Here are 97 books that A Heavy Reckoning fans have personally recommended if you like
A Heavy Reckoning.
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I was the ten-year-old child who devoured David Copperfield (and then every other Dickens book), the teenager who began a lifelong love of Russian literature after discovering Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. To this day, my greatest reading pleasure is to lose (and find) myself in the rich, expansive world of a nineteenth-century novel. In my contemporary rom-com, Blame It on the Brontës, my heroine is torn between her literary ideal of love and the reality of losing the love of her life. To paraphrase Keats, she tries to reconcile “the truth of imagination” with “the holiness of the heart’s affections.” As a romance writer, it is my quest, too.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre follows the format of a romance novel: a governess falls in love with her employer, they overcome impediments, and they live happily ever after. Add a madwoman in the attic, Thornfield Hall in flames, and Mr. Rochester’s voice calling to Jane across the winds, and you have an unforgettable romance novel.
I admire Jane immensely. Her journey from being a suffering student at Lowood School to an independent woman is as relevant as ever. Through every experience, she asserts her autonomy but never wavers in her moral compass.
In Brontë’s world, love involves every fiber of one’s being, not just emotions or desire. Mr. Rochester is a complex, conflicted man who proves himself worthy of Jane’s love. For me, they have set the standard of the romantic heroine and hero.
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.
I'm an English writer now living in the wilds of Tasmania, Australia. My love of books began at school. I devoured the classics and couldn’t wait to audition for the lead in the next school play. Both my father and brother were in the military and I saw firsthand their love and duty for country, and family often with great cost to their mental health and wellbeing. I write stories about heroes like them and the women who win their hearts. Love takes courage.
Another first-in-series story that falls squarely into the protective romance category with fierce alpha heroes and the women who win their hearts.
I love these larger-than-life heroes and Ms. Crouch effortlessly makes them believable, especially when you want to escape everyday reality. Not recommended on a regular basis, but something we all want to do at times, on holiday, at the weekend or simply after a rough day at the office.
I love the way Zac patiently and carefully rebuilds his shaky relationship with Annie. Guess I really am a sucker for the hard, in this case, very muscular frame, and the gooey center living inside the man.
He’d protect her from any threat… But what if the biggest threat is him?
Doctor Anne Griffin is back in Oak Creek, Wyoming only because she has no other options. Here, she was always the shy, stuttering girl, invisible to everyone.
Except Zac Mackay. The very reason she left in the first place.
Zac’s years in Special Forces taught him survival skills, and he’s created a company—Linear Tactical—to teach those skills to others, so they never have to live in fear.
Then why is Annie, the last person he’d ever want to hurt, afraid of him?
I'm an English writer now living in the wilds of Tasmania, Australia. My love of books began at school. I devoured the classics and couldn’t wait to audition for the lead in the next school play. Both my father and brother were in the military and I saw firsthand their love and duty for country, and family often with great cost to their mental health and wellbeing. I write stories about heroes like them and the women who win their hearts. Love takes courage.
Colby and Mia’s story was the first military romance book I ever read and was the inspiration to write my own romantic suspense. Lots of action, sizzling romance, and a happy ending. What’s not to love?
Two very different people work together to bring the bad guys to justice while sorting out their rocky relationship. In all of Ms. Harber’s books, the men are fierce protectors, and the women are strong and independent. A winning combination.
My father and brother were military men and I strongly identified with the gruff characters with soft and compassionate hearts.
After putting her life on the line to protect classified intelligence, military psychologist Mia Kensington is on a cross-country road trip from hell with an intrusive save-the-day hero. Uninterested in his white knight act, she'd rather take her chances without the ruggedly handsome, cold-blooded operative who boasts an alpha complex and too many guns.
Colby Winters, an elite member of The Titan Group, has a single objective on his black ops mission: recover a document important to national security. It was supposed to be an easy in-and-out operation. But now, by any means necessary becomes a survival mantra when he…
I'm an English writer now living in the wilds of Tasmania, Australia. My love of books began at school. I devoured the classics and couldn’t wait to audition for the lead in the next school play. Both my father and brother were in the military and I saw firsthand their love and duty for country, and family often with great cost to their mental health and wellbeing. I write stories about heroes like them and the women who win their hearts. Love takes courage.
This collection of short stories has a special place in my heart.
Stories written about people living in the early sixties in working-class London. The colloquial language rings true in my ears, and the stories belong in that special place held dear by my teenage self. Laugh or cry, I pick the book up when I am at most in need of, no place like home, comfort.
Ken Loach made a film based on the book and followed it up with another one of her books. Poor Cow. Dog-eared and well-worn, the books remain on my shelf.
'Her art is ignited by voice, as you hear it, is unquestionable' ALI SMITH, GUARDIAN
'Distinctive, pared-down style' DAVID EVANS, INDEPENDENT
'Unflinching look at the lives of working-class women' DAILY MAIL
Nell Dunn's scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy.
I grew up in a reading and history-loving family. My parents read all the time, and their books of choice combined historical fiction and nonfiction. It’s no wonder I ended up teaching high school history for over three decades. The first books I read were my older brother’s hand-me-down Hardy Boys. Then, I went on to Agatha Christie. Books written in the 1920s and 30s were historical mysteries by the time I read them decades later, so the historical mystery genre is a natural fit. As for the Victorian age, all that gaslight and fog makes it the perfect milieu for murder.
This superb biography is an engrossing account of the mysterious title surgeon and the doctor’s fascinating world. James Miranda Barry joined the British Army in 1813 as a regimental surgeon and served in colonial posts for the next fifty years. But Barry had been born Margaret Bulkley, an anatomical female—a surprise revealed after the doctor’s death.
Was Barry’s masquerade strategic, the doctor’s only route to a medical career? Was Barry a transgender person? I wondered if the “truth” would remain a mystery. Rachel Holmes persuaded me that the probable answer lies in a document “gathering dust” in Edinburgh’s medical school archives, a revelation she saves for the last chapter.
A reissue of Rachel Holmes's landmark biography of Dr James Barry, one of the most enigmatic figures of the Victorian age.
James Barry was one of the nineteenth century's most exceptional doctors, and one of its great unsung heroes. Famed for his brilliant innovations, Dr Barry influenced the birth of modern medical practice in places as far apart as South Africa, Jamaica and Canada. Barry's skills attracted admirers across the globe, but there were also many detractors of the ostentatious dandy, who caused controversy everywhere he went. Yet unbeknownst to all, the military surgeon concealed a lifelong secret at the…
I am a paramedic. I like being a medic. Not so much because of the science and medicine related to the job, but I like connecting with people. People from every walk of life. I like the chaos and unpredictability of the streets. The books on my list portray what it’s like to be out there. Not just war stories. But stories of humility and grace.
I found Trauma: My Life as an Emergency Surgeon when I was on a read-all-the-books-about-emergency-medicine kick. I had recently gotten my paramedic certification and was trying to learn all I could about the science of medicine. My brain does not do well with textbooks, so I gravitated towards memoirs.
Unfortunately, being a great doctor and being a great—or even good—writer, seldom go hand in hand. Most of the doctor memoirs I came across were as thrilling as an Anatomy and Physiology textbook.
Dr. Cole’s book was different. He’s a skilled writer and his experiences are exciting and varied.
"Trauma" is Dr. Cole's harrowing account of a career fighting to save lives. But unlike the authors of other medical memoirs, Cole trained to be a surgeon in the military and served as a physician member of a Marine Corps reconnaissance unit, United States Special Operations Command, and on a Navy Reserve SEAL team. From treating war casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq to his experiences as a civilian trauma surgeon treating alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals, and the mentally deranged, "Trauma" is an intense look at one man's commitment to his country and to those most desperately in need of aid.
I’m a biomedical anthropologist/epidemiologist with a post-doctoral studies in Human Genetics. I learned about pharmacology and medicinal chemistry at a large Swiss pharmaceutical company. There, we developed some of the first precision medicines in oncology—treating tumors with a specific protein signature. We took the next step to personalize prescription medicine, which is in its infancy. The goal is to prescribe the right drug, the first time—prescribing drugs that work with patient genes. As VP, Global Research Strategy and SVP, Global Pharmaceutical Strategy, this has been my vision for decades, and why I wrote The Goldilocks Genome to introduce personalized medicine to the lay public in a compelling read.
Who doesn’t love a true story of David and Goliath? Who really believes that the inventor of the “better mousetrap” always wins? This is a real-life medical thriller when the properties of a mineral were found to be a cheaper, better solution to stopping battlefield bleeding.
The “Davids” took on “Goliath,” who supported their vested interests in an inferior product that cost the lives of infantrymen. It took a courageous whistle-blower to come forward and change the trajectory. Ultimately the mineral was adopted and used effectively in the Iraq War. The better trauma medicine won, but it took years. The story is, sadly, all too real—but good does triumph!
The "high-stakes" true story of how an absent-minded inventor and a down-on-his-luck salesman joined forces to create a once‑in‑a‑generation lifesaving product: "Suspenseful storytelling helps us see and feel the struggle and frustration, the sweat and tears . . . Inspiring” (Robert Kolker, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road).
At the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, dramatized by the popular film Black Hawk Down, the majority of soldiers who died were killed instantly or bled to death before they could reach an operating table. This tragedy reinforced the need for a revolutionary treatment that could transform trauma medicine.…
As a lover of history, when I lived in Hawaii, Japan, and Guam, I visited World War II sites. I had a fascinating career as a political reporter. I reported on a “Christmas Drop,” a tradition since WWII. On Johnston Atoll, I did photojournalism on the incineration of chemical weapons from East Germany. I interviewed a Kuwaiti sheik and human shields during Desert Storm. I covered negotiations when the Philippines didn’t renew US military base leases. While at the San Antonio Express News, I researched the WWII Japanese soldier, Shoichi Yokoi, who hid on Guam for nearly 28 years. That was the seed for my novel No Surrender Soldier.
Author Dandi Daley Mackall wrote With Love, Wherever You Are after reading a trunk-load of letters exchanged by her parents during their years as a nurse and doctor on the battlefields of Europe during World War II. Mackall's novel is based on genealogical research and is a story about people and the matters of their hearts, instead of military strategies and battles. Mackall was closer in time, though, since With Love, Wherever You Are is about her parents and set during the 1940s. She had access to primary sources in her research. As “The Greatest Generation” is passing away, it’s important that authors like Mackall are preserving these biographical stories.
Everyone knows that war romances never last . . . After a whirlwind romance and wedding, Helen Eberhart Daley, an army nurse, and Lieutenant Frank Daley, M.D. are sent to the front lines of Europe with only letters to connect them for months at a time.
Surrounded by danger and desperately wounded patients, they soon find that only the war seems real―and their marriage more and more like a distant dream. If they make it through the war, will their marriage survive?
Based on the incredible true love story, With Love, Wherever You Are is an adult novel from beloved…
I’ve written a couple of books about other subjects, but most of my professional life has been devoted to writing, speaking, and teaching about the South. I’ve been doing it ever since I went north to college and graduate school in the 1960s. My early books and articles were written as a sociologist, mostly for other sociologists, but in the 1970s I started writing what I learned to call “familiar essays” for a more general readership, and lately I’ve been writing about Southern foodways—three books about barbecue (so far), one of them a cookbook. I’ve also written several country songs (only one of them recorded).
This magnificent history of the South’s landscape, an unexpected one-off from a historian of military medicine, looks at how humans have shaped the Southern land and vice versa. It debunks the romantic view of pre-Columbian Indians as “natural ecologists” living in harmony with nature, showing how they radically altered their environment by hunting and burning. Europeans were even more exploitative and brought with them diseases that loved their new home. Later developments like flood control, wildlife protection, and anti-pollution measures have had profound and sometimes unanticipated consequences. The book is richly detailed and unusually well-written—not surprising, since Cowdrey has also written award-winning science fiction and fantasy.
Here is the story of the long interaction between humans, land, and climate in the American South. It is a tale of exploitation and erosion, of destruction, disease, and defeat, but also of the persistent search for knowledge and wisdom. It is a story whose villains were also its victims and sometimes its heroes. Ancient forces created the southern landscape, but, as Albert E. Cowdrey shows, humankind from the time of earliest habitation has been at work reshaping it. The southern Indians, far from being the "natural ecologists" of myth, radically transformed their environment by hunting and burning. Such patterns…
Life is, and I think we all can agree, a wild mess of lessons, harshness, wonderful moments, and so much more—the coming-of-age genre has been so fun to explore for me because it touches on the many aspects of daily life. We all live different lives, and telling the stories of others, fictionally or non-fictionally is always something I have enjoyed. I am a journalist, author of coming-of-age fiction, and a lover of the stories life gives us. I hope you find within my recommended books, stories of growth, stories of dealing with life, and stories of the crazy yet beautiful gift that life is.
The Weight of this World is one of my absolute favorite additions to southern literature. I enjoyed this book, and honestly all of David Joy’s books, because it is crafted in a way to show darkness while at the same time showing glimmers of hope within the characters. This novel is real, raw, and a wonderful read that I would recommend to anyone who is looking to read a book that you can’t put down because of the action, the moments of self-discovery, and the depiction of the roughness within the world.
Critically acclaimed author David Joy, whose debut, Where All Light Tends to Go, was hailed as "a savagely moving novel that will likely become an important addition to the great body of Southern literature" (The Huffington Post), returns to the mountains of North Carolina with a powerful story about the inescapable weight of the past.
A combat veteran returned from war, Thad Broom can't leave the hardened world of Afghanistan behind, nor can he forgive himself for what he saw there. His mother, April, is haunted by her own demons, a secret trauma she has carried for years. Between them…
