100 books like The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

A gorgeous, extravagant dual-timeline historical mystery about late-20th-century academics researching a pair of (fictional) Victorian poets – did they or didn’t they?

If you like library settings, fictional documents (letters, poems – lots of poems), and a good dose of poking-fun-at-academia, you’ll love it. Yes, it is also a movie (though I can’t speak to it). 

This is one of my favorite books of all time! Kadish adeptly intertwines the story of Ester in 1660s London with that of two modern academics, the soon-to-retire Helen and the grad student Aaron. As they research a treasure trove of papers they have received, they slowly learn of Ester’s astonishing story.

Academic success is not all that is at stake in the lives of Helen and Aaron, and we carefully follow their trials, too. Kadish wrote an article for the Paris Review in 2018 called “Writing the Lives of Forgotten Women,” which I often think of when creating my own characters.

I always find books about artists intriguing, and this one adds a bit of forgery, too. In 1631 Amsterdam, Sara de Vos is widowed, inheriting her husband’s debt. She paints to eke out a living, though that is not easy for a woman of that time and place. In 1957, a young art student agrees to forge one of de Vos’s works, only to be haunted by her crime in Sydney in 2000, when she becomes a famous art historian and curator.

I loved this book when I read it and went back to it again when I later decided to write The Map Colorist, my own novel set in seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

The modern-day Jaya, grieving after a third miscarriage and trouble in her marriage, goes to India to learn more about her grandmother, Amisha, who lived under the British occupation in the 1930s. Amisha’s servant and confidant, Ravi, tells Jaya about Amisha’s life so that Jaya comes to understand its relevance to her.

I was especially touched to see how learning about her ancestors' lives helps to heal Jaya in the present.

This rare novel by the TV writer Gail Parent is a broad, almost slapstick comedy about a proudly Jewish girl in the 1970s who moves from Long Island in Manhattan in her bid to find Mr. Right.

“As a graduation present, I was offered either a nose job or a fur coat. I took the fur coat with a high collar.” Mr. Right proves elusive as Sheila makes her way through the swinging singles scene of the time, and she ends up finding a different kind of success as a teacher.

I’ve probably read this book a dozen times and still find it very funny – although, trigger warning, it’s written in the form of an extended suicide note. (She changes her mind.)

This is THE book for neurotic hypersexuals. It set the genre. I think it’s wild, brilliant, horny, thoughtful, introspective, delusional, and absurd at the same time. I mean, for the love of God, there’s no plot! It’s the protagonist (Alex Portnoy) rambling to a psychologist about his clear Oedipal Complex. The man is torn, trying to be a good Jewish boy who betters the world, but he has some nasty sexual desires (and messed-up feelings about his sexual partners) that are holding him back. 

This book is one of my obsessions. (It’s fitting, given the obsessive nature of the book.) Ironically, I felt really seen and sane while reading it. No, I’m not as neurotic and horny as Alex, but boy, do I struggle with some of the same obsessive thought patterns as that man!

Some authors have an innate faculty for bringing the dim and distant past into such razor-sharp clarity that it’s hard not to believe that they were once present at the time. That’s how it is with Mary Renault (real name Eileen Mary Challans): any number of her books could have made this list.

What I particularly love about this duology (the sequel The Bull From the Sea isn’t quite as strong) is that Renault retold the ancient tale of Theseus and the Minotaur as historical fiction. Though she followed the main beats of the well-known story, she boldly stripped it of gods, monsters, and magic, and the narrative doesn’t suffer at all from it. If anything, it makes it even more compelling because it feels like she has stumbled upon a possible origin to the myth.

I love a tense, character-driven thriller, and this one was set in a remote town I’ve visited. 

I love that the book is set in 1963, a decade that had particular significance for Australian women, their roles, and the expectations placed upon them.

It’s not fast-moving, but the setting is an almost palpable character in its own right. I found it dark, rife with corruption, violence, oppressive heat, and both the best and the worst of what Australia has to offer.

A book with astonishing imagery and surrealism!

It lurks in the hazy landscape between magical realism and weird fantasy, which is an unusual thing per my reading experience for a coming-of-age story of a girl named Aisha from Mombasa. Her voyage to rescue her father from across an ocean of godlike sharks was a strange and unsettling experience to read.

Certainly one of the most unique (even if, in some fleeting moments, it reminded me of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, which I found strictly okay).

I don’t know about you, but when I learned history in elementary school, we skipped straight from Ancient Greece and Rome to the Norman Conquest with the briefest of nods at Byzantium to acknowledge there was something in between. It was all very simple and straightforward—and completely left out the crumbling kingdoms left behind in the wake of the fall of Alexander the Great’s Empire.

I can still remember opening Gillian Bradshaw’s Horses of Heaven for the first time and thinking, “What’s Ferghana? Or Bactra?”  Gillian Bradshaw wrote a number of books set in the wake of Alexander’s empire, but this one is the one that really stuck with me, told through the eyes of a girl picked to go as attendant to a Greek aristocrat from Bactra being married to King Mauakes of Ferghana (now Afghanistan).