If you loved Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery…

…try This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

This story of the vivacious red-haired orphan who arrives on the unsuspecting Marilla Cuthbert’s doorstep is delightfully warm and welcoming – a coming-of-age narrative that features a loyal best friend and a dash of romance. Ann Patchett’s essays also feature a loyal best friend (see the essay, ‘“The Love Between the Two Women is Not Normal”’) and dash of romance (see the titular essay), but it’s the essay collection’s ‘tenderness of heart’ that will most resound with fans of Anne.

If you loved Black Beauty by Anna Sewell…

…try Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears

If you cried along with Anna Sewell’s heartbreaking tale of Black Beauty, chances are you’ll also cry along with this heartbreaking novel by Gillian Mears. Set around the country show high-jumping circuit that prevailed in rural New South Wales prior to the Second World War, here is a love story of impossible beauty and sadness. While Foal’s Bread isn’t narrated from the perspectives of the horses, these animals are integral to the story and Mears demonstrates an astounding depth of empathy for them.

If you loved Picnic At Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay…

…try The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

The delicious mystery of Picnic At Hanging Rock (a class of young women from an exclusive private school go on an excursion to the isolated Hanging Rock, deep in the Australian bush, and only one returns) is increased tenfold in Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers in which thousands of citizens disappear in an instant. Ooooh, mystery…

If you loved Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White…

…try Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey

Aside from the obvious (both these books are from the perspective of animals), the common thread that runs through E.B. White’s beautiful tale of a spider who saved the life of a pig and Ceridwen Dovey’s stories of animals dying during human conflict is the significance of empathy, and the redemptive power of writing.

If you loved Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park…

…try Cross Stitch by Diana Gabaldon

Some readers only have to see the word 'time-slip’ and they’re sold. Playing Beatie Bow is an Australian classic, written in 1980 with a ‘slip’ back to 1873 and set around the Rocks district. For many young readers it would have been their first fictional romance and they’d have ached alongside 14-year-old Abigail Kirk as she falls in love but has to accept that Judah can never be hers because he’s promised to someone else. In Cross Stitch (the first in the Outlander series), the love triangle gets next level as Claire Randall slips from 1945, where she’s on honeymoon with her husband in Scotland, to 1743, where she falls for a passionate Scots warrior.

If you loved Winnie-the-pooh by A.A. Milne…

…try The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Cast your minds back to ‘Chapter Three: In which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting And Nearly Catch A Woozle’. Pooh is the Sherlock, ‘tracking something’ but remaining covert about the operation, and Piglet is a natural Watson, never deterred from asking questions no matter how obscure Pooh’s answers are.

“Now, look there.” He pointed to the ground in front of him. “What do you see there?”
“Tracks,” said Piglet. “Paw-marks.” He gave a little squeak of excitement. “Oh, Pooh! Do you think it’s a – a – a Woozle?”
“It may be,” said Pooh. “Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. You never can tell with paw-marks.”

Two super-sleuth teams, two beautiful bromances.

If you loved The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr…

…try The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane

In Judith Kerr’s 1968 picture book, The Tiger Who Came To Tea, there is a sense of danger, and delight in that danger, alongside a quite unusual sense of the unresolved or ambiguous. And these are some of the qualities that have also drawn readers into The Night Guest, which cleverly employs an intruding tiger in the life of a vulnerable older woman. Above all, the use of a tiger in both books is wonderfully restrained.

If you loved A Kestrel For A Knave by Barry Hines…

…try H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Young Billy has a rough time of things both at home and at school in the 1968 novel A Kestrel For A Knave (later made into a film called Kes), set in a mining town, but manages to find a small pocket of joy when he discovers a passion for a kestrel hawk. Like several of the great children’s classics, this is a story about hope despite the heart-breaking death within it (yes, the hawk). In H is for Hawk, the author channels her grief over her father’s death into her passion for training a goshawk.