Here are 100 books that The Burning Girls fans have personally recommended if you like
The Burning Girls.
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I've been writing for 20 years, and the more I learn about the craft, the less interested I am in big, bombastic thrillers about the end of the world. Now I'm more impressed by books that do a lot with a little. Some talented writers can spin a gripping story out of nothing more than two people in a room (Stephen King's Misery is one of my all-time faves). The domestic noir genre lends itself to this kind of minimalism. Sure, serial killers are scary, but not as scary as the thought that your spouse might not be who they seem.
Christine has a brain injury, which causes her memories to degrade every time she sleeps. She wakes up every morning as a blank slate, and her devoted husband explains who she is and then helps her get through the day. Unbeknownst to him, she starts keeping a journal—and soon realizes that his story about how she was injured is a little different each time.
I'm never in the mood for a thriller with a big twist in the penultimate chapter. I always want one with a big twist at the end of every chapter, and this book absolutely delivers. Is the husband a good guy or a bad guy? I changed my mind a dozen times over the course of this book, expertly manipulated by the author. I read the whole thing aloud to my wife on a long drive, and the time went by in a blink.
Anita Walsh, still reeling from her husband's sudden death, finds herself haunted not only by grief, but his Negative Image, a new phenomenon where the deceased prey on those they loved in life, turning intimate memories into nightmares. This spectral figure uses their shared past as a weapon, systematically dismantling…
I am the author of the DI Winter Meadows series. I love reading and writing crime fiction, especially books set in rural locations. I live in South Wales where I go hiking mountains, exploring caves, and discovering waterfalls. I take inspiration from these remote areas and close-knit communities to create the settings, characters, and plots for my books.
The book grabs your attention from the first chapter.
Lenny Moon is a struggling Private investigator who is asked to look into the disappearance of Betsy Blake. Betsy disappeared 17 years ago when she was 4 years old. The catch? Betsy’s father is about to go into heart surgery with only a 50 percent chance of survival. The clock is ticking.
The book quickly draws you in and keeps up the tension throughout. The characters are engaging, particularly the girl who is kept in the basement. The clues are all there and even if you think you’ve worked it out the twist at the end will leave you reeling. I raced through this book desperate to know the outcome.
Whatever happened to Betsy Blake? can be read as a standalone story. Betsy Blake was only four years old when she vanished outside her family home in Dublin. Her father – wracked with guilt for the past seventeen years – still can’t bring himself to admit the search is over, despite the fact that his wife has moved on and police have closed off the investigation.
When he is informed he must undergo major heart surgery that he only has a fifty percent chance of surviving, Gordon Blake hires a…
I am the author of the DI Winter Meadows series. I love reading and writing crime fiction, especially books set in rural locations. I live in South Wales where I go hiking mountains, exploring caves, and discovering waterfalls. I take inspiration from these remote areas and close-knit communities to create the settings, characters, and plots for my books.
In 1963 13-year-old Alison Carter vanishes from her home. A man is convicted and hung for her murder. Her body is never found. 35 years later Catherine Heathcote is writing a book about the Carter investigation, but she is not prepared for what she is about to discover.
The story is atmospheric with well-drawn characters. The first half of the book follows the investigation in 1963 and gives you an insight into the family of the missing girl. I found myself fully immersed in the tight-knit community. Nothing is as it seems, and this is one book you won’t want to miss.
A riveting psychological thriller from the Number One bestselling Queen of crime fiction - Val McDermid.
In the Peak District village of Scardale, thirteen-year-old girls didn't just run away. So when Alison Carter vanished in the winter of '63, everyone knew it was a murder.
Catherine Heathcote remembers the case well. A child herself when Alison vanished, decades on she still recalls the sense of fear as parents kept their children close, terrified of strangers.
Now a journalist, she persuades DI George Bennett to speak of the hunt for Alison, the tantalizing leads and harrowing dead ends. But…
Anita Walsh, still reeling from her husband's sudden death, finds herself haunted not only by grief, but his Negative Image, a new phenomenon where the deceased prey on those they loved in life, turning intimate memories into nightmares. This spectral figure uses their shared past as a weapon, systematically dismantling…
I am the author of the DI Winter Meadows series. I love reading and writing crime fiction, especially books set in rural locations. I live in South Wales where I go hiking mountains, exploring caves, and discovering waterfalls. I take inspiration from these remote areas and close-knit communities to create the settings, characters, and plots for my books.
This was the first book I read by Sharon Bolton and it got me hooked on this author.
The book draws you into the lives of the residents of a small village where beneath the idyllic setting lurks secrets and malice. We follow newcomer Clara, a local vet, who is called upon when poisonous snakes turn up in the residents’ homes. The book has a brooding atmosphere which will leave you checking under the bed before you sleep.
Clara Benning, a veterinary surgeon in charge of a wildlife hospital in a small English village, is young and intelligent, but nearly a recluse. Disfigured by a childhood accident, she generally prefers the company of animals to people. But when a local man dies following a supposed snakebite, Clara's expertise is needed. She's chilled to learn that the victim's postmortem shows a higher concentration of venom than could ever be found in a single snake—and that therefore the killer must be human.
Assisted by a soft-spoken neighbor and an eccentric reptile expert, Clara unravels sinister links to an abandoned house,…
I don’t think I’m alone in considering cults and those who join cults fascinating, but I’ve also always found it frustrating when non-fiction accounts or documentaries focus on the logistics of how the communes operate rather than finding out the why. Why do people join a cult, why do they stay, why do they follow increasingly erratic and dangerous instruction? For me, researching cults for my new novel The Sleepless – about a commune whose disciples believe that sleep is a social construct – was about finding out about the characters, the individuals, who are drawn into organisations which often ask you to relinquish that self-same sense of individuality.
This is a novel about a young woman, the titular Nina, escaping from a Maoist cult and it’s a terrifically absorbing and engrossing tale.
What makes it unique is that it’s as much about the protagonist reclaiming, or even forming, her own identity as it is about the cult that she’s wrestling herself free from. Both the storyline and the form of the book itself involves the reader in that journey into freedom. An excellent and under-rated book.
Winner of the Saltire Literary Award Fiction Book of the Year
'Literary gold . . . Morrison has published his masterpiece' Sunday Times
'Sensational. Like nothing I've ever read. A tour de force' Ian Rankin
Nina X has never been outside. She has never met another child. Nina X has no books, no toys and no privacy. Nina X has no idea what the outside world is like. Nina X has a lot to learn.
Nina X has no mother and no father; she has Comrade Chen, and Comrades Uma, Jeni and Ruth. Her closest emotional connection is with the…
I have always loved reading about individuals and the ways they behave in extraordinary or unusual circumstances. Stories that are about a person growing up and coming to an understanding that the world around them is deeply flawed, and that they themselves are patched-up, imperfect creatures, fascinate me. I find myself observing people and the words they say. Those are the kinds of stories I write, about regular people stumbling along and discovering some truths about themselves.
The protagonist is a Pakistani girl moving from the urban city of Rawalpindi to a rural city in the US, as part of a program that places students abroad for a year in high school.
There were so many instances when I completely understood Hira, the way she talked about the US, about growing up in Pakistan, about language. Her adjusting to life far from home is complicated by her illness, a disease the perception of which further makes us question our prejudices about a place and its people.
'Prose that dances with charge and potency' LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
WINNER OF A 2023 ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR LITERATURE
On a year-long exchange programme, sixteen-year-old Hira must swap the bustle of urban Pakistan for church and volleyball practice in rural Oregon.
Stuck between two worlds, her experience of America is sometimes freeing, sometimes painful, often quite painful. And while she faces racism and Islamophobia, she also makes new friends and has her first kiss.
But when her new life is blown apart by a shocking health crisis, Hira's sense of belonging is overturned once…
I worked for years as a long-haul flight attendant, and met a lot of people. Some travelling for love, honeymoons, anniversaries, some for medical care, to say goodbye to someone. And some for that bucket list item, because they knew it was their last chance. I’ve always been amazed by the human spirit and its ability to love deeply. And I love romance stories! I have read so many. My favourites are the ones about people and the emotional journeys they go on. So combine the two, and you’ve got heart-wrenching stories that make you realise what’s important, even if they do break your heart in the process.
It is a beautiful story about childhood friends, Poppy and Rune, who are fated to be together. But circumstances break them apart, and when teenager Rune returns, Poppy has a secret – she has a terminal diagnosis.
This isn’t strictly a romance because the ending isn’t a traditional happy ever after. But it is bursting with love and all the strength that a gripping love story brings. I loved it.
It’s a book that makes you look at life and feel grateful again. To really remember how powerful we all are and can be when we harness our true meaning of loving ourselves and each other.
It is breathtakingly beautiful and will stay with you a long time after turning the final page.
I’m a Chinese Vietnamese American author who writes about the Asian girls I never saw in books as a kid. Growing up in Southern California, I was part of an Asian community that was extremely diverse—a reality that was rarely reflected in American pop culture. For years, I longed to see messy, flawed, fully humanized Asian characters in all different kinds of stories, not just the typical child-of-immigrant narratives. As a result, I now spend a lot of time thinking about representation (whether I want to or not!), and I’m always looking for writers who pull it off with nuance and realism. I hope you’ll find these books are great examples of that.
There isn’t another young adult book out there that makes me feel as seen asLucy and Linh, alternately titled Laurindain its native Australia.
It was the first novel I’d ever come across with a Chinese Vietnamese protagonist, and the details about her life as the daughter of working-class refugees really hit home.
That the prose is impeccable, the social observations incisive, and the themes not at all didactic (the main character Lucy makes plenty of mistakes) instantly turned me into an Alice Pung superfan.
From an author Amy Tan calls “a gem,” this is a witty, highly acclaimed novel that’s “part Mean Girls, part Lord of the Flies” (The Bulletin, Starred review) about navigating life in private school while remaining true to yourself.
Lucy is a bit of a pushover, but she’s ambitious and smart, and she has just received the opportunity of a lifetime: a scholarship to a prestigious school, and a ticket out of her broken-down suburb. Though she’s worried she will stick out like badly cut bangs among the razor-straight students, she is soon welcomed into the Cabinet, the supremely…
I am a forty-five-year career educator, sharing my classrooms with students from primary school through graduate programs in creative writing. What I love most in every classroom I enter is sharing the books and stories and poems I love with my students. The best days: when I’m reading one of my favorite parts of the book out loud to the group and I look up and they laugh or gasp, or I look up and see their eyes full of joy. If it’s my own work I’m reading from, all the better!
Ah, these juvenile narrators: they think they know it all. Lucille Odem has it all figured out. She can fix her broken family and heal her parent’s broken hearts—because of course she can. For me, the pleasure of a great young adult narrator is watching as even the smartest of these smarty pants comes to learn that we all have blind spots and that it’s often the things we can’t see or don’t know that are the most important part of the equation. What a sweet book this is.
At the age of seventeen, Lucille Odom finds herself in the middle of an unexpected domestic crisis. As she helps guide her family through its discontent, Lucille discovers in herself a woman rich in wisdom, rich in humor, and rich in love.
I grew up on a Viking battlefield, in an English coastal village once raided then occupied by Norsemen. We had ancestors who lived on the Isle of Orkney, and in the Celtic south-west. From a young age, I read Norse and Celtic myths and legends, and went on to study history and philosophy – and then became an author. Now, I have family in Sweden and grandchildren of Ash and Elm. My list offers pure escapism, but also shows how our ancestors lived in an age with no electricity or compulsory schooling. It’s the wonderful combination of the ‘other world’ myths and history that I believe makes us who we are.
This beautifully written novel showed me what life must have been like on the island of Orkney in the Dark Ages and trapped me in a gripping, almost ‘other-world’ coming-of-age tale.
Full of fascinating descriptive details and wise human insight, the story tells of the developing, sometimes tender, sometimes aggressive, relationship between two homeless adolescents in a very dangerous adult environment.
