What to read after “Riders of the Purple Sage” by Zane Grey: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
A nameless cowpuncher on a Wyoming ranch falls for the new schoolteacher from Vermont while feuding with a ranch hand named Trampas. His code of honour is tested by a cattle thief, a lynching and a duel, in a territory where the law is still being made.
Frontiersman Hugh Glass is mauled by a bear and left for dead by his companions, who take his rifle and supplies. He crawls out of the wilderness and sets out on a long journey to find the men who abandoned him.
After Comanche raiders kill his brother's family and carry off his niece Debbie, Amos Edwards and Martin Pauley, the orphan the Edwards family took in, spend years searching the Texas plains for her. The long hunt hardens Amos's hatred and strains his bond with Martin, who wants to bring the girl home.
After her father is shot dead in 1870s Arkansas, fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross hires Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed U.S. marshal with a taste for whiskey, to hunt the killer into Indian Territory. A Texas Ranger joins them, and the three ride into a hard country where justice is personal.
A quiet stranger rides into a Wyoming valley and hires on with homesteaders Joe and Marian Starrett. The boy Bob idolises him, but Shane's skill with a gun pulls him back toward a past he wants to leave when a cattle baron moves against the settlers.
William Andrews leaves Harvard for a frontier town in Kansas, hoping to see the West for himself. He joins an old buffalo hunter on an expedition into Colorado, where the work becomes a brutal test of endurance and the hunters' ambitions strip the land bare.
In 1870 Texas, an ageing widower who reads newspapers aloud to frontier audiences agrees to carry a ten-year-old girl south to her relatives. She was taken by Kiowa years earlier and has forgotten English, and the long journey is dangerous for them both.
Stolen from a comfortable California home, the dog Buck is sold into the Klondike gold rush and forced to haul sleds through frozen wilderness. Amid cruelty and hardship he discovers a wildness within himself that calls him away from men.
In a Puritan town, a young woman is publicly shamed for having a child out of wedlock and refuses to name the father. As she builds a quiet life with her daughter, the man's secret guilt and her wronged husband's quest for revenge eat away at the community. A novel about sin and hypocrisy.
Two former Texas Rangers drive a herd of cattle north to Montana, leading a ragged crew across rivers, drought and hostile country. The long journey tests the old friendship of the two men and the loyalties of everyone who follows them.
Eli and Charlie Sisters are hired killers riding to California to find a prospector. As the brothers travel, Eli grows tired of the violence of their trade and begins to imagine another life, while Charlie insists that the job must be finished.
In a militarised near-future American West, a young woman flees an arranged marriage and hides in a travelling library. The librarians turn out to carry banned books and help people cross the border, and she finds a purpose, a community, and a woman she loves.
In the 1850s, a teenage runaway known only as the kid drifts into a borderland of scalphunters and broken towns. He joins the Glanton gang, whose campaign against Apache raiders becomes indiscriminate slaughter, shadowed by a pale, learned judge who preaches war as the highest law.
Twin sisters from a small Southern town where everyone is light-skinned choose opposite lives: one returns to raise a Black daughter, the other passes as white and hides her past. Across the decades, their daughters' paths unexpectedly cross.
After a traumatic loss, Bree Prescott rents a cabin in Pelion, Maine, hoping to disappear. There she meets Archer Hale, a young man who cannot speak and lives apart from the town. As they grow close, the town's old secrets and Archer's isolation threaten the life they begin to build.
In an alternate 1878, Karen Memery works at a brothel in Seattle. When a badly injured woman arrives with a ruthless man on her trail, Karen is pulled into a hunt for a serial killer, a corrupt election and a mess of dangerous inventions.
Évike is the only woman in her pagan village with no magic, and her people treat her as an outcast. When the kingdom's holy warriors demand a sacrifice, she is handed to their one-eyed captain, a monster-hunter her village hates. To survive the winter forest, the two must rely on each other despite everything between them.
Four elderly friends in a small New York town have spent a lifetime telling each other ghost stories at their club. Now something from a winter forty years earlier, a death they all helped to hide, has returned to collect the debt.
Abandoned by her family as a child, Kya grows up alone in a North Carolina marsh, shunned by the nearby town as the Marsh Girl. She teaches herself to survive on the land and inches toward love, until a local man is found dead and she becomes the chief suspect.
In Clanton, Mississippi, a Black father shoots the two men who attacked his young daughter and hires a young white lawyer to defend him. The town splits along racial lines as the murder trial approaches, with the Ku Klux Klan threatening the defense team and the jury.
Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland in old New York society when May's cousin, the Countess Olenska, returns from Europe after leaving her husband. Newland and the Countess are drawn to each other, but the rules of their world demand that he marry May and hide what he feels.
Makani moved from Hawaii to a small Nebraska town and is still guarding a secret from her past. Then students at her high school are murdered one by one, each killing exposing something the victim hid, and the killer edges closer to her.
Rae hunts ghosts in the small town of Abelaum, where old occult secrets are stirring. A summoning binds her to Leon, a demon assassin who was ordered to kill her and chose not to. As a cult closes in and monsters wake in the woods, Rae must decide how far she trusts the demon who wants her soul.
Win Hathaway has loved Kev Merripen, the brooding Romany boy taken in by her family, since childhood, and has spent years recovering from illness for his sake. Kev believes he is too dangerous to deserve her, and keeps his distance even as she decides to make him hers.
What should I read after “Riders of the Purple Sage”?
Start with “The Virginian”, “The Revenant”, “The Searchers”: they are the closest to “Riders of the Purple Sage” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Riders of the Purple Sage” these are Wild West, Revenge, Forbidden Love), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “The Revenant”, “News of the World”, “The Sisters Brothers”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
