If the way pain literally shines in The Illumination drew you in, you’ll love the sleep epidemic in The Dreamers. The phenomenon is unexplained and luminous in its own way—changing how people treat one another as it spreads through a college town. Like the love-note journal passing from person to person, Walker follows multiple lives brushed by the event, keeping the focus on intimate human moments rather than hard science.

You enjoyed how the love-note journal in The Illumination ties strangers together across chapters. In Station Eleven, a handmade comic book drifts between people before and after a catastrophe, linking an actor, a paramedic, and a troupe of traveling performers. The shifting viewpoints and graceful, mosaic structure echo those quiet, handoff-to-handoff revelations you admired.

If the episodic chapters of The Illumination—each spotlighting a new person touched by the glowing-pain world and a passed-along notebook—captivated you, Marra’s linked stories will hit the same nerve. A retouched painting, like that journal, reappears across portraits of censors, dancers, soldiers, and survivors, each piece deepening the whole with poignant callbacks.

If what stayed with you from The Illumination was how an unreal phenomenon reframed suffering, love, and faith—the glowing hurt and the tender missives that move from hand to hand—Faber’s novel will speak to you. A missionary travels off-world to minister to an alien people while exchanging intimate messages with his wife back home, and the book lingers on empathy, loss, and belief rather than mechanics.

If you loved the luminous language of The Illumination and the way a notebook of love notes stitches together separate lives, The History of Love mirrors that feeling. A vanished book links an elderly recluse, a grieving mother, and a curious teenager, all rendered in prose that glows with the same intimate, aching beauty.