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Touch Not the Cat.
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As a reference librarian, I love doing research for myself and others. By reading a well-written historical novel, we can learn about the past and compare and contrast it to our present. All but the last of my choices have strong female characters who must overcome the customs of their time. The struggle goes on today. Let these books remind you of how far we have come and how far we have to go.
When I was fifteen, I stayed up reading the end of this book under the covers with a flashlight because I could not put it down.
A scandalous bestseller in 1847, this was the first romance to feature an antihero. Mr. Rochester is far from pure and kind. He mocks Jane, who describes herself as small and plain and stands up to him. He has an immoral secret and when Jane learns of it, she leaves him. I doubt I would have.
Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue, Canterbury Christ Church University College.
Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage.
She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious, sardonic and attractive Mr Rochester.
As a writer of Gothic-inflected suspense and horror fiction, I just can’t help it: I love to be scared! We are lucky to be in a time when so many wonderful thrillers, mysteries, suspense, and horror stories are being written and published, but I have a great love for the classics of the genre. These are the books I turn to again and again, not just to marvel at their craft and ingenuity, but to feel the skin prickle on my arms and shoulders and the hairs rise on the back of my neck. Whether for the first or the twentieth time, let these masterworks cast their spells over you.
While I am a tremendous fan of Daphne DuMaurier’s uncanny short stories, in particular, The Birds and Don’t Look Now, I reserve my greatest love and admiration for her modern Gothic masterpiece Rebecca.
While Alfred Hitchcock’s film version is justifiably a classic, it cannot capture the richness of DuMaurier’s prose nor the powerful first-person perspective of the narrator, the unnamed newlywed of a wealthy widower who finds herself cursed to always be in the shadow of his first wife, the eponymous Rebecca. It also can’t quite evoke the oppressive atmosphere of Manderley, silent and secretive, ancient and beautiful, the gilded cage of a mansion ruled over by a domineering housekeeper, the unforgettable Mrs. Danvers.
* 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY * 'One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century' SARAH WATERS * 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .'
Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory…
I’m a fan of all things spooky! I especially love ghost stories, which is probably abundantly clear from my own novels. I’ve been known to frequent old graveyards, seek out haunted places, and sneak into abandoned buildings for inspiration—and the adrenaline rush! This fascination started when I was a young girl and my dad brought me a YA ghost mystery home from the library—every week, he would have the librarian help him pick out books for me, and I would devour the stack immediately, then re-read until the next library day! My favorite ghost stories have a mix similar to what I write—a tension-filled romance combined with a spooky, suspenseful haunting.
Jane-Emily is a YA classic, both a sweet romance and a spooky ghost mystery, set in the early 1900s.
It’s also the book I described in my introduction as the one that made me fall in love with this genre! I first read it when I was about ten, and I immediately recommended it to my best friend, who was also an avid reader. To this day, we are both still scared of those mirrored gazing balls people display in gardens.
When my own children were young, I bought an old paperback on eBay and read it to them, savoring the story that I’ve re-read so many times once again. Even after all these years, Emily’s ghost still delivers chills as she unleashes her wrath on the innocent nine-year-old Jane, and the romance developing between Jane’s young aunt and an old friend of the family plays a part.
Emily was a selfish, willful, hateful child who died before her thirteenth birthday. But that was a long time ago.
Jane is nine years old and an orphan when she and her young Aunt Louisa come to spend the summer at Jane's grandmother's house, a large, mysterious mansion in Massachusetts. Then one day . . . Jane stares into a reflecting ball in the garden—and the face that looks back at her is not her own.
Many years earlier, a child of rage and malevolence lived in this place. And she never left. Now Emily has dark plans for little…
My first experience with historical fiction was reading The Witch from the Sea by that iconic author, Victoria Holt. This sparked a 40-year-long love affair with that genre that’s still burning intensely. I’ve been immersed in such fiction for a lifetime and have read the works of virtually every great author in this genre. I started my own series in 2020 because I feared this type of no-fluff fiction was becoming obsolete. There were 17th Century English characters making noise in my head so I used my creative writing background to bring them to life on the pages of my books, under the pen name Jessica Russell.
I started reading this story and thought at first that it was average. I was going along, wondering what would happen next, and then slam! I had to sit there and say, “What!” Really?” You couldn’t tear me away from it until the final word! It seems that so many authors these days try to replace poignant, dramatic characters and stellar plots with profanity and graphic sex. This writer does the opposite and this book is the absolute
best showcase of that type of talent. There was a twist, and then another twist, and then another twist, yet they were all completely believable. That book stayed with me forever and I’ve read it many times since.
For generations, Victoria Holt has dazzled and entertained millions of readers with her spine-tingling novels of romantic suspense. On the Night of the Seventh Moon is one of her most evocative, magical, and chilling. Come take a journey into a dark and shadowy forest where nothing is as it seems.…
On the night of the seventh moon, according to ancient Black Forest legend, Loke, the god of mischief, is abroad in the world. It is a night for singing and dancing. And it is a night for love.
Helena Trant was enchanted by everything she found in the Black Forest—its…
As a licensed mental health professional, I once had a client claiming to be demonically possessed, and requested that I get an exorcist to drive the evil spirits out of her body. Instead, I utilized a therapeutic approach to challenge “irrational” beliefs. The problem was gone. I realized that people were prone to strange beliefs and started to read and listen to “experts” who were skeptical in nature. To my surprise, I saw Carl Sagan distinguishing astrology (pseudoscience) from astronomy (science). His talk was clear, convincing, and logical. I was hooked.
Richard shows how people are emotionally attracted to thinking about the supernatural world and how they are hoping that it’s true. There are activities in the book that promote learning and understanding regarding how we fool ourselves and allow ourselves to be fooled. He even shows the reader how to convince others how he/she has paranormal abilities.
Professor Richard Wiseman is clear about one thing: paranormal phenomena don't exist. But in the same way that the science of space travel transforms our everyday lives, so research into telepathy, fortune-telling and out-of-body experiences produces remarkable insights into our brains, behaviour and beliefs. Paranormality embarks on a wild ghost chase into this new science of the supernatural and is packed with activities that allow you to experience the impossible. So throw away your crystals, ditch your lucky charms and cancel your subscription to Reincarnation Weekly. It is time to discover the real secrets of the paranormal. Learn how to…
I am a professor of English at the University of Florida, and an author of SF/F myself; I teach it both as a creative writer, and as a scholar of both American Literature and feminist thought. This is my subject and I am passionate about it, and I’ve been teaching SF/F, American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries for thirty years, so I know my topic well.
Vonda N. McIntyre is an often over-looked science fiction and alternate history author whose prose is lush, whose imagination is daunting, and who was unfailingly generous to the fan community, and to the community of writers she knew and supported; she was also my teacher, my mentor and my friend of thirty years, and she knew how to make you laugh! Exile is back in print after being out of print, and it is a terrifyingly beautiful, thought-provoking read.
The Exile Waiting was the first novel by the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelist Vonda N McIntyre, published in 1975. It introduces the world that McIntyre later made famous with her multi-award-winning Dreamsnake: a post-apocalyptic world in which Center, an enclosed domed city, is run by slave-owning families who control the planet's resources, and exile the dissidents.
It is an ordinary day. A transport arrives from off-world, piloted by two pseudosibs, a powerfully intelligent threat to Center's dominant families. A girl is punished for being in the wrong room under the gaze of the wrong person. A visiting stranger defends…
We all need to understand more about how the world ticks, who is in control, and why they act as they do. And we need to salute those of courage who refuse to go along with the flow in a craven or unthinking way. I was an MP for 18 years and a government minister at the Department for Transport with a portfolio that included rail, bus, active travel, and then at the Home Office as Crime Prevention minister. After leaving Parliament, I became managing director of The Big Lemon, an environmentally friendly bus and coach company in Brighton. I now act as an advisor to the Campaign for Better Transport, am a regular columnist and broadcaster, and undertake consultancy and lecturing work.
Have you ever sat on the top deck of a bus and stared hard at someone on the pavement below. It is surprising how often that person will then look up at you. How does this work? Rupert Sheldrake’s book delves deeply into such matters, ones for which there must be scientific explanations but which the traditional conservative scientist in a white coat dismisses without looking into the matter. Too many scientists, it seems, prefer the comfort of the status quo. We haven’t really moved on much from when Galileo was rubbished for suggesting the earth goes around the sun. Rupert Sheldrake reveals more about the human than we knew before.
Explores Rupert Sheldrake’s more than 25 years of research into telepathy, staring and intention, precognition, and animal premonitions
• Shows that unexplained human abilities--such as the sense of being stared at and phone telepathy--are not paranormal but normal, part of our biological nature
• Draws on more than 5,000 case histories, 4,000 questionnaire responses, and the results of experiments carried out with more than 20,000 people
• Reveals that our minds and intentions extend beyond our brains into the world around us and even into the future
Nearly everyone has experienced the feeling of being watched or had their stare…
After being rejected in school, because I had to move with my family again and again, I never had really friends and knew how being left alone and rejected felt. So I put my nose into books and developed a love for writing. Since I didn’t know what to do with them, I left them alone when I married. After being diagnosed with cancer later in my life, I couldn’t go back to work, I remembered my love to write and read so I started to write short stories again. I want to help young people going through similar rejections and bullying, to lift them up, and take the negativity out of their minds.
I love reading sci-fi YA books and this book was really talking to me. Peaceful contact or not?
Reading this book by the author – her first– it reminded me of the much-loved movie Avatar, which I also love.
Like in the movie, when Captain Melissa and her crew finally arrived at the new planet, to contact the people living there, they looked peaceful. They find out, that they are telepathic, not only the people, the plants, and animals as well.
After the people of the planet perform a play, they find out, what was really going on there. Not everything you see can be trusted when you look behind the scenes. From the outside, it was all peaceful, but when you touch the plants, they speak to you.
As the crew sets foot on a new world, human aggression meets the peaceful nature of an advanced race.
Captain Melissa Shakeworth leads her crew to a new world to make first contact with a tranquil, nonviolent, advanced race of beings.
As she tries to maintain control over her unpredictable crew in a world that is peaceful, she struggles to stay respectful and honorable as things quickly spin out of control.
One crew member’s volatility and aggressiveness goes too far, endangering his life and the safety of the crew and the entire mission.
I’ve always loved fantasy books with female main characters, but as I’ve grown older, it’s been difficult to find contemporary women’s fantasy with main characters over the age of thirty-five. So when I discovered paranormal women’s fiction, a new genre label for stories of midlife women with magic, I was instantly hooked. I read everything I could get my hands on. After that, I was so inspired that I decided to write a contemporary fantasy series of my own, one in which every protagonist was a woman over the age of forty.
Two words: action and adventure! A quick stop at the grocery store leaves our middle-aged main character able to read minds, but now there's a mob boss out to kill her.
Carrots is a thrilling magical story for fans of Stephanie Plum and similar female-led thriller stories, and there are plenty of books in this series to keep you busy reading.
A mind-reader, a mob-boss, and a hit-man. What could go wrong? More fun than you can imagine!
Book 1 in the Shelby Nichols Adventure Series
"One of the best and rarest gems of the indie book market."~ Matthew LeDrew
USA TODAY and Wall Street Journal Bestselling author Colleen Helme offers a clever mix of mystery, laugh-out-loud humor, and page-turning adventure in the highly acclaimed Shelby Nichols Adventure Series.
Stopping at the grocery store for some carrots shouldn't be dangerous, but in Shelby's case, it changes her life forever. During a bank robbery, she is caught in the cross-fire and grazed…
As a planetary scientist and college professor, I love the adventure of finding something new, the wonder of strange worlds, and the magic of mysterious discoveries that behave logically in a way that I can figure out. Unsurprisingly, that is what I like in my fiction too. I also love a story that explores the nature of the interaction between people, particularly in friendship or romance (all proper of course—I’m an old-fashioned guy). The books on this list are all touchstones in my own journey into science and life, and I hope that you can find in them the delight, wonder, insight, and motivation that I have found.
This fun story from the 1990s revived my youthful joy in reading at a time when the busy-ness of adulthood had stolen it away. Siri has forgotten who she is and is swept into multiple space adventures as she tries to reconstruct her lost memories and regain the power and place she once held with her people. In the process, she finds friendships (the Drapsk!) and romance (Morgan!), and comes to understand herself better.
In reading this book, I realized that the science fiction stories I like best are ones that deal with relationships, mystery, and discovery and not just complicated technologies and their implications for society. I realized that I could have fun reading again if I had some fun science fiction with adventure, romance, and exploration!
The tenth anniversary edition of Julie Czerneda's debut science fiction novel, the story of a woman on the run, from the law, her own people, and an unknown pursuer. Her memory taken from her by a stasis block, Sira must stay free long enough to regain her identity and the full use of her telepathic powers-for failure may cost not only her own future but that of her entire race.
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