Here are 76 books that The Road to Roswell fans have personally recommended if you like
The Road to Roswell.
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This graphic memoir takes a kid’s-eye view of sibling tussles, screw-ups, a family background of toil and loss, the pull of two identities, and 1970s pop culture. Pedro is dismayed to learn that his family will drive from California to Jalisco to persuade his long-widowed grandfather to move into their very crowded house. Martín mixes graphic styles and pops in irreverent explainers on subjects like Mexican food, music, and toys. Being shaken down by border guards, hanging out with cousins, reburying Abuelita, and dealing with an undead deer in a Winnebago, Pedro connects deeply with what his parents and grandfather have endured. In between poignant parts, I laughed myself silly.
An unforgettable graphic memoir about a Mexican American boy's family and their adventure-filled road trip to bring their abuelito back from Mexico to live with them that National Book Award Finalist Victoria Jamieson calls "one of those books that kids will pass to their friends as soon as they have finished it."
Pedro Martin has grown up hearing stories about his abuelito-his legendary crime-fighting, grandfather who was once a part of the Mexican Revolution! But that doesn't mean Pedro is excited at the news that Abuelito is coming to live with their family. After all, Pedro has 8 brothers and…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I loved this classic when I was a kid, so I had to share it with my granddaughter. She loved it, too. Elmer Elevator is a startlingly independent kid who listens to an alley cat. He learns of a baby dragon who is held captive by the animals of Wild Island. The cat knows exactly how Elmer should stow away to get to the island, and how to thwart the captors: hair ribbons, lollipops, rubber bands, magnifying glasses. I like that it’s both preposterous, and a triumph of kindness and ingenuity in the face of adversity. I adore the illustrations by the author’s stepmother. Two sequels feature anxious canaries, the dragon’s gorgeous family, and men who want to put them in zoos.
When Elmer Elevator tells a stray cat about his dream of being able to fly, he learns of a captive dragon on Wild Island. The dragon has been forced by the jungle residents to serve as their shuttle across a wide river — and anyone who rescues the dragon from its cruel captors might be entitled to a free ride. Elmer needs no further encouragement to stow away aboard a ship to the island, where he matches wits with hungry tigers, an irate gorilla, cranky crocodiles, and other moody creatures. A charmingly illustrated Newbery Honor Book, this comic adventure story…
I’ve spent my career with my students exploring microbes in all kinds of worlds, from cosmetics on our skin to the glaciers of Antarctica. In Antarctica, I discovered bizarre bacteria that form giant red blobs; we call them the “red nose” life form. In our lab at Kenyon College, we isolated new microbes from a student’s beauty blenders. These experiences, and those of the books I list here, inspire the microbial adventures of my science fiction. If microbes could talk, how would they deal with us? Find out in my novel, Brain Plague. And I hope you enjoy all the microbial tales on this list!
This is the best novel I’ve read about bubonic plague.
Student historian Kivrin travels back in time to England of the Middle Ages—unknowingly at the start of the Black Death. The cause of Black Death was the plague bacteria, unknown to people of that time.
What makes the book memorable is its depiction of everyday life, where children who get lost in the forest must find their way home by the tolling of the village church bell. Ultimately, the bell tolls for all the plague’s victims.
The vivid characterization makes me experience people of a time so distant their minds feel alien to us, yet still deeply human.
"Ambitious, finely detailed and compulsively readable" - Locus
"It is a book that feels fundamentally true; it is a book to live in" - Washington Post
For Kivrin Engle, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing a bullet-proof backstory. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I’ve been a science fiction fan for as long as I can remember. As someone who never quite felt like I fit in, these stories became a kind of refuge and revelation for me. They taught me that being on the outside looking in can be its own kind of superpower—the ability to see the world differently, to question it, and to imagine something better. I’m drawn to characters who are flawed, searching, and human, because they remind me that courage and belonging are choices we make, not gifts we’re given. That’s the heart of every story I love and the kind I try to write.
I’d read the reviews, so I was prepared for a great book. I wasn’t prepared to be thrown out of my comfort zone—but in the best possible way.
Mandel made me sit with what it really means to lose everything and still create something beautiful. It’s not about saving the world; it’s about creating a new dream and making it your home. I loved how it celebrates art, memory, and the strange persistence of humanity even when everything else is gone.
This book reminded me that hope is often raw, painful, and ultimately necessary.
'Best novel. The big one . . . stands above all the others' - George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones
Now an HBO Max original TV series
The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction National Book Awards Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.
One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in…
Where many people would see an empty package of Oreos, I see the remains of a lost civilization, an artifact crafted galaxies away by beings who flit in and out of existence in order to build rainbows for lonely children and who have left the empty bag, filled with dog poop, flaming on someone’s front step and are laughing uncontrollably as the person stomps on it to put it out. I want to find authors who see more than the bag of Oreos. I want them to be wildly imaginative and to paint what they see with cleverness and humor. I try to do the same.
Kage Baker is an Isaac Asimov compared to Terry Pratchett’s Marx Brothers. In the Garden of Iden is more sci-fi than fantasy, including time travel, cybernetics, and nanotechnologies. And love and loss. This book is part of a series of novels that Baker crafted about time-travelling enhanced humans who carry out critical tasks throughout history.
What I loved most about this book is how very human her main characters are. Like Pratchett and Bill Shakespeare, Baker is a master at showing us human nature. Her comedy is high comedy. I laugh because I recognize myself in her characters. Baker has a fine eye for the subtle and the absurd. And yet unlike many humorous authors, the tragedies of the heart are always at the core of her stories.
This is the first novel in what has become one of the most popular series in contemporary Science Fiction, now back in print from Tor. In the twenty-fourth century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life (for profit of course). It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company. One of these is Mendoza the botanist, who is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden. Her quest is jeopardized by Nicholas Harpole, who stirs unfamiliar emotions within her about her…
Stephen King is such an amazing writer, but if, like me, you don't read horror, your selection is limited. This incredibly inventive, incredibly researched, incredibly compelling book was one I couldn't stop talking about. My book club loved it too! And the ending--I couldn't guess how he was going to land that plane, but he did. Amazing.
Now a major TV series from JJ Abrams and Stephen King, starring James Franco (Hulu US, Fox UK and Europe, Stan Australia, SKY New Zealand).
WHAT IF you could go back in time and change the course of history? WHAT IF the watershed moment you could change was the JFK assassination? 11.22.63, the date that Kennedy was shot - unless . . .
King takes his protagonist Jake Epping, a high school English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, 2011, on a fascinating journey back to 1958 - from a world of mobile phones and iPods to a new world of…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
To be honest, and this will sound strange, but suspense is the air I breathe. I’m a pretty calm, boring human being, and the only thing that gets my heart pumping are films, TV, books, and video games in this genre. Suspense and thrillers are genres that make up ninety percent of the entertainment that I consume, and one hundred percent of the entertainment that I write.
I can only speak from my experience and, wow, this book hooked me right at the end of that first chapter, “but it’s happening faster.” Now to go into what that means, I will remain spoiler-free, but my jaw dropped. And the story only ramped up after that.
I love stories where the protagonist finds themselves in genuine peril, and Claire puts Harry August in a particular type of peril that truly had me terrified for his well-being in every chapter. The best type of suspense escalates in every chapter and it escalates here in this book in the best possible ways.
'ONE OF THE FICTION HIGHLIGHTS OF THE DECADE' Judy Finnigan, Richard and Judy Book Club
Featured in the Richard and Judy Book Club, the BBC Radio 2 Book Club and the Waterstones Book Club Winner of the John W. Campbell Award Shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award
SOME STORIES CANNOT BE TOLD IN JUST ONE LIFETIME
No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before.
For someone who loves sci fi *and* historical fiction, this book was a perfect merge of the two, with the added bonus of stylistic homage to Jerome K. Jerome if you like that sort of thing (and I very much do). It is gently witty and full of personality; the characters are well filled out, and the frequent oscillations of the plot from the sublime to the absurd are delightful.
Ned Henry is a time-travelling historian who specialises in the mid-20th century - currently engaged in researching the bombed-out Coventry Cathedral. He's also made so many drops into the past that he's suffering from a dangerously advanced case of 'time-lag'.
Unfortunately for Ned, an emergency dash to Victorian England is required and he's the only available historian. But Ned's time-lag is so bad that he's not sure what the errand is - which is bad news since, if he fails, history could unravel around him...
I’ve always been nostalgic. I long for a connection with times and places I’ve never experienced, and I think my fascination with ghosts and the uncanny is connected to that. As a child, I fell in love with ancient Egypt, with its famously complex religious traditions concerning death and the afterlife. I earned a PhD in Egyptology and spent a lifetime crafting stories about the past, often with a speculative or supernatural twist. For me, ghosts and history are a natural combination.
I read this book not long after reading Spook, and it scratched many of the same philosophical itches for me. I love its dreamlike quality and haunting sense of nostalgia. As far as I know, it's also unlike any other work of fiction in its approach to the question of life after death.
It blends two seemingly unrelated topics—historical disasters (e.g., the Hartford circus fire, the sinking of the Titanic)—and the science of near-death experiences in a striking, unique way. Although it is, in many ways, a deeply sad story, it ultimately feels hopeful. This is one of those novels that left a lasting impact on my psyche.
One of those rare, unforgettable novels that are as chilling as they are insightful, as thought-provoking as they are terrifying, award-winning author Connie Willis's Passage is an astonishing blend of relentless suspense and cutting-edge science unlike anything you've ever read before.
It is the electrifying story of a psychologist who has devoted her life to tracking death. But when she volunteers for a research project that simulates the near-death experience, she will either solve life's greatest mystery -- or fall victim to its greatest terror.
At Mercy General Hospital, Dr. Joanna Lander will soon be paged -- not to save…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’ve loved both history and fantasy since I was a child. The first book I can remember reading at all was The Hobbit. The first historical novel I fell in love with was The Killer Angels. I visited the battlefield of Gettysburg with my family, and currently teach the movie every year to my high school film class. (I’ve never visited Middle Earth, but plan to visit New Zealand as soon as possible). I’ve been reading both genres ever since—and quite by accident my first novel contains a mix of both genres.
This one isn’t fantasy at all. In fact, it’s probably the most accurate fictional retelling of the battle of Gettysburg out there. But I love it so much I had to list it here.
Furthermore, the characters involved—such as Lee, Longstreet, and Chamberlain—are deeply spiritual men, meaning that many pages meditate on the meaning of all this blood and loss. These meditations evoke a sense fantasy often can: that the visible world contains a mystery deeper than our limited minds can grasp.
Yet the text remains deeply human. The Civil War pits brother against brother, friend against friend. In it, there is a great speech by Col. Chamberlain addressing his men which captures a theme of the book.
“This is a different kind of army,” he says. “If you look back through history you will see men fighting for pay, for women, for some other kind of loot. They fight…
“My favorite historical novel . . . a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant.”—James M. McPherson
In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history, two armies fought for two conflicting dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty…
