Books like

Books like The Muse

12 books with a reading profile close to The Muse by Jessie Burton. Balanced in tone; a moderate read.

  1. 1 I Have Some Questions for You

    I Have Some Questions for You

    by Rebecca Makkai

    narrative, mystery

    Bodie Kane, a successful film scholar and podcaster, returns to Granby School, the New Hampshire boarding school where she spent four uncomfortable years.

  2. 2 The Book of Speculation

    The Book of Speculation

    by Erika Swyler

    narrative, mystery

    Simon Watson, a young librarian in a small New York town, receives a package from an antiquarian bookseller: a fragile, water-damaged ledger from the 1700s, which appears to be a record kept by a traveling circus.

  3. 3 The Lie Tree

    The Lie Tree

    by Frances Hardinge

    narrative, mystery

    Faith Sunderly is a fourteen-year-old girl in Victorian England whose family moves to a small island after a scandal involving her father, Reverend Sunderly, a respected naturalist who is suspected of fraud.

  4. 4 Fingersmith

    Fingersmith

    by Sarah Waters

    narrative, mystery

    Set in the smog-laden streets of Victorian London, the story follows Sue Trinder, an orphan raised among a family of petty thieves and fences.

  5. 5 Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

    Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

    by Tom Franklin

    narrative, mystery

    In a small Mississippi town, two boys grew up on opposite sides of a divide: Larry Ott, a white loner whose father owned a garage, and Silas Jones, a Black boy who became friends with him.

  6. 6 Ordinary Grace

    Ordinary Grace

    by William Kent Krueger

    narrative, mystery

    In 1961, thirteen-year-old Frank Drum lives in New Bremen, Minnesota, where his father serves as a Methodist minister.

  7. 7 The Secret Keeper

    The Secret Keeper

    by Kate Morton

    narrative, mystery

    During a 1961 summer party, teenager Laurel Nicolson witnesses her mother, Dorothy, kill a stranger with a paring knife.

  8. 8 Happiness Falls

    Happiness Falls

    by Angie Kim

    narrative, mystery

    When Mia Parkson’s father disappears during a morning hike in Virginia, the only witness is her younger brother, Eugene, who has autism and a rare genetic condition called Angelman syndrome.

  9. 9 Disappearing Earth

    Disappearing Earth

    by Julia Phillips

    narrative, mystery

    The story begins on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia with the abduction of two young sisters, Sophia and Alyona Golosovskaya, by a stranger in a tan sedan.

  10. 10 Motherless Brooklyn

    Motherless Brooklyn

    by Jonathan Lethem

    narrative, mystery

    Lionel Essrog has Tourette's syndrome, which makes him blurt, count and tap compulsively.

  11. 11 Winter's Bone

    Winter's Bone

    by Daniel Woodrell

    narrative, mystery

    Ree Dolly is a sixteen-year-old girl living in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, taking care of her two younger brothers and her mentally ill mother.

  12. 12 The Wonder

    The Wonder

    by Emma Donoghue

    narrative, mystery

    In the humid summer of 1859, English nurse Lib Wright arrives in a rural Irish village to oversee an eleven-year-old girl named Anna O'Donnell.

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