Books like St. Patrick's Gargoyle — picked by fans

Brave mice defend a monastery from marauding pirate rats! An evil snake haunts the forest, eating gentle beasts!

Redwall is a medieval Viking tale populated by animals. But what animals! Speedy hares with bottomless appetites evoke British Army captains. Quarreling shrews must pass around an object to speak at the council, reminding us of The Lord of the Flies. We meet tiny sparrows who follow a Spartan warrior ethos, and Friar Tuck-like fieldmice who cook great feasts that will make you salivate.

Yes, it’s a young adult book, but it’s also one of the reasons I became a writer in the first place. Let me throw down a glove here: the vitality of Redwall’s characters equals anything found in Dickens, Dumas, or Stevenson. 

Sidenote: the first piece of fiction I produced was an imitation of this very title, fulfilling an elementary school assignment. I folded ten pages of… show more.

My dad gave me these books too. For the same reason—he had loved them.

What child wouldn’t?—A baby, lost in the jungle, is threatened by a tiger. A wolf pack rescues and raises him. His school-teacher is a bear and his mentor a black panther, Bagheera. (I loved Bagheera.)

Today, Kipling is often called "racist." I can’t totally defend him, but—he could easily have made Mowgli a white English lord, as Burroughs did Tarzan. Instead, Kipling made Mowgli the child of poor Indian villagers—and also handsome, athletic, courageous, strong, honourable, and fiercely intelligent. Racist?

Not all the stories are about Mowgli. "Rikki-tikki-tavi," a favourite, is about a mongoose. Another is "Quiquern," set in the Arctic. Classics.

A unicorn believes she’s the last of her kind and undertakes a quest to find where the others have gone. This might be my favorite book!

It plays with the fantasy genre in a way that few books can. It seamlessly mixes the whimsical with the mundane and it gives us memorable characters who are unique twists on old tropes.

What I love most about this book is seeing life through the eyes of the unicorn protagonist. She’s a timeless creature—unaging, unchanging—who finds navigating a mortal world to be puzzling, inconvenient, and, at times, terrifying.

Can you imagine being immortal and suddenly being forced to confront your own impossible mortality? Read this book and you will.

When you’re in the mood for pure adventure-driven fantasy with a noble, troubled hero beleaguered on all sides, this is the one to pick up. Going back to when I first read about Theseus in grammar school and all the way through my Dungeons & Dragons years, I have always thought that minotaurs were cool and full of untapped potential. Herein lies the tale that proves I was right. It will evolve your feeling about minotaurs from mindless beasts in the labyrinth to courageous knights of quality and mettle. Don’t worry about the massive scope of the Dragon Lance Chronicles, this one can be read on its own.

I first read this book in my teens and it profoundly affected me. The storyline is set in Dublin from 1907 to 1914, when a third of the city’s residents were destitute. Large families lived in single rooms in the dilapidated former homes of wealthy landlords. The author weaves the lives of his fictional characters into the workers’ revolt and great lockout of 1913, a tragic time for the ordinary people of Dublin. In spite of this, there are wonderful scenes of kindness and self-sacrifice that a close-knit community will often provide. I feel this book greatly influenced my own writing decades after first reading it. 

I love the delightful yet diverse ensemble of characters that form the story of Evening Class and how their individual stories weave together so beautifully. It taught me that it’s never too late to take a risk or try something new and that everybody has a story, no matter how they present themselves to the world. There is something so comforting in Maeve Binchy’s delightful prose and many moments of laugh-aloud humour.

This book is one of the best at capturing the impact of myth on history, culture, and politics. Thompson starts long before the Easter 1916 Rising, the book’s central event, and examines how Celticity became a focal point of reclaiming an Irish identity separate from the British. Just as Jack Zipes’ Grimm Legacies demonstrates how the collection of folklore developed a unified German cultural identity, Thompson illustrates how collecting (and in many cases updating) the myths of the land gave Ireland not only a new identity but also a new history. The heroes of those mythic stories would be used for the next three centuries as allegories for both Ireland and the Irish in art, literature, theatre, and political rhetoric. It is the blueprint of all my worldbuilding.

Having a parent walk out on the family is the stuff that nightmares are made of. Yet, Roddy Doyle pulls it off in this masterpiece that has been my gold standard in writing humour for the twenty years since I read it.

Nine-year-old Paddy Clarke is trying hard to brag and battle his way through a regular childhood, even as he goes back to a home that threatens to break apart. The parents he loves are at war with each other, and he dreads the day his Da will leave and he will be called in to be "the man of the house." Inevitably, this day comes along. 

No one does dialogue and atmospheric tension like Tana French. Faithful Place is my favorite of hers.

I felt like the characters were so alive that I could hear their voices in my head long after I had closed the book. This story is rife with a gritty, urban Irish atmosphere and thick with familial tension. French does a cross between literary fiction and procedural that is devastating, at times quite dark, and yet ringing with hope—one of my favorite qualities in a mystery.

Best read on a dark, rainy afternoon with a mug of rich coffee—or a Guinness. 

As the song goes: “It ain’t whacha say, it’s the way how’s ya say it.” And that’s what I love about all five of these books. It isn’t exactly the place, or the time, or a particular character; it’s the style. 

Joyce’s early stories, though, do cast magic over a certain time and place and make them come alive as if they were written yesterday.

The Dead, probably the best known of them, and made into a touching movie (John Houston’s last), is a great example of the feeling Joyce could evoke in us, the readers, with the carefully chosen words of a poet.