When I was a boy, my adoptive father – a star pupil and friend of C.S. Lewis – heard I’d started reading the Sherlock Holmes stories. He bought every Sherlock Holmes book he could find. I remember lifting one to my nose and smelling the pages. I fell in love with books that day. I went on to earn a senior scholarship in English Literature at Cambridge University, and a PhD in storytelling. Since then, I have written over 50 books of my own and ghostwritten over 30 titles. I now host The Christian Storyteller Channel on YouTube, and I run BookLab, dedicated to helping emerging authors. My whole life is books.
I’m recommending this novel because it shows how books can quite literally save your life.
There was a time when I was very young when I was sent away to boarding school and suffered the trauma of abandonment and abuse. The school library offered me a magical portal into other worlds where I could escape in my mind, if not in my body.
The Midnight Library connects with this part of my story. I love the genre (magical realism). I also love the idea of books in a magical library offering hope for those suffering from depression and despair.
The #1 New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon
Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year
"A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits."-The Washington Post
The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of How To Stop Time and The Comfort Book.
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of…
I’m recommending this novel because it’s about the way you can sometimes find very special treasures in old bookshops.
I love the idea of writing a story about this because it’s happened to me. A few times during my life I’ve been in a second-hand bookshop and stumbled on a book that I didn’t even know existed – one that was just what I needed for that season of my life or that phase of my pursuit of truth.
I love The Echo of Old Books because it celebrates such book-related serendipities. And obviously I love it because it's my genre too – magical realism.
A novel about the magical lure of books and summoning the courage to rewrite our stories by the Amazon Charts bestselling author of The Keeper of Happy Endings and The Last of the Moon Girls.
Rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer's affinity for books extends beyond the intoxicating scent of old paper, ink, and leather. She can feel the echoes of the books' previous owners-an emotional fingerprint only she can read. When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound volumes that appear to have never been published, her gift quickly becomes an obsession. Not only is each inscribed with a startling incrimination,…
I love unusual first-person narrators anyway. But the idea of Death telling the story of a young girl in World War 2 who grows to love words and adore books, that’s genius. I love it! And I love the way that this girl, Liesel, comes to a very Hebraic understanding of the power of words to give life.
This, in the end, causes a great reversal. Instead of Liesel being frightened of death, Death is frightened of her! I love the idea of books containing something that’s stronger than death.
'Life affirming, triumphant and tragic . . . masterfully told. . . but also a wonderful page-turner' Guardian 'Brilliant and hugely ambitious' New York Times 'Extraordinary' Telegraph ___
HERE IS A SMALL FACT - YOU ARE GOING TO DIE
1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall.
I love the idea that books have souls, and I adore this quotation from Zafon’s classic novel: “Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.”
I was thrilled to find this novel after I’d written my book because it shows that there are others who sense the soulful quality of old books. I also love it because it is written by a Spanish novelist, and it is in the Spanish-speaking world that we find the true literary origins of my most-loved genre of writing – magical realism.
"The Shadow of the Wind is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero." -Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice)
"One gorgeous read." -Stephen King
Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer's son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julian Carax. But when he sets out to find the author's other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been…
I love unpretentious, dusty, second-hand bookshops that contain many surprises.
In my own novel, I celebrate a unique bookshop located in Paris during the 1920s-1940s – Shakespeare and Company. I love the fact that Evie Woods shares the same yearning as me for those days at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop where the likes of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway visited, often giving readings.
You can visit a new version of that shop in Paris today, founded by George Whitman. I love it deeply – the best bookshop in the world.
The Echo of Old Books meets The Lost Apothecary in this evocative and charming novel full of mystery and secrets.
'The thing about books,' she said 'is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.'
On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found...
For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their own lives.
But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones…
A Book in Time is a love story about a book’s longing for the mother who bore it in 1805. Adopted by many different owners over the next two centuries – some loving, others unscrupulous – this book longs to be reunited with the elderly author who cherished it as if it was her only child. As the book passes through many hands, it observes not only the way people treat it but each other, and in all of this, its mother’s love sets the high bar for true devotion.
A Book in Time is an award-winning story in the magical realism genre. If you’re a lover of books, or you work in a profession to do with books, you will be hooked from the first sentence.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
