92 books like The Owl Service

This book begins with only the most famous first line of a novel in English literature. (Move over, Jane Austen.)

Wistful, mysterious, and yearning, the unnamed narrator of Rebecca follows her much older husband to his luxe estate in England after a hasty marriage in France. There, she encounters a housekeeper bent on humiliating her (or worse) and the specter of her new husband’s perfect first wife, who died unexpectedly.

Even knowing what will happen, I am sucked in every time. This hits that great spot between outright horror and suspense, and my next book will be heavily influenced by this one. 

This is extraordinary, meditative, and beautiful. For me, it fulfils the most important element of any book – that magical sense of stepping into another world. In this case, it is the world of Katherine Swift as she describes the creation of her garden in Shropshire. Yet it is so much more than that. The book is built around the daily structure of monastic prayer, as in a medieval Book of Hours, and this contemplative mood flows through every page, taking us on a discursive journey involving horticulture, history, and the stories of some of the people who previously lived at Morville. Whenever I read it, I get that all-important sense of connection with nature and the rhythm of life.

I love books that chronicle the passing of time, going from dark and gloomy January, through the quixotic summer months and right into late December which I always think of as the fag-end of the year. The Ivington Diaries is a collection of Monty Don’s diary entries about his home and garden over several years. With charming honesty, he describes his gardening failures as well as his successes, the people he knows, and the vagaries of the changing seasons. Whenever I read this book it casts a spell over me and I feel as though I’m living in a secret corner of the garden at Ivington, watching all its comings and goings.

Plants are our companions through life. We grow, pick and eat some of them, but how much do we really value them? Our ancestors had an intimate knowledge and understanding of the power of plants and were aware of which were helpful and which caused harm. They wrapped comfrey leaves around the damaged legs of animals, believed that fairies sheltered from the rain beneath ragwort plants, cured childhood hernias with the aid of ash saplings, and recognized the benefits of rosehips long before science could analyse their nutrients.

Hatfield’s Herbal follows the tradition of so many other excellent herbals, weaving botany, plant magic, medicine, and folklore into an engrossing mixture that always keeps me reading long after I found what I was originally looking for. Read a good herbal and you’ll never look at a so-called weed in the same way again.

First published in 1962, I read this book in the late 70s when I was about ten years old. Not quite as iconic as The House with the Clock in its Walls (another favorite), this novel is equally evocative and strange, with its rambling, Victorian house, mysteries unfolding in the attic, and just the right hint of menace. Secrets lurk behind doors and in dreams, but the daylight world of the book is just as compelling. I recall as a child being swept away by the charm and pedigree of historic Massachusetts with all its transcendental mystique (replete with busts in the hallway of Emerson and Thoreau). Filled to the brim with what we might now call magical realism, this book is seared into my DNA – a must-read.

I’ll be completely honest, Hourglass sat on my bookshelf for years. I kept pushing it off, and pushing it off, until one day I took the plunge and read it. Why did I wait so long?

I fell in love with the main character Emerson. While she was immature I had to remember her age and she does progress as the book goes on. Emerson has visions and has a hard time dealing with them like any girl would. Her caring brother hires Michael who promises he can help control these visions. The two don’t exactly hit it off right away, but their dynamic is hilarious. Their relationship was slow to build, my favorite kind. The author did an excellent job explaining how time travel works for Emerson. It wasn’t difficult to understand, but it was tricky and very unique. The slow-burn romance eventually builds and, well you’ll have to… show more.

Suburbanite Ragle Gumm is overcome with a sense of urgency to play a bizarre newspaper game every day. He’s so good at it, he makes a living from its cash prizes. But lately, his world seems to be fraying around him. Things he sees and knows are suddenly...not. And if you can’t trust the very ground you’re standing on, what’s left? This takes the whole “maybe my world isn’t what I think it is” idea about as far as it can go, and it was just about the first story to ever do that. The best, most satisfying book I ever read about a banal, mundane world that turns out to be anything but.

I was enthralled by this book. I didn’t want to leave its strange but familiar world. Lai slipstreams between a near-future dystopia and ancient origin stories.

This book made me question the common assumption that eating and reproduction are unrelated processes. I started wondering if I carried the smells of my mother’s diet on my skin like Lai’s protagonist, who smells like durian fruit.

When I finished this book, I knew I would read it several more times, and I have!

Price is a philosopher and this book, along with Paul Horwich’s Asymmetries in Time and David Albert’s Time and Chance, are heirs of Reichenbach’s masterpiece. I select Price’s book here because it is more accessible than Horwich’s or Albert’s books. It is packed with fun and deep stuff: criticism of Hawking’s cosmology, exploration of the electromagnetic arrow of time, and serious discussion of wild ideas like causation going backward in time.

Prepare to have your world turned upside down in this peculiar take on the faerie novel. We meet Cathy as a resident of modern England but learn she’s actually an escapee from “The Nether,” a faerie mirror world that’s stuck in the 19th century. As a historian, I absolutely love how Newman moves characters between the worlds—without time travel! And just imagine being in the shoes of a young woman forced to straddle the freedoms that come with modern life with a life with an arranged marriage. And above all, she must appeal to the whims of the faerie lord who controls her family’s fortunes. Come for the premise, but stick around for her deep world-building and richly-drawn characters (I mean, who doesn’t love a talking gargoyle?)