If the mysterious voice that sends Ray to build a ballfield—and the way Shoeless Joe Jackson and Moonlight Graham simply appear—moved you, you’ll feel right at home with the Land family’s unexplainable wonders in Peace Like a River. Reuben’s father, Jeremiah, works gentle miracles that steer their journey much like Ray’s faith-driven trek to find J. D. Salinger and Doc Graham. It’s the same tender blend of the everyday and the miraculous, suffused with longing, grace, and the belief that what we love can call the past back to us.

Ray hears a whisper—“If you build it, he will come”—and sets off on an improbable journey to Salinger and to Moonlight Graham. In The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, a retired man likewise answers a quiet inner summons and simply begins to walk across England. If you loved how Ray’s open-hearted quest rekindles hope in Annie, Karin, and even skeptical neighbors who gather at the field, Harold’s gentle odyssey offers that same restorative warmth as strangers and old regrets transform along the way.

If the hush of the Iowa fields, the bleachers appearing in Ray’s yard, and the neighbors quietly rallying around a miracle diamond drew you in, Plainsong will resonate. In Holt, Colorado, ordinary folks—schoolteachers, the McPheron brothers, a pregnant teen—gather one another in with the same understated decency you felt when Ray, Annie, and Karin opened their farm to wonder. It’s intimate, humane, and suffused with that grounded goodness that made the Kinsella farm feel sacred.

If Ray’s plainspoken, first-person voice and his reverence for the game—catching by moonlight with Shoeless Joe, chasing box scores, road-tripping to meet Moonlight Graham—stole your heart, Henry Wiggen’s narration in Bang the Drum Slowly will, too. As Henry tends to his ailing teammate Bruce Pearson across a season’s travel, the locker-room rhythms, road hats, and dugout loyalties turn baseball into a meditation on friendship and mortality—much like Ray’s diamond becomes a shrine to love and memory.

If the final catch with Ray’s father left you in tears—and the way a single game, a single ball, can rewrite a life—A Prayer for Owen Meany delivers that same catharsis. John Wheelwright recounts how Owen’s uncanny voice and foreknowledge (including a fateful baseball game) shape their destinies. Like Ray’s pilgrimage to Doc Graham and the redemption it brings, Owen’s purpose unfolds toward an ending that fuses faith, fate, and forgiveness into a powerful emotional release.