Books like The Wishing Game

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern creates a mysterious circus that appears without warning and opens only at night, built around a secret competition between two young magicians who fall in love despite being pitted against each other. Shaffer and Morgenstern share a commitment to making magic feel real on the page, not as a gimmick but as an extension of what the characters want and fear. Both novels use a contest as the plot engine while keeping the emotional stakes personal rather than apocalyptic.

The Night Circus is denser and more atmospheric than The Wishing Game, with descriptions of impossible tents and enchanted gardens that reward slow reading. But the core is the same: two people discovering that the competition matters less than the connection they build inside it. Morgenstern's prose has a fairy-tale cadence that Shaffer fans will recognize, and both books argue that the most powerful magic is the kind that changes how someone sees themselves.

This is the ideal next read for anyone who wanted The Wishing Game to last longer.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin follows a widowed, bitter bookshop owner on a small island whose life changes when a mysterious package appears in his store. Zevin and Shaffer both write love letters to books and reading, building stories around characters whose lives are shaped by the fiction they consume.

A.J. Fikry starts as the kind of person who has given up on connection, much like Hugo Reese in The Wishing Game, and the novel tracks his slow, reluctant return to the world through the people who refuse to leave him alone. Both novels use island settings to create contained worlds where transformation can happen without the noise of ordinary life.

Zevin's tone is warmer and more grounded than Shaffer's, with less overt magic but the same belief that stories create the bridges between isolated people. The book-within-a-book structure adds a layer of literary playfulness that Shaffer fans will appreciate. If The Wishing Game made you want to hug a librarian, this book will make you want to open a bookstore.

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune sends a caseworker for magical children to evaluate an orphanage on a remote island, where he finds a misfit family that changes his understanding of what home means. Klune and Shaffer write from the same emotional playbook: both believe that kindness is a form of courage, that chosen families matter as much as biological ones, and that the people society discards are often the ones most worth knowing.

The island setting mirrors The Wishing Game's Clock Island, and both novels use isolation as a space where characters can shed the personas they built for the outside world. Klune's book has a more explicit fantasy framework, with literal magical children, but the feelings it generates are identical to what Shaffer achieves.

The relationship between Linus and Arthur carries the same slow-burn warmth as Lucy and Hugo's connection. This is a book that treats gentleness as a radical act and never apologizes for wanting its characters to be happy.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro is told from the perspective of an artificial friend, a solar-powered robot designed to be a companion for a sick child. Ishiguro and Shaffer both write about devotion that crosses boundaries the world considers impossible, and both use a slightly otherworldly lens to examine very human questions about love and sacrifice.

Klara observes the world with an innocence and precision that strips away social pretense, much like the way Shaffer's fairy-tale framework cuts through adult cynicism to reach something honest. The novel is quieter and more restrained than The Wishing Game, with an undercurrent of sadness that Shaffer's book avoids, but both ask the same question: what does it mean to give yourself completely to another person's well-being?

Ishiguro's prose is deceptively simple, each sentence doing more work than it appears to on first reading. Readers who appreciated Shaffer's treatment of unconditional love will find a more bittersweet version of the same theme here.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab follows a woman who made a deal with the darkness in 1714 and has lived for three hundred years, forgotten by everyone she meets the moment they look away.

Schwab and Shaffer both write about the power of being remembered and the pain of being overlooked, and both use fantastical premises to get at real emotional truths. Addie's curse is a metaphor for invisibility that anyone who has ever felt unseen will recognize, and her fight to leave a mark on the world echoes Lucy Hart's determination to matter in a child's life. Schwab's novel is darker and more ambitious in scope than The Wishing Game, spanning centuries and continents, but it shares the same conviction that one person's stubborn refusal to give up can bend the rules of the universe.

The love story unfolds with the same patience Shaffer brings to Lucy and Hugo, letting connection build through shared understanding rather than instant attraction. This is a bigger, more sprawling book, but the heart beating inside it is the same size.

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman starts with a failed bank robbery that turns into a hostage situation in an apartment viewing and uses that absurd setup to deliver a story about loneliness, forgiveness, and the invisible ways strangers are connected. Backman and Shaffer share a gift for writing characters who are wounded but not broken, cynical on the surface but secretly hoping for rescue. The humor in Anxious People is broader and more overtly comedic than Shaffer's, but both writers use laughter to disarm readers before hitting them with genuine emotion.

Backman's ensemble cast mirrors the group dynamic in The Wishing Game's contest, where a collection of strangers slowly reveal the private pain behind their public faces. Both novels believe in second chances and treat failure as the beginning of a story rather than the end of one. The narrative structure is trickier than it first appears, with reveals that reframe earlier scenes.

Readers who want another book that makes them laugh and cry within the same chapter will find exactly that here.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman introduces a woman whose rigid routines and formal speech patterns mask a childhood trauma she has never processed. Eleanor's voice is funny, strange, and heartbreaking in equal measure, and her gradual opening to the world mirrors Hugo Reese's transformation in The Wishing Game. Both novels are about people who built walls so thick they forgot there was supposed to be a door, and both use unlikely friendships to show that connection does not require perfection.

Honeyman writes with a dry wit that differs from Shaffer's warmer tone, but the emotional trajectory is identical: a person who has been alone too long allows someone in and discovers the risk was worth it. Eleanor's relationship with Raymond, her IT-department coworker, builds with the same slow trust that defines Lucy and Hugo's arc. The novel also deals honestly with mental health and the long shadow of childhood abuse without turning its protagonist into a case study.

This is a book about becoming a person again, told with specificity and care.