Recommendations
Books Like The Graveyard Book
Best books to read after The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is his Newbery and Carnegie Medal winner — Nobody Owens raised by ghosts. These recommendations continue the Gaiman canon, explore the tradition of dark children's fantasy, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the child protagonist living outside ordinary childhood.
- 1Buy
Coraline
by Neil Gaiman
The closest Gaiman companion — Coraline Jones and the Other Mother, similarly a children's horror novel using a child protagonist to explore genuine fear in a domestic setting, slightly darker and more concentrated than The Graveyard Book.
- 2Buy
American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
The adult Gaiman mythology — Shadow Moon in a war between old gods and new, Gaiman at his most ambitious, the natural next Gaiman novel for young adult readers who have outgrown The Graveyard Book.
- 3Buy
The Jungle Book
by Rudyard Kipling
The direct source — Gaiman wrote The Graveyard Book as a deliberate homage to Kipling's The Jungle Book, replacing the jungle with a graveyard and the animals with ghosts. Reading the original shows how Gaiman transformed and honored his source material.
- 4Buy
Neverwhere
by Neil Gaiman
The adult urban companion — Richard Mayhew in London Below, the same interest in hidden communities and the people who live outside ordinary society that The Graveyard Book explores through a child raised by the dead.
- 5Buy
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by Neil Gaiman
The most personal adult Gaiman — the memory of childhood terror from an adult perspective, a natural progression from The Graveyard Book for readers who want a more emotionally complex Gaiman using the same themes of childhood vulnerability.
- 6Buy
A Monster Calls
by Patrick Ness
The other great dark children's fantasy of the 2010s — Conor O'Malley visited by a monster who tells stories while Conor's mother is dying, as emotionally concentrated and as willing to engage with grief as The Graveyard Book is willing to engage with death.
- 7Buy
The Phantom Tollbooth
by Norton Juster
The American classic of the child protagonist in a magical world — Milo traveling through the Lands Beyond with Tock the watchdog, the quest structure and the adult-invisible magic that makes both Tollbooth and Graveyard Book enduringly beloved.
- 8Buy
His Dark Materials
by Philip Pullman
The most ambitious dark children's fantasy — Lyra Belacqua and the multiverse, Pullman's trilogy engaging with death, consciousness, and the nature of childhood as seriously as Gaiman does, at greater length and greater philosophical ambition.
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