Books like True Grit — picked by fans

Farley Mowat once declared: “I never let facts get in the way of a good story.” I have read Never Cry Wolf as fiction many times, even though its author pretended it was factual. As a writer interested in Canada’s north, Mowat’s universe is an obvious choice for me. The inclusion of Inuit characters is also quite appealing. In this book, a naturalist studies Arctic wolves in a makeshift camp in northern Manitoba and deals with the ridiculous expectations of the bureaucrats who sent him out there to fend for himself. He discovers that contrary to public opinion, wolves are not responsible for the decimation of caribou herds, humans are. Some elements are exaggerated for comic effect, and as one of Canada’s best storytellers, Mowat delivers on laughs. 

I was immediately drawn to the suspense of this book. The novel begins at the Berlin Wall, where British intelligence agent Alec Leamas helplessly watches as East German guards murder his colleague.

As I followed the elaborate British plan to get revenge on an East German official, I had the nagging feeling that I was missing something. When I finally got to the end, I realized that I had been duped—much like many of the characters in the novel. 

I love this book because of the strange and wonderful 10-year-old female protagonist, a white girl who is “rescued” from Kiowa captivity on the Texas frontier in 1870, a time of Indian raids and pervasive anarchy.

This girl was assimilated into her Indian family and considers her “rescue” a kidnapping; she remembers almost nothing of her family of origin. She is icy-veined, fearless, and creatively violent. The scene where she improvises ammunition from hundreds of dimes (yes, coins) blew my mind.

From this book, I learned about how whites (especially children) who were captured by Indians quickly abandoned their former lives and usually did not want to return if given the opportunity. The language is spare, tough, and beautiful. I did not want this book to end.

I love a fantastic novel about strong young women and female friendship, particularly when the characters are facing dire situations together, and Code Name Verity is exactly this kind of book.

Set during World War II, the story is action-packed, populated by female pilots and female spies, members of the Gestapo and the French Resistance.

There is a hint of boy-girl romance here, but as the novel proves, war-torn love is not limited to that particular kind of passion. Sometimes the love is platonic in nature, the kind of love shared between best friends. 

I thought it was great to have Circe herself narrate her love affair with Odysseus.

The first half of the novel interestingly shares her tribulations growing up as a child in a family of gods. I found that this establishes a theme of immortality vs. mortality that the book explores in profound ways. Especially fascinating was Circe’s personal story of her love affair with Odysseus.

I was surprised and delighted that Miller included the resulting child, Telegonus, who is not in Homer but is in ancient myth. Even more surprising to me was Circe falling in love with Telemachus, Odysseus’ son by Penelope (also not in Homer!). This relationship allows the novel to end on a positive note as Circe learns to live like a mortal in her new life with Telemachus.

O'Connor was an uncomfortable contradiction: she isolated herself as much as possible from the world she so beautifully described, writing about ordinary Southern lives with real human feeling and understanding - while holding personal views that were deeply ugly.

I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I will say is that her stories have a cast of people who seem strange until you recognise them, and then they are suddenly far too familiar. She wrote that anything out of the South would be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it actually was grotesque, in which case it would be called realistic.

A number of my characters owe their existence to her assortment of murderers, false prophets, hypocrites, malevolent strangers, and good old Southern weirdos.

This is my book's protagonist's favorite book.

The Bundren family sets out across Mississippi to honor their dying matriarch's wish to be buried in her hometown, and nearly everything that can go wrong does. The ending is uneasy rather than truly resolved, and the landscape itself is a main character: it floods and burns and resists the Bundrens throughout.

Faulkner understood something crucial about the South, and Southerners by extension: it will not cooperate, and the people who love it regardless are complicated and oftentimes their own worst enemies.

I have been pressing this book into people’s hands since I studied it under the direction of Faulkner scholar Charles Chappell, and I aimed for my own book to sit in the same uneasy space.

Forget the show, read the books.

This fantasy series reads like a medieval history lesson come to life. They live in a world where power is dispensed with decrees, armies, and combat. But the real battles are fought among the kingdoms with verbal confrontations.

Tyrion is the jewel of the series as the despised dwarf of one of the great noble houses who must use his wit and words as both weapons and armor to overcome his lack of stature. He doesn't compete where he is weak, but rather redefines the game where his opponent's strength is irrelevant.

"I have to be careful. Everything I say is a lie."

Mary "Jacky" Faber, an orphaned street kid in early 19th century London, begins her adventures across the seven seas by dressing up as a ship's boy. Throughout the series she builds up quite the amazing resume that would put a Navy Seal to shame. And of course, there is a bit of romance here and there but the focus lies on Jacky sailing the world and kicking butt!

Three worlds in one book! There’s the not-so-important world of the Ancelstierre, roughly Edwardian or early-20th-Century-ish, and there’s the Old Kingdom, basically medieval, where Charter Magic wars with Free Magic (and how well Nix thinks through the workings of his forms of magic).

But the third world is the one that takes the cake! An underworld of the dead, with its different levels, gates, and sills. Sabriel discovers her own special inheritance and powers—OK, that’s standard fantasy fare, except that Sabriel’s powers are those of an abhorsen. It’s the Abhorsen’s role to make sure that the dead stay dead, and journey on down into the deeper levels of death. Of course, the dead who keep coming back are the ones who drive the narrative!