100 books like Out Stealing Horses

Perhaps one of the most classic Arctic memoirs, this book is Ritter’s account of the year she spent in the remote Arctic wilderness of Spitsbergen in the 1930s. 

The nature writing is exquisite, and you can’t help but be transported to the time in place in which she lived, replete with polar bears and long, cold, (and dark) Arctic nights. 

When my book club read this, we were universally blown away by Augusten Burroughs’ humor. Mining his tumultuous childhood, Burroughs paints a vivid and unforgettable picture of life with the ultimate dysfunctional family.

I went on to read the author’s other memoirs, and while I always enjoy his one-of-a-kind spin on the world, this remains my favorite of his works.

I’ve just reread the opening of Our Endless Numbered Days and whoosh – I’m back in the story, with so many questions, prime among them why the narrator’s father – the liar, the north London survivalist – is removed from all photographs but this last, hidden one that she cuts and conceals under her breast.

Fuller’s story is a page-turner in all the best ways, going back in time to follow nine-year-old Peggy and her father as they run from their family home to a remote cabin in a European forest and a life of barely surviving despite all his plans.

Why? Who is the strange man on the mountain? And how does she get back home? Maybe that isolated mountain hut wasn’t so idyllic after all?

Smith is a master at depicting multi-racial families (something she knows all about, as she grew up in one).

Her narratives take up the complex nature of the relationships between parents, children, and siblings, while delving into issues of race, class, politics, infidelity, and self-knowledge. Smith is expert with her use of voice, as she composes character through idiosyncratic styles of language and expression.

Life in this novel is colorful and messy, as it cleverly investigates the impossibility of really knowing those closest to you.

I interviewed Doris Lessing about her memoir Alfred & Emily at her home in London in 2008. She was 88 years old, but was still trying to break free of the “monstrous legacy” of World War II, which had left her father, Alfred, broken and her mother, Emily, “demented.”

Growing up in colonial Rhodesia, she was more comfortable in the bush with wild snakes than she was at home with her troubled parents. Yet she acknowledges what they could have been had history not been so cruel. I’ve tried to apply that same grace to my parents, who met during the Vietnam War and later struggled to care for my severely disabled brother.

Acknowledging my parents’ war wounds, as Lessing did with hers, helped pave the way for forgiveness.

Nigel Slater was already one of the U.K.’s most celebrated chefs when he released his memoir Toast in 2003.

When I read it more than a decade later, it was like diving into a prequel to his many cookbooks, columns, and TV shows that I’d followed for years. The book is hilarious and heartbreaking. It beautifully illustrates how interests and passions can save people from unhappy childhoods and toxic people, like his coarse stepmother and distant father, both of whom are vividly drawn.

As a memoirist, I took inspiration from his narrative arch and how he persevered. The darkness and isolation of my own childhood is what prepared me to embrace the glitz and glamour of Eurovision. 

Neil Ansell is such an honest writer. I came to this book because I loved his other writing about nature and followed him back through time to the five years he spent living alone up a Welsh mountain, seeing no one for weeks on end, exploring and working in the woods and hills around him.

It’s a rich and deep description of place, but more than that, it’s a gradual unfurling of Ansell’s sense of self. In a later book, he writes of that time of prolonged solitude, ‘You slough off the skin of self, all self-awareness, and are left with pure sensation. Nothing has a name; it is only itself.’

Ansell is a slow-burning writer who I trust completely to take me, however slowly, to a new understanding.

This is one of the most beautiful novels of solitude I’ve ever read.

Conti immerses us in the strange, shifting world of the Paraná Delta in Argentina where Boga lives on a sandbank until the old man he used to fish with dies. Boga finally has the solitude he has craved for so long and sets off in his small boat.

This wondrous book carries us with Boga floating with the currents and tides, following fish, drifting. Though Boga’s chosen life feels aimless, we’re swept with him in the world of the delta and its people, where every storm, every encounter builds towards an unforgettable climax. 

I read it four years ago, and I’m still there in the boat with Boga: it’s a quiet masterpiece.

In this diagnosis story, author Kamins chooses to use a fictional illness—lepidopsy—to perfectly emulate the otherworldly confusion and uncertainty of being diagnosed with a disease you have no context for. Suddenly, everything changes for Anna. Nothing makes sense. It’s disorienting, uncomfortable, and terrifying. I loved how the book shows the character figuring out how to navigate this new life step by step by misstep. Despite the fictional illness, Anna’s journey feels incredibly real.

Written by Nobel Prize winning, libertarian communist (don’t worry about it, it’s a thing) author Jose Saramago, All the Names is a weird and joyful exploration of the grind of bureaucracy and the power of information to control lives. Unlike Bear, this is not an easy read. Saramago’s signature style features long, convoluted sentences, which confuse and disorient – much like plunging into complex archival research. The story focuses on Senhor José, a poorly socialised records clerk, trudging through his days in a faceless, nonsensical records centre. One day he connects with a particular file and the realisation that the pieces of paper he manages represent whole beautiful lives sends him on a journey that requires breathtaking bravery and the formation of new, if eccentric, friendships. A life-affirming read.