Books like Split Tooth — picked by fans

This chronicle of arctic life and landscape enchanted me from the beginning.

Here is the true story of Christiane Ritter, an Austrian painter with no outdoor experience who travels to the remote northern coast of Svalbard to spend the winter of 1933-34 with her scientist husband.

Ritter’s frank voice and wry humor drew me right in; at first, she’s hilariously unimpressed by the pack ice and endless snow! But soon she’s deeply transformed by the same things that inspire me to write about the far north: the land’s vast scale, the aurora borealis, arctic foxes, and night skies brimming with stars.

A few weeks into winter’s polar night she describes herself as “moonstruck” and the following rapturous chapters kept me breathlessly reading until the end.

This may be a surprise coming from a historical novelist, but near-future dystopian stories are among my favorites, and Migrations is a great example of why I love this genre.

The novel’s magic is in showing all we could lose if we don’t protect our planet’s biodiversity, including in the polar regions. It is a haunting page-turner about a troubled protagonist who sets off by boat from Greenland to follow what could be the very last migration of arctic terns – birds with the longest known migratory path in the world.

There’s no way around it: Migrations is bleak. But its finely drawn characters and emotional impact make it a masterful work of eco-fiction that has undoubtedly sparked action among its readers to help reduce the destructive forces the book depicts.

As a writer obsessed with folklore and magical realist fiction, I adore this book!

Based loosely on the Russian fairy tale of the same name, The Snow Child is set in 1920s Alaska and balances the ethereal arrival of a magical child with the harsh reality faced by homesteaders in an unforgiving landscape. My favorite elements in this book are also primary themes I aspire to in my own writing: characters who face hardship with grit, perseverance, and a deep connection to their wild home. 

The author was born and raised in Alaska, and you can tell by the detail and specificity in her writing. In this novel, the natural world truly is the main character, to breathtaking effect.

I was swept away by Gretel Ehrlich’s profound fascination with Greenland as expressed in this book; I read This Cold Heaven in great gulps over the course of a single weekend.

In its masterful weaving of natural history, Inuit lifeways, and personal experience, the book stands as a powerful, compelling testament to the far north and inspiration to me as a writer.

In addition to expressing a unique, deep love of the landscape, Ehrlich offers her experiences living with a community of Inuit Greenlanders, whose ancient and persevering culture lives and thrives in one of earth’s most stunning, and most overlooked, land- and sea-scapes.

In 2000, there were few English-language fantasy books based on Japanese myths. I opened this one, and instantly, Heian Period Feudal Japan came alive in a lyrical, mesmerizing way, unlike the dry history books.

And unlike the fantasy I’d grown up with, the main voice of the book was a woman—a complicated, imperfect magical kitsune who also felt like a human woman. This book made me hungrier for more non-Western myths as a lens through which to view my own concepts of womanhood.

A year or so ago, I read a lot of factual books about India, so I was delighted to find this Golden Age cozy mystery set in a land I was falling in love with through books. This book took me back to a pre-partition India still under British rule, with a realistic glimpse of life under colonialism alongside a hefty–hopefully less realistic–dose of murder and mystery.

I adored how Harini Nagendra created a strong, independent female character who still feels genuine and believable in the time and place in which the book is set–a time when most women were stifled, submissive, and governed by their husbands–and how the observations of colonization feel true to life while remaining both sympathetic and observant to the Indian culture and ways of life.

The setting is vividly portrayed, and the sights and sounds of 1920s India are an absolute delight. The main characters… show more.

My all-time favorite amateur detective is Miss Marple, and if I had to pick a favorite book she is in, it would be this one. I love the idea of a quiet, mostly ignored spinster who most people dismiss being the one character who seems to know exactly what is going on and what people are up to.

I really like the way Miss Marple figures out why the main character thinks she is going mad and proves that she isn’t. In this book, Miss Marple really proves her status as one of the best amateur detectives, and I love it.

I was immediately taken with author/filmmaker Nicholas Meyer's brilliant pairing of a flailing, cocaine-addicted Sherlock Holmes with a winningly rendered Sigmund Freud, whom a desperate Doctor Watson has recruited to save the self-destructive detective.

Freud’s efforts eventually teased out the darkest of secrets driving Holmes’ notorious substance abuse in a manner I found enthralling. I believe the best historical novels confidently ground you in a time and a place that captivates but also conjures a reality all their own in their blending of fact and fiction, which this novel does in spades.

I’ve revisited it many times over the years. A wonderful film adaptation by Meyer was also released many years ago, starring Nichol Williamson as Holmes and Alan Arkin as Freud.

I’m an absolute sucker for a ‘what really happened that night’ tale and this is one of my all time favourites due to the unreliable narration and the sense of slowly creeping dread.

The core of this book is the messy tangle of friendship, obsession, and unspoken longing, which I can never get enough of. Throughout my first read of the story, I re-evaluated what I thought I knew, and went back to the start over and over. I had to know who was lying…

I am not a plotter. I have always wished I was. But nope, sorry, Gwen. That said, this is still an amazing book. Even if you are a discovery writer (sometimes called pantster for writing by the seat of your pants), thinking about your plot in terms of pacing, story elements, backstory, characterization, and setting…and thinking about them in a logical way is beneficial.

Kudos if you can write it down in a notebook before you start drafting. That’s not in my wheelhouse.