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The Lure of the Strange: 10 Liminal Books That Feel Like a Dream
Step into stories that defy logic, unravel time, and drift between worlds. These are the books that live in the spaces in between—liminal, lyrical, and quietly surreal.
If you've ever finished a novel feeling like you'd woken from a dream you couldn't quite explain, this list is for you. The ten books below are defined not by explosive plots or heart-racing action but by atmosphere, language, and the way they tilt reality just enough to make the ordinary feel uncanny. In an age of algorithm-driven recommendations pushing the loudest, fastest narratives, these quieter works often go overlooked—yet they offer some of literature's most profound and lingering experiences.
From submerged identities to memory fogs and fluid time, each entry here walks the hazy line between what is and what might be. They resist easy categorization, slipping between genres like ghosts through walls. Some might call them magical realism or literary fantasy, others psychological fiction or philosophical tales. What unites them is their dreamlike quality—the sense that you're experiencing something just beyond the reach of waking consciousness.
These are stories that resonate like an echo in the mind, long after the last page.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
In an infinite house of endless halls, statues, and tides, one man lives alone—or so he believes. Piranesi's world consists of countless rooms and vestibules, an ocean that floods the lower halls with the tides, and the statues that fill every available surface. He meticulously documents his explorations in journals, convinced there are only fifteen other people who have ever existed—most of them skeletons. When evidence suggests otherwise, his reality begins to unravel.
Clarke's haunting novel is a metaphysical mystery and a meditation on solitude, perception, and meaning. The prose has a dreamlike precision, creating a world that feels both mathematically exact and impossibly vast. As Piranesi's understanding of his circumstances slowly transforms, readers are drawn into questions about identity, reality, and the nature of captivity versus freedom. This slim volume contains infinite dimensions, leaving readers in a contemplative trance.
Goodreads: 4.22 | Amazon UK: 4.4
Perfect for fans of: Jorge Luis Borges' labyrinthine puzzles, Erin Morgenstern's The Starless Sea, David Mitchell's reality-bending narratives, and metaphysical fiction that questions the nature of existence.
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Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung
These genre-defying Korean short stories blend horror, folklore, and the surreal into tales that shock and seduce. A cursed toilet gives birth to a golden baby. A woman's head blossoms into flowers. A fox tells a businessman the uncomfortable truth about his life. Each story begins in recognizable reality before sliding sideways into the uncanny, exploring themes of capitalism, patriarchy, and environmental degradation through a lens of fairy tale logic and body horror.
Chung's collection refuses categorization, moving fluidly between magical realism, horror, and allegory. The stories unnerve not through conventional scares but by exposing the strangeness just beneath everyday life. Translated with precision by Anton Hur, the prose maintains a matter-of-fact tone even as events grow increasingly bizarre, creating a dissonance that heightens the dreamlike quality. These tales linger in the mind like fever dreams—vivid, disquieting, and impossible to forget.
Goodreads: 3.76 | Amazon UK: 4.0
Perfect for fans of: Han Kang's The Vegetarian, Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire, Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream, twisted fairy tales with feminist undercurrents, and fiction that transforms the mundane into the monstrous.
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What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
A fungal retelling of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, this novella is swampy, grotesque, and richly unsettling. Former soldier Alex Easton arrives at the decrepit Usher mansion to visit their childhood friend Madeline, who is gravely ill. What they discover is a house and landscape infected with something unnatural—where rabbits behave strangely, mushrooms glow in the dark, and the lake harbours secrets beneath its surface. As Madeline's condition worsens and her brother Roderick spirals into paranoia, Alex must uncover the truth before the house claims them all.
Kingfisher lingers in the in-between: life and death, sanity and decay. The atmosphere is thick with spores and dread, creating a hallucinatory reading experience where nothing can be trusted—not the house, not the land, and perhaps not even one's own perceptions. Through a masterful slow build, the story creates a sense of wrongness that burrows under the skin, culminating in revelations both scientific and supernatural. This is ecological horror with a gothic heart, delivered with the precision of a fever dream.
Goodreads: 3.86 | Amazon UK: 4.1
Perfect for fans of: Shirley Jackson's haunted spaces, Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic, fungal body horror, and atmospheric tales where setting becomes character.
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Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat
Spanning continents and centuries, this time-folding novel traces multiple seekers on metaphysical quests. In contemporary times, Shai leaves India for the remote Lofoten islands in Norway, seeking connection to something larger than herself. In parallel narratives, we follow botanist Linnaeus in 1732, Evelyn during the British Raj, and German naturalist Goethe as he develops his theory of plant metamorphosis. These four characters, separated by time but united in their search for understanding, create a tapestry of human curiosity and our relationship with the natural world.
Pariat's prose moves like light itself—illuminating, refracting, and revealing hidden connections. The novel flows seamlessly between timeframes and perspectives, creating a cumulative effect that transcends traditional narrative. Her writing is deeply informed by Indigenous ways of knowing, bringing non-Western epistemologies into conversation with European scientific traditions. The result is a lyrical, poetic story about how we come to understand the world and each other—a dream that spans centuries, suggesting that time itself may be more permeable than we imagine.
Goodreads: 3.73 | Amazon UK: 4.3
Perfect for fans of: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Richard Powers' The Overstory, Deborah Levy's boundary-blurring fiction, literary epics with environmental themes, and novels that weave science and spirituality.
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Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge
In a fictional city haunted by cryptid-like creatures, a cryptozoologist documents the strange and sorrowful beasts that surround her—and discovers she may be one of them. Each chapter follows our unnamed narrator as she investigates a different beast: sorrowful beasts who die when happy, sacrificial beasts who dream others' dreams, impasse beasts confined to underground tunnels. As she records their stories, the boundaries between human and beast, observer and observed begin to blur.
Yan Ge's novel unfolds like a bestiary from a parallel world, where each entry opens into a fable about loneliness, conformity, and the price of being different. The episodic structure creates a dreamlike progression, where connections between chapters emerge obliquely rather than explicitly. Translated with subtle grace by Jeremy Tiang, the prose combines journalistic detachment with moments of startling lyricism. This is a meditation on otherness and belonging where categories dissolve like mist, leaving readers questioning what truly defines humanity.
Goodreads: 3.81 | Amazon UK: 4.2
Perfect for fans of: Studio Ghibli's animated worlds, Kelly Link's strange tales, Murakami's urban fantasies, The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, and speculative fiction that uses the fantastic to illuminate social reality.
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Lanny by Max Porter
A poetic chorus of voices in an English village surrounds the disappearance of a child. Lanny is an unusual boy who speaks in riddles and makes peculiar art, catching the attention of both a famous artist and Dead Papa Toothwort—an ancient entity who has watched over the village for centuries, feeding on its stories and secrets. When Lanny vanishes, the village's hidden tensions rise to the surface, while Dead Papa Toothwort listens and waits.
Porter's novel is mythic and modern, experimental in form yet emotionally direct. The text itself becomes visual art, with lines that curve and twist across the page as Dead Papa Toothwort absorbs the village's voices. Time becomes fluid, with past, present, and eternal perspectives intermingling. This polyphonic approach creates a dream-state where individual consciousness dissolves into collective experience. At once a missing child story, an ecological fable, and a meditation on art and perception, Lanny defies categorization while casting a spell that lingers long after reading.
Goodreads: 4.05 | Amazon UK: 4.2
Perfect for fans of: Ali Smith's seasonal quartet, George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, mythic realism, polyphonic prose, English folk horror like The Wicker Man, and Max Richter soundtracks.
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The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
After his father's death, a boy begins to hear the voices of inanimate objects. Books speak loudest to him, offering comfort and guidance. As his mother's hoarding worsens and his own mental health becomes precarious, young Benny finds himself shuttling between home, a psychiatric ward, and the public library. There, he meets a cast of extraordinary misfits while learning to navigate a world where everything—from scissors to windows to his father's old vinyl records—has something to say.
Ozeki's novel interweaves Zen Buddhist philosophy with a deeply empathetic portrait of grief and mental illness. The narrative itself is partly told by The Book—the physical object you hold in your hands—creating a metafictional layer that questions the boundaries between story and reality. This poetic, philosophical, and whimsical tale explores the connections between materiality and meaning, suggesting that objects carry histories and energies that affect our lives. Through Benny's journey, readers experience a dreamlike immersion in a world where everything is alive with significance.
Goodreads: 4.02 | Amazon UK: 4.2
Perfect for fans of: Haruki Murakami's surreal everyday, The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, Zen fables and koans, magical realism with philosophical underpinnings, and novels that question the nature of storytelling itself.
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Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao
A woman inherits a pawnshop where regrets can be traded, and her encounter with a time-obsessed physicist leads to rain puddles that become portals and markets in the clouds. Mera grows up in an unusual pawnshop that trades in guilt and regret rather than valuables. When theoretical physicist Elias enters her life chasing theories about time, their collision creates ripples across reality. Together they discover doorways between worlds, where memories become tangible and time flows differently. As they explore these ethereal spaces, they must confront their own pasts and the nature of loss itself.
Yambao's novel unfolds with the gentle logic of dreams, where impossibilities are accepted without question. The prose creates a watercolor effect—emotions and images bleeding into one another with soft edges and translucent beauty. The physics of time becomes poetry rather than science, exploring how grief stretches moments and love compresses them. This softly surreal and emotionally profound story suggests that the boundaries between dimensions might be as permeable as those between hearts.
Goodreads: 3.80 | Amazon UK: 4.2
Perfect for fans of: Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away, Matt Haig's The Midnight Library, Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, poetic fantasy with East Asian influences, and stories about parallel worlds accessible through everyday objects.
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Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami
A mosaic of interconnected lives in a surreal post-disaster Japan. After a vague catastrophe, survivors navigate a changed landscape where children develop unusual abilities and shadowy creatures lurk at the edges of perception. A woman finds a small blue creature in her refrigerator. A man documents the changing behaviors of birds. A child begins aging in reverse. These quietly strange occurrences are accepted as part of the new normal in a world that has slipped sideways into something not quite recognizable.
Kawakami conjures the quiet magic of the mundane transformed by loss and strangeness. Her prose maintains a matter-of-fact tone even as reality fragments around her characters, creating a dissonance that enhances the dreamlike atmosphere. Translated with delicate precision, the novel follows dream logic where connections between events are felt rather than explained. This elliptical beauty creates spaces for readers to project their own anxieties about environmental collapse and social isolation. The result is a gentle dystopia that finds moments of wonder and connection amid uncertainty.
Goodreads: 3.79 | Amazon UK: 4.0
Perfect for fans of: Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police, Sayaka Murata's Earthlings, Banana Yoshimoto's melancholy surrealism, gentle apocalypse narratives like Station Eleven, and stories where trauma transforms perception.
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Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
A fragmented, metaphysical coming-of-age story inhabited by ogbanje spirits. When Ada is born in Nigeria, the gate between the spirit world and the living world doesn't fully close. Multiple selves—ogbanje spirits from Igbo cosmology—take residence within her, creating a fractured consciousness that becomes more pronounced as she moves to America for college. As Ada experiences trauma and awakening, these spirits (including the dangerous, seductive Asughara) move to protect her by taking control, leading to a life lived across multiple planes of existence.
Emezi's debut novel dissolves the boundaries between mind, body, and spirit, offering a dazzling perspective on identity and self. The narrative shifts between various voices—Ada's and those of the spirits within her—creating a dreamlike multiplicity where reality is constantly in question. Drawing from Igbo spiritual traditions rather than Western psychological frameworks, the novel reframes what might be called mental illness as spiritual experience. This perspective-shifting work challenges readers to reconsider fundamental assumptions about consciousness and selfhood.
Goodreads: 4.02 | Amazon UK: 4.2
Perfect for fans of: Myth-infused literary fiction like Beloved by Toni Morrison, Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird, Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, consciousness narratives that blur reality and fantasy, and The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw.
Let your mind linger in the fog between stories
These are not books to race through or consume like literary fast food. They ask you to float, to reflect, to lose track of time. In a world increasingly designed for speed and efficiency, these liminal narratives offer a different kind of reading experience—one that invites you to slow down and inhabit the spaces between certainties.
What makes these dreamlike books so compelling is their ability to access emotional and philosophical truths that might be inaccessible through more straightforward storytelling. By bending reality or creating worlds that operate on different rules, they bypass our rational defences and speak directly to our deeper selves. Like dreams, they communicate in the language of symbol and sensation, leaving interpretations open and meanings fluid.
The liminal spaces these books occupy—between genres, between states of consciousness, between cultures and worldviews—reflect the in-between nature of our own existence. We all live in thresholds: between past and future, between knowing and uncertainty, between connection and solitude. These narratives honour that complexity by refusing simple categorizations or easy answers.
If you found yourself drawn to these dreamlike journeys, you might also enjoy our recent feature: Time-Bending Books: 10 Mind-Altering Novels That Manipulate Reality
Have a favourite dreamlike novel that didn't make the list? We'd love to hear it. The liminal spaces between reader and text, between author and audience, are where the true magic of literature lives.
If you’re drawn to stories that feel like a lucid dream — strange, poetic, and impossible to pin down — you’ll find more like this in our weekly newsletter.
One quiet email, once a week. No noise. Just curated book lists, mood-driven recs, and literary rabbit holes worth falling into.
Until next time, happy reading.
— The Page Sage
Thumbnail Photo by Mahdi Soheili on Unsplash
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