Books like Guus Kuijer

Damian, a motherless boy fascinated by saints, is living in a cardboard hermitage when a bag stuffed with money falls from the sky. His visions are funny, practical, and spiritually serious: saints turn up not as pious ornaments but as eccentric people with awkward histories and opinions.

Like Kuijer, Cottrell-Boyce lets a child’s literal-minded faith expose the absurdities of adult morality. Damian’s goodness is never bland; it causes trouble, raises difficult questions, and clashes wonderfully with his brother’s worldly ingenuity. Winner of the Carnegie Medal, Millions is one of those exceptionally buoyant novels that can make theology, grief, and economic ethics feel like a caper. If you loved Thomas’s mixture of holiness and mischief, Damian is an essential acquaintance.

Soon after moving into a dilapidated house, Michael finds an emaciated, inexplicable creature hiding in the garage. Meanwhile, his baby sister is dangerously ill, and his unconventional new friend Mina introduces him to William Blake, owls, and ways of seeing that school cannot accommodate.

Skellig has the same confidence in children’s ability to live with mystery. It never pins its strange being down as angel, animal, or hallucination; instead, wonder becomes a language for fear, tenderness, and hope. Almond’s spare prose makes every image—dust, wings, bones, moonlight—feel newly discovered. The novel won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award and has become a modern classic because it trusts the imagination without using fantasy to evade pain.

Karl is sick, frightened, and convinced he is no hero. His adored older brother Jonatan comforts him with stories of Nangiyala, a land of campfires, adventures, and life beyond death. Lindgren begins with subjects many children’s books avoid and addresses them with astonishing directness and warmth.

What connects Karl to Thomas is not conventional bravery but bravery discovered while remaining afraid. Both books understand that oppressive power wants obedience to masquerade as virtue—and that stories can give a child the inner freedom to resist. First published in 1973, The Brothers Lionheart remains one of Lindgren’s boldest and most fiercely cherished novels. Its darkness caused controversy; its tenderness and conviction have kept generations of readers devoted to it.