Books like The Elegance of the Hedgehog — picked by fans

This book was my introduction to Kristin Hannah, and she has had me hooked ever since.

The novel follows two sisters in occupied France during World War II. They live separate lives, make impossible choices, but each finds a way to resist. Just when you think the story cannot demand more of these women, it does. I read with my heart in my throat.

The book feels achingly current. Authoritarianism, the fear it manufactures and the humanity it tries to grind down, is as recognizable now as it was in 1940s France.

I loved that the characters weren’t passive victims. They push back at great cost, and the book makes a quiet, powerful argument that will stay with me: resistance is always possible, and that love has a way of outlasting even the worst of what human beings do to each other.

This is such an insightful glimpse into what happens when an artist—in this case, an architect—stops creating, that’s both hilarious and heartbreaking.

Describing the price of privilege, but without preciousness, Maria Semple illustrates the decline of a mother and professional, doing what seem like the right things while producing disastrous results that really ring true.

Fatigued by the priorities of high-tech Seattle, Bernadette loses her confidence and misplaces her trust. Then it’s her daughter who has to pull her back from the brink. Their love withstands the tests of culture, community, and commodity, reminding us of the remarkable symbiosis between mothers and daughters while showcasing Semple’s irrepressible, satiric wit.

Humor wielded with ill intention is a cruel weapon. Yet in thoughtful and caring hands, laughter is such a balm.

This is a hard story, yet I’m not sure I can count how often I laughed out loud while reading—not at someone’s expense but at Gail Honeyman’s ability to adeptly portray so many of the odd moments that come along with being a human on this earth.

Most importantly, this story beautifully illustrates how one person with more emotional baggage than anyone should have to carry is able to walk herself into a peaceful life so different than the one that nearly crippled her. And of the help she gets along the way.

Friendly tip: I do not recommend reading this novel while isolated from your family due to travel and illness, because this book hits hard in all the right ways.

It invites both the protagonist and the reader to explore the deepest wells of regret and the branching infinities that our life choices produce. In doing so, the novel beautifully confronts the seductive lure of “what could have been” while reminding us of the quiet beauty in what is.

As someone whose mind is often lost in the past or gazing into the future, this ultimate lesson of the book provided a much-needed sense of clarity.

I fell into this story with the first line and barely came up for air until I was done.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book filled with so much beautiful and tragic truth, or an ending that filled me with so much optimism. Thousands have written gorgeous reviews about the story, the characters, the writing—so I won’t even attempt that here. 

These lines, from the book, are among the most beautiful and meaningful to me: “If you are surrounded by those who call what you are different instead of beautiful. If your mind or body has cried out for peace and acknowledgement and understanding, just know…You are part of an infinite family. The people who have been through terrible things and survived them. If you are reading these words, you WON today.”

What I love about this book is that Christopher is such an unusual child and sees the world in ways that most of us do not.

In reading this bizarre and disturbing mystery story, we begin to see the world differently ourselves. I like, too, the fact that what is different about him is never named – it’s not some specific diagnosis or categorization – he is just Christopher, the odd, mathematically gifted, strangely reacting, teenager.

When he becomes terrified of what we might take as quite ordinary events and places, I begin to feel some of his difference – to feel what it might be like to be so much an outsider. It helped me to remember that we are all different.

This is a big ambitious book with a huge literary and emotional payoff.

It’s set in Chicago, a town I don’t know well during the AIDS epidemic, an experience that has stayed with me. It’s also set in Paris, a place we all love to read about, in the art world, where I like to linger. I don’t always appreciate a multiple timeline structure; here, however, it really enriches the plot, heightens the stakes, and amplifies the theme of love within tragedy.

Every character is well-drawn and makes a lasting impression as you jump into not only a community in crisis, but also a world of visual art, found families, mortality, and memory. It’s a stunningly sublime story about the experiences and people who forever change us.

For years, I refused to re-embrace Holden Caulfield, because Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin, declared it inspired him to bloodshed. I’m glad I did, getting the juices circulating for my novel.

Holden, manic-depressed over his brother’s death, cut loose from his prep school, may speak in a stream-of-consciousness babble, but he enunciated an old-soul contempt of Ivy-League elitism that reverberates today.

When Holden declares, “The more expensive a school, the more crooks it has,” it’s a literary MRI on American classism still tearing us asunder.

A book rarely brings me to tears. I didn’t know what to expect when I first picked up this one. The main thing I love about this book is that it takes you right into the head of the main character, who happens to be a very precocious nine-year-old boy. Outwardly, the main character is on an adventure to solve a mystery, but inwardly, he’s on a journey to come to terms with his father’s death.

The protagonist–who, on the surface, is nothing like me–made me feel and address things I had not come to terms with in my life. I felt myself struggling along with the character, and then I ultimately began to heal with him, too. It’s a powerful, tragic, yet absolutely hilarious story that allowed me to forget myself for a while before realizing that I was learning about myself the entire time I read it.

When I was a teenager, I would have felt very much at home at the vintage record store in London where this story is set. (In fact, my hometown is named London, except my London is in Canada.) The quirky clerks who work there adore their boss, Rob Fleming, and spend their days attempting to outwit one another with music trivia and compiling funny and far-reaching Top Five lists.

As Rob negotiates a recent breakup, he must sort through his ex-girlfriend’s belongings and the emotional baggage he’s collected over the years. Though Rob is an adult, this still feels like a coming-of-age tale. I came away from the book resonating with the bittersweet awareness of what it means to become an adult with a list of careers if time and money were no object.