Why am I passionate about this?

Long before I fell in love with History as an academic subject, I fell in love with stories. And as the granddaughter of Caribbean immigrants, true stories of my grandparents’ early lives could transport me to another place as vividly as fiction. So although I have studied History to Master’s level, where I specialized in the legacy of slavery, it is always to fiction that I turn to breathe life into the past. My favourite books are those that are unsettling in the unfamiliarity of the world they create, and yet deeply moving because, at heart, the characters are motivated by timeless and human things like grief, ambition, or love. 


I wrote

River Sing Me Home

By Eleanor Shearer,

Book cover of River Sing Me Home

What is my book about?

It’s 1834 and slavery has ended. In Barbados, Rachel flees her plantation in search of her stolen children, embarking on…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Barkskins

Eleanor Shearer Why did I love this book?

This book is a sweeping, multi-generational epic that is, at its core, about the destruction of the great American forests.

Annie Proulx writes so breathtakingly about the natural world, and is also able to conjure such vivid characters through the generations.

But what I love most about this book is how it connects unexpected places – like 16th Century Canada and Japan, or 18th Century California and New Zealand – reminding us that history is not confined to any one place. 

By Annie Proulx,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Barkskins as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017

NOW A MAJOR TELEVISION SERIES

From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world's forests.

In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a "seigneur," for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters - barkskins. Rene suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to…


Book cover of Omeros

Eleanor Shearer Why did I love this book?

This is not a book about history so much as one that has history suffused through it.

To me, it so perfectly captures what I love most about the Caribbean – the way that the past is always close to the surface. Derek Walcott writes so movingly about St Lucia, which is where my grandmother was born.

This is a book that is made for re-reading – I have read it at least three times now, and every time I spot a new line or a new image to savour.  

By Derek Walcott,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Omeros as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Omeros is the grand epic poem told in multiple chapters from Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott.

With circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, Omeros simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events--the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement--and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

“One of the great poems of our time.” —John Lucas, New Statesman


Book cover of Beloved

Eleanor Shearer Why did I love this book?

Some of the images in this book – like the moment when Sethe, the protagonist, shrugs off her dress to reveal the whip scars on her back – will stay with me to the grave.

This novel is brutal and beautiful in equal measure. Anyone who wants to explore the forgotten parts of Black history owes a huge debt to Toni Morrison, and she fills such a heart-wrenching story with such a vivid cast of characters.

By Toni Morrison,

Why should I read it?

39 authors picked Beloved as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times

Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved

It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…


Book cover of Small Island

Eleanor Shearer Why did I love this book?

This novel is about the experience of the Windrush generation – the Caribbean people who moved to Britain after the Second World War.

Andrea Levy so perfectly captures the experiences of these people that I feel like I can see my own grandparents on the page.

But what I love most about this book is that it sees itself as telling a part of British history – showing how the Caribbean and Britain were connected, but also exploring with equal empathy the experiences of white British characters during and after the War.

As someone mixed race, it is so rare to find books that speak to both sides of my heritage, and this is one of them. 

By Andrea Levy,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked Small Island as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Hortense shared Gilbert's dream of leaving Jamaica and coming to England to start a better life. But when she at last joins her husband, she is shocked by London's shabbiness and horrified at the way the English live. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was. Queenie's neighbours do not approve of her choice of tenants, and neither would her husband, were he there. Through the stories of these people, Small Island explores a point in England's past when the country began to change.


Book cover of Bring Up the Bodies

Eleanor Shearer Why did I love this book?

Hilary Mantel’s trilogy following the life of Thomas Cromwell is absolutely peerless as far as historical fiction goes.

One of my favourite challenges of the genre is how to take a time and place that is completely unfamiliar, where characters are motivated by ideas and concepts that modern readers find strange, and yet still find that kernel of universal feeling that allows a reader to anchor themselves in the text.

This novel in particular does that perfectly, showing the desperate ambition and cunning of both Cromwell and Anne Boleyn.

The result is completely captivating – and means that the story unfolds as if its final destination is not fixed, even though we all know what must happen in the end. 

By Hilary Mantel,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked Bring Up the Bodies as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the Man Booker Prize

The second book in Hilary Mantel's award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, with a stunning new cover design to celebrate the publication of the much anticipated The Mirror and the Light

An astounding literary accomplishment, Bring Up the Bodies is the story of this most terrifying moment of history, by one of our greatest living novelists.

'Our most brilliant English writer' Guardian

Bring Up the Bodies unlocks the darkly glittering court of Henry VIII, where Thomas Cromwell is now chief minister. With Henry captivated by plain Jane Seymour and rumours of Anne Boleyn's faithlessness whispered by…


Explore my book 😀

River Sing Me Home

By Eleanor Shearer,

Book cover of River Sing Me Home

What is my book about?

It’s 1834 and slavery has ended. In Barbados, Rachel flees her plantation in search of her stolen children, embarking on a journey to reassemble the pieces of her family. Inspired by the brave women of the Caribbean who really did search for their children after emancipation, this is a story of hope, a mother’s fierce love, and what it means to be free.

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Tasha and the Biologist

By Amy Q. Barker,

Book cover of Tasha and the Biologist

Amy Q. Barker Author Of Bailey and the CEO: A Corporate Love Story

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Avid reader Nature lover Park ranger wanna be Best Nana ever

Amy's 3 favorite reads in 2024

What is my book about?

Tasha and the Biologist is the second book in the "A Better Man" series. It's a contemporary romance about second chances, two lonely birders, and the healing power of love.

Tasha Moore is a visiting nurse with a family secret. She just went through a bad breakup. Caleb Drexel is a bird biologist trying to start a new life in a small town. He just got out of an unhappy marriage.

What happens when hope and romance bloom between these two nature lovers?

Tasha and the Biologist

By Amy Q. Barker,

What is this book about?

Tasha
He was handsome, confident, nice, smart—a good guy.
How did he end up here in the middle of Indiana?
And how did he know so much about whooping cranes?
I’d never met someone as passionate about birds as I was.
Was it too soon for me to be thinking about love again?
Caleb
She was sweet, kind, caring—a nurse and a birder.
I really liked her. Maybe more than liked.
And I’d only spent two hours—three, tops—with her.
Yet, I’d promised myself I wouldn’t get involved with anyone for at least a year after my divorce.


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