100 Books Like The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield

This book is part odyssey, part ghost story, and part passion play. Toni Morrison is one of the patron saints of American literature whom I was fortunate to discover at an early age. This is her masterpiece, an example of what is possible when a writer’s heart, mind, and spirit are aligned.

The fact that the unfathomable sacrifice around which Beloved is imagined is based upon an actual event speaks volumes about the innate horrors of slavery. In matters of race, America’s skeletons are buried in shallow graves.

I used to moderate a book club for museum members at what is now the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Love Medicine was chosen by one of our exhibition artists. This astonishing debut is a masterwork about family, poverty, and passion.

The book is set where my grandparents came from, Minnesota and the Dakotas, and illustrates how settlers from Europe (my ancestors) continued to disrupt and destroy Native lives well into the 20th century. Ojibwe spiritual beliefs and Catholicism tangle as tightly as the characters that embody them. Spanning from 1934 to 1985, this novel should not be missed by anyone interested in Native American history.

William Goyen’s The House of Breath—a relatively short, lyric, novel—is a unique creation.

Set in the early 20th century in small-town Texas, it portrays a family of misfits and an almost supernatural world in which a deep well and a river narrate two of the chapters, while other chapters are told in a different voice.

In the family, each of its four wayward grown children is a remarkably distinct character. They differ in their sexuality, and one of the main dramas they have in common is their feeling of wanting to leave the small town in which they were born and go out into the larger, while at the same time longing, in the larger world, for the small town again, and the original house of the family.

The narrative is told in different voices. The house, too, seems a character. I learned from this book (and from Goyen’s… show more.

This massive novel consists of several novellas in which some of the same characters appear.

Each major character is given a novella, and the characters interact among each other in different ways. But the great thing about this novel—which was the first of White’s books that I read (and then I read all the others!)—is that White has an unusual, a surprising, a somehow oblique angle, on human beings and their actions and feelings and fates, that is brought so vividly to life by his stylistic genius.

Some of his long sentences are almost like compositions that could stand alone. He sees so much in people, he delves so deeply into what they themselves don’t even realize they are thinking or feeling or deciding to do. I feel, when reading White, that I am standing behind him and he’s showing me how to understand other human beings. How to perceive… show more.

This book for younger YA’s has some of the creepiest villains you’ll ever meet and knuckle-biting tension as the heroes are chased by the evil Wilberforces, slug-like shapeshifters who live under Auckland’s extinct volcanoes. Their goal is the destruction of the world and only red-haired twins Rachel and Theo Matheson can stop them, with the help of the strange Mr. Jones, who helps the twins unleash their supernatural power.

What I love most about this book is the focus on women. That sounds really obvious, given the title, but it’s unusual. Male migrants are so easy to find in historical sources. On shipping lists, women and children were often only recorded as ‘wife and 5 children’ of a named man.

Due to this bias in the primary sources, men are usually at the center of 19th-century migration literature. Their experience is taken as the norm. Their motivations are assumed to be the ones guiding the migration. So I really love that this spotlight on women highlights the experiences and importance of these migrants to New Zealand and also that it has forced historians who have come after this publication to try harder to include women in their migration stories, too. 

Displaced is a historical young adult novel rich in detail, atmosphere, and life of a family in New Zealand in the early 1870s.

The main character Eloise is courageous in the way she copes with her life being torn apart by the men she trusted and believed in.

The fate of women in this time in history is completely held by the men of the family.

I loved the characters and I adore historical novels. This one is set in New Zealand when none of the Pakeha (white) settlers had heard the Maori name for the country of Aotearoa. Eloise, the protagonist is a young woman who is forced to forge her own way in an alien society filled with several different, and often conflicting, alien cultures to her. The research the author has done is impeccable so that it’s possible to immerse yourself in the fascinating but difficult life… show more.

With all the gorgeous scenery in New Zealand, my family and I have thoroughly enjoyed getting out into nature by hiking on weekends.

In sparse but skillful rhyme, this book follows a group of families that go exploring together. A gentle story with soft illustrations, this contemporary picture book feels like a cozy classic.

For me, Catherine Lacey’s debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing is a kind of reverse exploration of foreignness.

Elyria escapes from a comfortable New York life to New Zealand, where she backpacks down to the South Island towards a half-hearted invitation to stay from a poet she once met. Interesting to see your own country through the eyes of another writer as she observes “a boring little mountain, a plain blue lake, a gas station, the same as ours only slightly not” while she searches for a “small and manageable life”.

As she outwardly drifts through the landscape she also takes us on a very inward journey, interrogating her own thoughts about her adopted sister’s suicide, the mutual grief that drew her to her husband, and her mother’s drinking.

After graduating, the narrator's family set him up with a job on Wall Street but it just isn't for him despite his upbringing preparing him for this kind of route. A few months later, he sets off on a round-the-world trip. The book features the first eighteen months of this journey spent in Australasia scraping a living in any way he can with occasionally outlandish casual jobs including beekeeping, running a youth hostel, and working on a production line in a cardboard box factory. He comes across a young woman, another traveller, sleeping beneath a table of honey pots and they begin a passionate yet fraught love affair.

Not only is this a great story, it is also punctuated with Bloom's vivid descriptions of landscapes and people he encounters along the way. There are meditations on the quirky details of life and reminiscing on an unusual childhood.