Hidden gems: 12 great books you may have missed
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There are books everybody seems to have read, or at least everybody seems to be recommending. This isn’t that list.
In fact, there’s no genre tying these books together, no particular mood, and no single type of reader we had in mind. Unless “someone who likes really good books” counts.
Some of these books were acclaimed when they first came out but have since slipped out of the conversation. Some are less obvious titles from authors whose names you probably know. Others simply never became the books everyone was talking about.
What they have in common is that they’re worth discovering—or rediscovering. So, if your TBR could use a few books that don’t show up on every other list, start here.
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
For readers who like: atmospheric historical fiction, fairy tales, unforgettable settings
In 1920s Alaska, Jack and Mabel are struggling with both the brutal realities of homesteading and the loneliness of a childless marriage. One winter night, they build a child out of snow. The next morning, the snow child is gone—and a mysterious little girl begins appearing in the woods.
Eowyn Ivey’s debut was a Pulitzer Prize finalist when it was published in 2012, but it’s exactly the kind of wonderful older novel that can gradually disappear beneath newer releases. Part historical fiction and part fairy tale, The Snow Child is strange, beautiful, and deeply rooted in its wild Alaskan setting.
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The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
For readers who like: smart romantic comedies, quirky characters, books that are actually funny
Genetics professor Don Tillman has decided it’s time to find a wife. Naturally, he approaches the problem by creating a highly detailed questionnaire designed to eliminate unsuitable candidates.
Then he meets Rosie, who fails the questionnaire spectacularly.
The Rosie Project was a big hit when it arrived in 2013, so we can’t exactly claim to have unearthed an unknown treasure. But more than a decade later, it’s easy to miss if you weren’t reading it along with everyone else the first time around. It’s fast, funny, romantic, and a welcome reminder that a great book doesn’t have to devastate you.
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If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
For readers who like: complicated female friendships, contemporary international fiction, stories about ambition and class
Set in contemporary Seoul, If I Had Your Face follows four young women living in the same apartment building as they contend with beauty standards, money, work, relationships, and the expectations surrounding them.
Frances Cha’s 2020 debut earned plenty of praise, but it never became one of those novels that seems to follow you from recommendation list to recommendation list. That makes it particularly worth putting back on the radar. The four intertwined perspectives create a fascinating portrait of both friendship and the pressures facing women in a world where appearance and status can shape nearly everything.
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Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger
For readers who like: coming-of-age stories, literary mysteries, small towns with secrets
Minnesota, 1961. Thirteen-year-old Frank Drum is enjoying what should be an ordinary summer when a series of deaths changes his family and his town forever.
William Kent Krueger is best known for his long-running Cork O’Connor mystery series, but Ordinary Grace is a standalone novel—and a particularly good reason to venture beyond the books for which an author is best known. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, among other honors, yet it’s easy to overlook now. Come for the mystery; stay for a thoughtful story about family, faith, loss, and the moment childhood begins to give way to something more complicated.
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The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley
For readers who like: found family, interconnected stories, warm books about ordinary people
What would happen if you told the truth about your life in a notebook and left it somewhere for a stranger to find?
That’s the idea behind The Authenticity Project, which begins when a lonely artist writes honestly about himself in a green notebook and leaves it in a café. The people who find it add their own stories, and gradually a group of strangers becomes connected in ways none of them expected.
Published in 2020, this is one of the newer books on our list, but it’s an easy one to have missed amid a crowded few years of publishing. Warm, funny, and hopeful, it’s a particularly good pick when you want a book that believes people can still surprise one another in good ways.
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State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
For readers who like: literary adventure, remote settings, ethical dilemmas, books that take you somewhere
Mention Ann Patchett, and you’re likely to hear about Bel Canto, The Dutch House, or Tom Lake. But her 2011 novel State of Wonder deserves a place in that conversation too.
When pharmaceutical researcher Marina Singh is sent into the Amazon to investigate the death of a colleague, she must track down a brilliant and elusive scientist who is conducting potentially groundbreaking research deep in the rainforest. What follows is part literary novel, part mystery, and part jungle adventure, with plenty of complicated questions underneath it all. If you know Patchett but somehow skipped this one, consider this your reminder to go back.
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The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz
For readers who like: dysfunctional families, mysteries with a sense of humor, fast and clever reads
Imagine growing up in a family of private investigators where surveillance is basically a love language.
That’s life for Isabel “Izzy” Spellman, a 28-year-old investigator working for the family business alongside parents and siblings who have very few qualms about investigating one another. The Spellman Files kicked off a series in 2007, blending mystery with genuinely funny family dysfunction.
It’s the kind of older series opener that can easily get buried beneath years of newer mysteries and thrillers, which is a shame, because sometimes what your TBR really needs is a smart, funny book that knows exactly how much fun its premise can be.
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When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
For readers who like: magical realism, unconventional love stories, lush and atmospheric writing
In Trinidad, Darwin has recently arrived in the city of Port Angeles to work as a gravedigger. Yejide has inherited a very different relationship with death through the women in her family. Their paths cross in a story that brings together love, loss, family and the boundary between the living and the dead.
Published in 2022, When We Were Birds is one of the more recent hidden gems on this list. It’s a love story, but not a conventional one; magical, but firmly rooted in a vividly rendered place. If your reading has been feeling a little too predictable lately, this may be exactly the kind of book to shake it up.
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The Day the World Came to Town by Jim DeFede
For readers who like: remarkable true stories, ordinary people doing extraordinary things, nonfiction that reads like a novel
When U.S. airspace closed on September 11, 2001, 38 commercial flights carrying thousands of passengers were diverted to the tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland.
What happened next became the basis for the hit musical Come From Away, but the nonfiction book behind the story deserves attention of its own. Jim DeFede chronicles how residents opened their homes, schools, and community to strangers suddenly stranded far from where they were supposed to be.
The Day the World Came to Town is an account of an extraordinary moment in history, but its real subject is human generosity. Even if you think you know the story, the individual stories behind it are worth knowing too.
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The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler
For readers who like: books about books, family mysteries, old secrets, a little bit of magic
Simon Watson is a librarian living alone in his crumbling family home when a mysterious antique book arrives in the mail. Its records reveal something unsettling: generations of women in Simon’s family—traveling carnival performers who could hold their breath underwater for impossible lengths of time—have died by drowning on the same date.
And that date is approaching.
The Book of Speculation came out in 2015 and has the sort of premise that makes us wonder why it isn’t still turning up everywhere. Part family mystery, part bookish treasure hunt, part magical tale, it’s one for anyone who likes discovering a story that’s just a little difficult to categorize.
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The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat by Edward Kelsey Moore
For readers who like: lifelong friendships, small-town stories, humor mixed with heart
Odette, Clarice and Barbara Jean have been best friends since high school, when they earned the nickname “the Supremes.” For decades, they’ve gathered at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat in their Indiana town, seeing one another through marriages, children, heartbreak, illness, and everything else life has thrown at them.
Published in 2013, Edward Kelsey Moore’s debut is exactly the kind of book this list was made for: well received when it appeared, loved by many of the people who found it, and yet hardly a title you see recommended everywhere today.
It’s funny, warm, and deeply interested in friendship that lasts long enough to know every version of you.
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Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
For readers who like: unforgettable coming-of-age stories, complicated families, books that stay with you
Fourteen-year-old June Elbus has lost the person who understood her best: her uncle Finn, a renowned artist who dies of AIDS in 1987. Then, after his funeral, June receives a package from someone she didn’t know existed—and begins an unexpected friendship that forces her to reconsider what she thought she knew about Finn, her family and grief.
Tell the Wolves I’m Home was published in 2012 and earned considerable praise, but time has pushed it farther from the book-discussion spotlight. It’s tender, complicated, and emotionally powerful without reducing its characters to their losses.
And maybe that’s the best reason to end our list here. Hidden gems don’t have to be books no one has heard of. Sometimes they’re simply really good books waiting for someone to put them in front of you again.
Find it: Bookshop.org (indie bookstores) | Amazon(paid links)
Your TBR probably didn’t need 12 more books. Ours didn’t either. But that’s the trouble with hidden gems: once you find a really good one, it’s awfully hard to leave it behind. Here’s to finding something you might have missed.
In the mood to keep adding to your TBR? Try our 15 books to snap out of a reading rut that aren’t the usual recommendations, or browse our Read Before Watching picks for books worth getting to before they hit your screen.