Here are 100 books that Starting Out In the Afternoon fans have personally recommended if you like
Starting Out In the Afternoon.
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I am captivated by memoirs that shed light on the deeper life experiences of their authors. My curiosity about inner life compelled me to learn about the psychological essence of memoir writers, resulting in my writing a memoir from an in-depth psychological perspective. My curiosity also led me to become a psychotherapist, which helped me better navigate dark and uncertain waters with my clients. By probing the inner psychological dynamics of such memoirs, I learned more about myself and became a writer with rare psychological insight. Such illumination served to ignite my very soul. My passion is fueled by tapping the mysteries of what lies within us all.
At age 15, I was captivated by Ernest Hemingway and his depiction of Paris in the 1920s. This book today reignites the enchantment of those years. Hemingway's profound influence shaped my aspirations as a writer. Through his eyes, I can vividly see Paris's cafés, salons, and vibrant social scenes, which ultimately became the backdrop of my dreams.
This book, rich with lovemaking, drinking, writing, betting at the track, and the bohemian lifestyle of so many young artists in Paris, reawakens my desire to immerse myself in that world. Hemingway's narrative voice and his novels continue to speak to me in a language that feels intimately mine, reminding me of the undying impact of his work on my life and aspirations.
Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. Since Hemingway's personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now this new special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published.
Featuring a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest's sole surviving son, and an introduction by the editor and grandson of the author, Sean Hemingway, this new edition also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-published Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son Jack and…
As a kid, I hated the outdoors, hated change, hated discomfort. Imagine my surprise when, in 2004, without an iota of expertise, I decided to hike Spain’s Camino de Santiago de Compostela. It was life-changing and world-opening on so many levels. Since then, I’ve written five best-selling journey memoirs, two of which have been nominated for awards. I read just about anything but I am particularly drawn to stories about those who leave the comfort of their homes to go and live another life. We all think of doing it; few of us actually do.
Admittedly, a book about a womanizing druggie who finds God and goes off to be a Trappist monk sounds trite. But this is the real deal, mainly due to Merton’s candidness, but also to his beautiful writing. Though published in 1948, it feels entirely modern. There’s a journey here but you’ll remember the interior one more than the exterior one.
The complete and unedited edition of Thomas Merton's famous autobiography, one of the greatest works of spiritual pilgrimage ever written.
'The Seven Storey Mountain is a book one reads with a pencil so as to make it one's own.' Graham Greene
'A remarkable book, a classic of its kind, written in a vivid, rich and alert style which ranges from crisp vernacular to passionate eloquence, full of picturesque incident and passing at times into religious ecstasy.' The Times Literary Supplement
'A book which may well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience.' Evelyn Waugh
Hi! I'm John Glynn, and I'm excited to share some book recommendations inspired by one of my favorite Taylor Swift songs, "Cruel Summer." To me, this song perfectly encapsulates the heightened emotions of summer love—a theme at the heart of my memoir Out East. I chose books that capture the "fever dream highs" of the season. But at the same time, as Taylor sings, "Summer's a knife," filled with longing and heartache, primed for nostalgia. All of these books carry the kind of moonlit shimmer I crave in a smart beach read. As a Swiftie, a beach lover, an avid reader, and a hopeless romantic, I hope you enjoy.
This might be my all-time favorite memoir. Every time I sit down to write, I tend to read a few pages of it to absorb the rhythm of Patti Smith’s unadorned, lyrical writing.
Like Taylor Swift, Patti Smith is a music icon, a poet, and a genius wordsmith. For me, this book totally captured the radiant nostalgia of a bygone era and a romantic love that evolves into something more permanent and transcendent.
“Reading rocker Smith’s account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it’s hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding.” -- People
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence…
I love travelogues and wrote a dual POV travel memoir with my husband. Travel writing allows us to see the world through others’ eyes, and my favorites are by those who used travel as a way to escape or heal. I’m more invested when I know this person not just wants, but needsthis journey. I understand this feeling. I empathize with them, I root for them, and I am happy for them when they reach their destination. I adoreEat, Pray, Loveand Wild, and want to recommend five other memoirs that have stayed with me as examples of brave people who left home behind in search of something better.
Guy left his demons in England and set out on a pilgrimage. After mental health issues and a year of being afraid to leave his home, Guy re-entered the world by trekking through 10 countries in 10 months, hoping the journey would heal him. He traveled down ancient paths through changing landscapes, and the charity of everyday strangers kept him and his hope alive.
He finally arrived in Jerusalem, and though neither his physical nor emotional journey ended in the climax he’d hoped, he’d gained understanding. I’ve experienced the clarity that can come with putting physical distance between you and your issues, and though they say not to run away from your problems, sometimes a really long walk can actually help.
Winner - Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2019. Shortlisted - Rathbones Folio Prize, Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award 2019.
'An extraordinary travelogue, strange and brilliant' - i
In 2013 Guy Stagg walked from Canterbury to Jerusalem. Though a non-believer, he began the pilgrimage after suffering several years of mental illness, hoping the ritual would heal him. For ten months he hiked alone on ancient paths, crossing ten countries and more than 5,500 kilometres. Travelling without support, he had to rely each night on the charity of strangers.
I love to read and write about complex characters and particularly the “unlikeable” female character. Many readers connect with my characters because they are flawed—they don’t always think or do what we want them to, or what we think they should do, which is often (frustratingly) the case with the real-life people we love and care about. Real, complex people exist in real, complex relationships, including friendships that don’t always serve them—or that do serve them, but in unconventional or superficially unclear ways. I think that reading about contradictory, inconsistent, and confused characters in relationships helps us to be kinder and more empathetic people—and, quite possibly, better friends.
Before reaching middle school, I pretty much believed that my friends—who they were and how many I had—determined my value. But my circle could be fickle; girls were ostracized for minor infractions (you bought the same coat as me!) I lived with daily fear of being dropped.
So Cat’s Eye captivated me with its lack of sentimentality in depicting (some) girls’ friendships. Elaine, a middle-aged artist, returns alone to Toronto, the city where she grew up, for a retrospective of her work. The trip gives Elaine space to reflect on her life in that city, and Cordelia, her childhood “friend”, is central to her memories.
Cordelia tormented and humiliated Elaine, even putting her life in danger, yet Elaine remained loyal to her for years. It felt very real to me that this toxic relationship would continue to preoccupy Elaine into her functional adulthood. Girlhood friendships are often fraught, and Atwood…
Elaine Risley, a painter, returns to Toronto to find herself overwhelmed by her past. Memories of childhood - unbearable betrayals and cruelties - surface relentlessly, forcing her to confront the spectre of Cordelia, once her best friend and tormentor, who has haunted her for forty years. 'Not since Graham Greene has a novelist captured so forcefully the relationship between school bully and victim...Atwood's games are played, exquisitely, by little girls' LISTENER An exceptional novel from the winner of the 2000 Booker Prize
Born the same year as Winona Ryder, Tupac Shakur, and Elon Musk, I’m a Toronto-based writer of novels, short fiction, graphic stories, nonfiction, and scripts for film and television. My YA books include the graphic novella The Lion of Africa, the supernatural, climate change-fuelled Daughters of Lighttrilogy, and the hard-hitting Since You’ve Been Gone. My writing gives voice to strong, diverse protagonists in urban settings who are dealing with seemingly insurmountable challenges. I’ve been a special education teacher for more than 20 years and my characters are often inspired by the amazing young people I’ve worked with. The cities in my work are living, breathing entities that shape the plot and the protagonist’s character.
The majority of my teaching career was in Regent Park, so the setting of Looking for X is particularly meaningful. Eleven-year-old Khyber is smart, savvy, and mature beyond her years. Told from Khyber’s POV, the story centers around the friendship she develops with X, a woman living in the parkette across from Khyber’s apartment building. When Khyber witnesses X being attacked a group of skinheads, the dangers faced by Toronto’s homeless population, especially those living with mental illness, become glaringly clear. The next day, Khyber is wrongly accused of vandalizing her school. X is the only person who can provide an alibi for Khyber, but she is nowhere to be found. In an effort to locate her friend, Khyber embarks on a a journey navigating the urban landscape of Toronto.
In this urban adventure story, Khyber, a smart, bold, eleven-year-old girl from a poor neighborhood, sets out to find her friend X, a mysterious homeless woman who has gone missing.
The desperate search takes Khyber on a long, all-night odyssey that proves to be wilder than any adventure she has ever imagined.
For a number of years, I was a historical interpreter at two of Toronto’s oldest and finest houses. While looking at the furniture, paintings, and below-stairs bells and open-hearth cooking in these upper-class mansions, I became immersed in the lives of the people who once lived in these places. I have always been interested in history, and I have a post-graduate degree in Canadian literature, but my schooling in history seemed confined to the Tudor period and Greek and Roman times. Working in Toronto’s fine homes led me to a deep understanding of the fascinating history we have right here on our doorstep!
When you write historical novels, you have to place your characters in a certain real setting. Hounsom’s book let me step right onto the streets and into the houses of Toronto in 1810. As well as wonderful information on the way people lived at the time, Hounsom includes maps and drawings of Toronto and its important buildings. For example, I actually found a drawing of the house that my novel’s main character lived in.
As someone who spent his days working as a journalist and his nights writing novels and short stories, I've always been fascinated by the fine line separating fact and fiction. We live our lives conforming to the rules of our universe, yet sometimes feel brave enough to ask what’s that?and watch with delight as reality transforms into fantasy. What, exactly, is that brilliant sunset? Billions of bits of light being processed by our survival-evolved brain as a reminder to seek shelter before the perilous darkness descends? The wondrous work of God’s hand? A pleasing distraction from the brutality of our brief existence? Something else we may never comprehend? Great stories help us decide.
When Toronto bookstore owner Jean Mason hears she may have a doppelganger, it sets off a strange series of events that show how fragile our grip on reality really is. Equal parts psychological horror, ghost story, warm family drama, and literary look at mental illness, this dizzying and at times difficult novel asks if we genuinely know ourselves and the nature of our existence. It may leave you like its bewildered main character: full of questions about identity and struggling to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t.
A darkly comic literary thriller about a woman who fears for her sanity—and then her life—when she learns that her doppelganger has appeared in a local park.
Jean Mason has a doppelganger. She's never seen her, but others swear they have. Apparently, her identical twin hangs out in Kensington Market, where she sometimes buys churros and drags an empty shopping cart down the streets, like she's looking for something to put in it. Jean's a grown woman with a husband and two kids, as well as a thriving bookstore in downtown Toronto, and…
I am a big fan of romance books with thrilling plots. It’s partly how I remember the stories years later. When I wrote Flowers for Kate in theRainbow Desireanthology, it started as a pure romance, but I added a supernatural thrill. One reader admitted checking over her shoulder in case a spectral being was there while reading the story. I love writing stories with twists and turns, and surprising readers. Maybe it comes from my childhood days of being a Scooby-Doo fan—I loved the thrill of guessing the mysteries behind each character and the villain being unmasked. I’m an ex-journalist who has published romance stories from erotic to sweet.
Wildfirestarts with the protagonist Stephanie Fournier working as an assistant in a boring 9 to 5 job. Yet, this book is anything but boring. Things heat up very fast when gorgeous CEO Robert Quinlan notices her, and the two become passionate. There’s a catch…she’s a virgin. Will his sudden disinterest in Stephanie mean the end of a romance? Or, can experts be seduced by amateurs? And, there is trouble brewing when another woman’s jealousy bubbles over Quinlan. Wildfireis book one in the Smoke Chaser series. It’s packed with great dialogue, a ruthless female antagonist who drops nasty surprises in Stephanie’s path, and a fiery romance that honors the story’s title.
Stephanie Fournier is an assistant at a law firm in Toronto, Ontario. Her boring 9 to 5 starts to heat up when Robert Quinlan, the gorgeous CEO of the company, takes a special interest in her. At first she responds to his obvious interest with glee... and then he finds out she's a virgin.
His sudden disinterest is not only embarrassing, but awkward around the workplace, especially with an undeniable heat still present between them. Stephanie sets out to prove she's unshaken, only to entice him back into her thrall. But can an amateur really win over an expert in…
I write whodunits. I love a good puzzle. And I love humour. I have written five mysteries Wayward Shot,Death and Denial, a travel mystery, The Trouble with Funerals, The Suspects, my protagonists, go on another travel mystery, and Murder Exit Stage Right. I have won BWL INC best-selling author two years in a row. I am now writing another mystery Moving is Murder the publishing date is October 2023. And new to me and a challenge is a historical mystery I’m writing set in the 1900s.
This was the first mystery thriller of Linwood’s I read. And it wasn’t the last.
Since then, I’ve read every book he has written and have never been disappointed. Bad Move is a mystery thriller set in the small town of Promise Falls.
You would think moving from the big bad city would be a good move. But no. Hence the name Bad Move. Linwood combines this mystery thriller with humour. Yes, humour in a thriller.
Zack Walker is a writer with an overactive imagination and two teenage children. After a murder on their street, he uproots his family from the city - insisting it's for their own good - and heads for the security of the suburbs.
However, his peaceful new life is soon shattered when he finds a body while out walking by the creek. Zack recognizes the dead man - and knows who his killer might be.
Things go from bad to worse as Zack follows a trail of deceit that leads right to his front door. To protect…
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