Books like The Strange Library
A boy who stops at the library after school to borrow books on Ottoman tax collection is led to a reading room in the basement, where an old man locks him in and orders him to memorise them.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Strange Library
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
As a teenager, a man was told by the girl he loved about a town surrounded by high walls, and decades later, after she vanished, he leaves Tokyo to run a small library in the mountains, where the walled town and the real world begin to blur.
Kafka on the Shore
A fifteen-year-old runaway and a strange old man live parallel quests that converge at the edge of consciousness, guided by talking cats and phantom soldiers.
The Blind Owl
An opium-addicted painter of pen-case lids, alone in his room, writes for his shadow about a woman he glimpsed through a hole in the wall, and what followed.
White Cat, Black Dog
Seven fairy tales retold in Link's sideways style, starting with a rich old man, his three sons and a cannabis farm in the Vermont hills run by cats.
Bliss Montage
Eight surreal stories about women in flight from the past: one lives in a house with her husband and all of her ex-boyfriends, another takes a drug that makes her disappear.
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Bender's first collection of short, strange fables, among them a man whose lover is going through reverse evolution and a girl with a hand made of fire.
number9dream
Eiji Miyake, a young man from a small island, comes to Tokyo to find the father he has never met, and his search slides between reality, daydreams and video games.
In Watermelon Sugar
In a small commune called iDEATH, where everything is built from watermelon sugar and the sun shines a different colour each day, a nameless narrator writes about his calm life and the trouble at the Forgotten Works.
Uzumaki
In the small coastal town of Kurouzu-cho, teenager Kirie Goshima watches her neighbours become obsessed with spirals, starting with her boyfriend's father, as the pattern takes hold of the town in ever stranger and more horrible ways.
Chess Story
On a ship to Buenos Aires, a reclusive Austrian lawyer who survived Nazi solitary confinement with a stolen book of chess problems takes on the reigning world champion.
The Box Man
A nameless man cuts a window in a cardboard box, puts it over his head and begins to live inside it, writing the notebook the reader holds.
Through the Woods
Five gothic, fairy-tale horror stories in comics form, a new bride in a house with a secret, sisters waiting for a father who does not come home, drawn in Carroll's luminous, blood-red palette.