100 books like There Is Nothing for You Here

Jason Matthews is the real deal, a 30-year-veteran of the CIA’s Operations Directorate and he gives the reader a ringside seat both into the Agency’s operations as well as Putin’s vast spy network and advanced training programs that recruits beautiful young woman to seduce and exterminate foreign assets.

This is one of the steamiest spy novels ever produced.

This is a pair of novels, French classics that were also made into two memorable movies. In a rural village in Provence, an old man and his only remaining relative cast a greedy eyes on some land. They need a hidden spring that is on the land to irrigate the flowers they intend to grow which they think will make them a fortune. But first, they need to drive out the owner and his family.The father of this family is a hunchback trying to succeed in a hostile world. An evil plot slowly unfolds and comes to tragic fruition. Ten years later, the daughter of the family returns to seek her revenge. A moral tale full of wonderful local detail, like my other choices it features a brave, invincible female protagonist battling overwhelming odds. 

This is a wonderful historical novel. A woman trying to recover from a personal tragedy is bequeathed a mysterious manuscript. It turns out to be the score of a previously unknown cantata by Bach—but there is a problem. The lyrics contain hateful anti-Semitic texts. What is she to do? Publish the score and allow this music to be heard—along with the awful words—or suppress it? The author traces the history of the manuscript and how it came into the possession of the heroine. We meet many strong women as we travel 200 years into the past and learn much about the history of Jews in Germany, about Bach and his times, Mendelssohn and his times as well as World War Two. This is a fascinating book featuring several inspiring female characters and is rich in historic background and steeped in music.

This historical work traces the improbable rise to power of Catherine the Great and her partnership and love affair with Prince Potemkin. Catherine, a German princess, seizes the throne from her mentally-unstable husband and begins to rule the vast empire that is Russia. She is largely responsible for the partition of Poland. Together she and her lover Potemkin conquer Ukraine and Crimea. It hardly needs stating that these territories are at the center of today’s headlines. Thus we learn a great deal about the background of the current war. Their affair was unbridled but it went far beyond sex. It was a marriage of intellects and politics. Ultimately, they agreed to share power, leaving each of them free to take younger lovers. This is another book about a woman operating in a man’s world, wielding power ruthlessly and giving free rein to her sexuality.

Having loved Allende’s previous novels, this tale of history and suspense took me into the magical worlds of South American culture, to gain a better understanding of what the immigrant experience is really like for other people. Redacting from a reviewer’s comment, “this story filled with Allende's signature lyricism and ingenious plotting, teaches us what it means to respect, protect, and love.”

In its early decades, from the 1880s to the 1930s, Wellesley College boasted not merely a woman president but—alone among the “Seven Sisters”—an exclusively female faculty. Palmieri examines the impact of an all-woman community on the college’s students, professors, traditions, and development. A model exploration of campus culture, highly original, and a fascinating read.

Scarlett Clark is a bi serial killer who kills bad men. Carly Schiller is a queer student who just escaped an abusive father. Their storylines are equally gripping, with moments of unexpected intensity in both lust and fear. Layne Fargo creates a world so grounded in reality that, as a woman, it was painful to read at times—micro-aggressions, normalized inappropriate touching. Fargo doesn’t exaggerate it, she just exposes it as part of the narrative. Better yet, she gives a glimmer of equalization in the form of Scarlett who focuses her urge to kill in a direction that’s easy to root for, to want to read. It was wanting a serial killer to go on with her work that made this book and Scarlett a standout.

I could barely put this book down. It’s incredibly well written and has themes that are close to my heart and not often explored in literature, especially through a somewhat unhinged female perspective: physical therapists, chronic pain, Shakespeare, performing, desire and self-identity. The body is at the core of this fleshy, raw, and brilliant novel.

I have liked all the Gamache books, but this one blew me away.

Not just another clever puzzle-solving entertainment (which it is). It’s also a compelling meditation on the ethics of free speech in our world today as we struggle with a pandemic and elect autocrats into seats of power.

And this isn’t just any free speech, but speech coolly advocating for euthanizing the elderly and disabled, because caring for them is too expensive, and a waste—they’ll die anyway and leave society with much-reduced ability to care for those with a real chance to survive.

This speaker is a reputable academic, popular, and with hard data to support her position. Which is why someone wants to kill her. Which is why Gamache is brought in.

Pictures from an Institution, to my mind, is the best novel written by a poet. It’s comical, biting, engrossing, moving, and flat-out entertaining. Once again, we are back in academia, at a woman’s college based loosely on Sarah Lawrence, and never has academia been skewered more amusingly. Regarding the college, one character muses, “You Americans do not rear children, you incite them; you give them food and shelter and applause.” The novel’s jokes—aphorisms, wisecracks, putdowns—come so fast and furious one could lose track of the story, if the story itself were not so interesting…and jovial. It’s funnier than throwing a hardboiled egg into an electric fan. Pictures from an Institution is also learned and wise and, underneath the drollery, there is a basic humanism that does not allow you to dismiss the book as mere satire.