus’ phrase “the old, weird America” gave me exactly the right words for something I’ve always felt: that there is a specific weirdness to the American landscape, an uncontrollable current of strange that runs beneath the carefully cultivated surface of heroes and neighbors and shared, stable dreams. Of course, as William Faulkner observed, the past isn’t past, and America is as weird as it’s ever been. Maybe weirder. Look at the news. Look out your window. No surprise, then, that I’m drawn to such a perspective when I read other people’s stories, and seldom get completely away from it when I write my own.
A stunning assembly of archival photographs and newspaper clippings from Jackson County, Wisconsin, in the last decade and a half of the 19th century, and the definitive explanation of why nobody in old-time photographs is ever smiling—and, I choose to believe, the real reason the parts of The Wizard of Oz set in Kansas were filmed in black and white. Economic privation, unceasing bereavement, disease both physical and mental—in other words, Tuesday. Was there any joy in Jackson County? Somewhere, I’m sure. What’s documented here is a stark, powerful beauty. The most real book I’ve ever encountered, and one of two on face-out display on my bookshelves.
This book is about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910. Against these are juxtaposed excerpts from the Badger State Banner, from the Mendota State (asylum) Record Book, and occasionally quotations from the writings of Hamlin Garland and Glenway Wescott.
Author Greil Marcus’ phrase “the old, weird America” gave me exactly the right words for something I’ve always felt: that there is a specific weirdness to the American landscape, an uncontrollable current of strange that runs beneath the carefully cultivated surface of heroes and neighbors and shared, stable dreams. Of course, as William Faulkner observed, the past isn’t past, and America is as weird as it’s ever been. Maybe weirder. Look at the news. Look out your window. No surprise, then, that I’m drawn to such a perspective when I read other people’s stories, and seldom get completely away from it when I write my own.
The other book face-out on my bookshelves, in some ways almost too obvious—what’s weirder than UFO culture? This photo-laden account of the material expressions of faith that Something Is Out There (including a house shaped like a flying saucer I used to drive by regularly when visiting Pensacola Beach) seems almost innocent after the toxic eruptions of conspiracy paranoia of recent times. With its rich Kodachrome record of how a sideshow can become the main event, a perfect complement to Wisconsin Death Trip. Whenever I look at either book, I find it hard to look away.
Since it was first published in 1985, Douglas Curran's photographic exploration of the strange world of UFO "true believers" has established itself as a classic work not only within the New Age/UFO community, but among sociologists, psychologists, and in the art and photography communities. This new edition, with an expanded text revisiting the Roswell, New Mexico, incident of 1947, brings back this essential work in a handsome new edition. As Tom Wolfe explains in his foreword: "Douglas Curran is not only a photographer but also a reporter, and an extremely gifted one. I am tempted to suggest that he also…
I’m an award-winning and bestselling novelist known for writing in a wide variety of genres. My most popular work to date is Lovecraft Country, a supernatural horror novel that served as the basis for the acclaimed HBO series of the same name.
I love books that refuse to fit neatly into genre categories. This underappreciated novel by the author of "The Lottery"and The Haunting of Hill House reads like a Seinfeld episode set on the eve of the apocalypse.
The Sundial’s combination of social satire and horror got lackluster reviews when it was published in 1958, but that’s just because it was way ahead of its time.
Before there was Hill House, there was the Halloran mansion of Jackson’s stunningly creepy fourth novel, The Sundial
When the Halloran clan gathers at the family home for a funeral, no one is surprised when the somewhat peculiar Aunt Fanny wanders off into the secret garden. But then she returns to report an astonishing vision of an apocalypse from which only the Hallorans and their hangers-on will be spared, and the family finds itself engulfed in growing madness, fear, and violence as they prepare for a terrible new world.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher…
I came to my passion for history later in life—when I realized I could trade in the endless date memorization I remembered from history class for an exploration of fierce lady pirates like Shek Yeung and unwilling empresses like Sisi of Austria. Historical stories that felt like thrillers, adventures, or mystery novels. Comedies. Tragedies. And most of all: books that didn’t require a history PhD to get swept up in the story. These are the books that made me fall in love with history, and they’re the kind of books I now write. I’m the author of three historical novels, all written first and foremost to sweep you away into a damn good story.
If you love a quirky narrator, this is your perfect entry point into historical fiction. In 1890 Atlanta, our heroine—Jo Kuan—works as a lady’s maid by day and offers up wit and wisdom as a secret advice columnist by night.
The voice in this one is what had me wrapped around Jo’s funny, sharp, insightful little finger. Expect to laugh, get angry, unravel a few mysteries, and learn a few dark things about American history along the way. There’s a reason this book was a Reese’s Book Club pick.
A Reese's Book Club YA Pick and New York Times Bestseller
From the critically acclaimed author of Luck of the Titanic, Under a Painted Sky, and Outrun the Moon comes a powerful novel about identity, betrayal, and the meaning of family.
By day, seventeen-year-old Jo Kuan works as a lady's maid for the cruel daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta. But by night, Jo moonlights as the pseudonymous author of a newspaper advice column for the genteel Southern lady, "Dear Miss Sweetie." When her column becomes wildly popular, she uses the power of the pen to address…
As a Gen X kid growing up in a very conservative place, I struggled with gender, not feeling like the girl I was supposed to be. I knew I wasn’t a boy, and that just led to uncertainty and perpetual emotional discomfort. When I first heard about the concept of nonbinary gender a few years ago, my mind was blown. I knew if I were young, I would have immediately come out as nonbinary. But as an older person, it felt weird and pointless. Writing and reading books about people struggling with gender gave me the courage to finally be true to myself, and acknowledge that I am agender.
Reading this graphic novel just feels good. It’s so positive and full of all kinds of sweet relationships—romantic, friends, and family.
It’s also a fantastic portrayal of numerous people with something that makes them different from most others, including wearing hearing aids, lesbian grandmas, large bodies, and last but not least, being nonbinary. None of these things is an issue in the book, and instead they’re presented as being as normal as breathing.
I just love the normalization of human differences. Add to that the fun urban fantasy elements of magic and werewolves, and it’s a perfect mix.
"Mooncakes is spellbinding. It had everything I love in a story-magic that felt inventive, characters that became my friends, and a romance that felt truly authentic. It was one of those books that I was sad to see end. Luckily, I can always reread." -Tillie Walden, creator of Spinning and On a Sunbeam
"Mooncakes transported me to a gorgeous magical realm that I never want to leave, and introduced me to lovable characters who stuck with me long after I finished reading. This graphic novel is the joyful fantasy romance we all need right now, and it might just restore…
