100 books like A Man's Place

By Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie (translator),

Here are 100 books that A Man's Place fans have personally recommended if you like A Man's Place. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324

Alexander F. Robertson Author Of Mieres Reborn: The Reinvention of a Catalan Community

From my list on village lives as keys to history.

Why am I passionate about this?

Working as a social anthropologist in Uganda, Ghana, Malaysia, and Catalonia, I became fascinated by villages as microcosms of broader social change, places where history can be observed in the making through the lives and histories of families and of their members. Villages are anything but ‘natural’ communities or social backwaters. They survive (or perish) because people, beliefs, and goods are continually moving in and out. Village lives are certainly shaped by state and society, but the impact goes both ways. Each of my selected books tells a gripping and distinctive story of villagers grappling with social and cultural tension, the forces of change, and the challenges of survival.

Alexander's book list on village lives as keys to history

Alexander F. Robertson Why did Alexander love this book?

An instant best-seller when it first appeared in 1978, Montaillou uses Inquisition records of the cross-examinations of Cathar heretics and their Catholic neighbours and kin to recover the religious, social, emotional and sexual lives of medieval Pyrenean villagers.

Shepherds, mayors, matriarchs and servants, priests and laity, come vividly to life as they recount their work and pleasures, friendships and enmities, doubts and beliefs. 

Montaillou is the most influential example of what was then a speciality of the French Annales school of history, namely, studies of everyday life (la vie quotidienne) in a particular historical milieu.

Since then micro-histories, detailed accounts of social microcosms and what they tell us about the wider worlds in which they were embedded, and the historical shifts or transformations to which they bear witness, have become the bread and butter not only of local but of global historians.   

By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Barbara Bray (translator),

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

APPEARS UNREAD. Hardcover with slipcase. Slipcase shows minimal shelving wear, binding is very slightly pulling away from the spine, otherwise an UNBLEMISHED copy.


Book cover of The Temple of Memories: History, Power, and Morality in a Chinese Village

Alexander F. Robertson Author Of Mieres Reborn: The Reinvention of a Catalan Community

From my list on village lives as keys to history.

Why am I passionate about this?

Working as a social anthropologist in Uganda, Ghana, Malaysia, and Catalonia, I became fascinated by villages as microcosms of broader social change, places where history can be observed in the making through the lives and histories of families and of their members. Villages are anything but ‘natural’ communities or social backwaters. They survive (or perish) because people, beliefs, and goods are continually moving in and out. Village lives are certainly shaped by state and society, but the impact goes both ways. Each of my selected books tells a gripping and distinctive story of villagers grappling with social and cultural tension, the forces of change, and the challenges of survival.

Alexander's book list on village lives as keys to history

Alexander F. Robertson Why did Alexander love this book?

On a cold winter night in 1960 the families of Dachuan village were forced out of their homes to make way for the waters of a huge new dam. Some managed to retrieve a few bones from the family graves to take to their new homes. But the ancestral temple that had been at the heart of village life and identity for centuries was lost to the rising waters. 

For decades Maoist policy suppressed all religious expression in China, but the reforms of the 1980s saw many forms of religious revival, including the triumphant reconstruction of Dachuan’s Confucius temple, its rituals, ethics, and ancestral spirit tablets. 

Jing’s book is an outstanding study of social memory, its powers of resistance to crisis and oppression, and its mobilization as a resource to rebuild community and history. A unique window onto the travails of modern China, it also invites us to reflect on…

By Jun Jing,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Temple of Memories as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This study focuses on the politics of memory in the village of Dachuan in northwest China, in which 85 percent of the villagers are surnamed Kong and believe themselves to be descendants of Confucius. It recounts both how this proud community was subjected to intense suffering during the Maoist era, culminating in its forcible resettlement in December 1960 to make way for the construction of a major hydroelectric dam, and how the village eventually sought recovery through the commemoration of that suffering and the revival of a redefined religion.

Before 1949, the Kongs had dominated their area because of their…


Book cover of Moroccan Households in the World Economy: Labor and Inequality in a Berber Village

Alexander F. Robertson Author Of Mieres Reborn: The Reinvention of a Catalan Community

From my list on village lives as keys to history.

Why am I passionate about this?

Working as a social anthropologist in Uganda, Ghana, Malaysia, and Catalonia, I became fascinated by villages as microcosms of broader social change, places where history can be observed in the making through the lives and histories of families and of their members. Villages are anything but ‘natural’ communities or social backwaters. They survive (or perish) because people, beliefs, and goods are continually moving in and out. Village lives are certainly shaped by state and society, but the impact goes both ways. Each of my selected books tells a gripping and distinctive story of villagers grappling with social and cultural tension, the forces of change, and the challenges of survival.

Alexander's book list on village lives as keys to history

Alexander F. Robertson Why did Alexander love this book?

The Berber village of Tadrar clings to the steep slopes of the High Atlas. Lives are hard.

Women, men and children labor to bring precious water to homes, fields, and byres, to coax barley from narrow terraces, keep houses warm, feed families, tend the sick, and support the mosque and school. Most younger people go to the city for work, at least for a while, sending money home to help their families. 

So how do families and individuals view their options, their place in the village and in the world?

Vivid interviews and observations stud Crawford’s affectionate and perceptive account of how people in Tadrar decide to become involved in the larger world economy, and their views on what it does for them and to them. 

By David Crawford,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Moroccan Households in the World Economy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, far from the hustle and noise of urban centers, lies a village made of mud and rock, barely discernible from the surrounding landscape. Yet a closer look reveals a carefully planned community of homes nestled above the trees, where rock slides are least frequent, and steep terraces of barley fields situated just above spring flood level. The Berber-speaking Muslims who live and farm on these precipitous mountainsides work together at the arduous task of irrigating the fields during the dry season, continuing a long tradition of managing land, labor, and other essential resources…


Book cover of English Pastoral: An Inheritance

Alexander F. Robertson Author Of Mieres Reborn: The Reinvention of a Catalan Community

From my list on village lives as keys to history.

Why am I passionate about this?

Working as a social anthropologist in Uganda, Ghana, Malaysia, and Catalonia, I became fascinated by villages as microcosms of broader social change, places where history can be observed in the making through the lives and histories of families and of their members. Villages are anything but ‘natural’ communities or social backwaters. They survive (or perish) because people, beliefs, and goods are continually moving in and out. Village lives are certainly shaped by state and society, but the impact goes both ways. Each of my selected books tells a gripping and distinctive story of villagers grappling with social and cultural tension, the forces of change, and the challenges of survival.

Alexander's book list on village lives as keys to history

Alexander F. Robertson Why did Alexander love this book?

This too is a tale of three village generations grappling with historical change.

Here the story is about changing ideas of stewardship of the land, an enthralling account of farming ways in flux and of the intricate, back-breaking, and unpredictable work of restoring degraded farmland to health.

The Rebanks family run a hill-farm in a Lake District village. Rebanks’ grandfather started with horse-ploughs. A tractor replaced the horses, yet he still knew the individual ways of every ewe and cow and farmed lightly on the land. But Rebanks’ father, caught in market pressures, industrialized his farming methods.

Progress became the mantra of all the village farmers, including the young Rebanks himself.

Today, although they recognize the precarity of their livelihood and the damage to the land, most see no alternative to intensifying production. When Rebanks decides to switch to regenerative farming to preserve the land for future generations, his fellow…

By James Rebanks,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked English Pastoral as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

THE SUNDAY TIMES NATURE BOOK OF THE YEAR

The new bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life

'A beautifully written story of a family, a home and a changing landscape' Nigel Slater

As a boy, James Rebanks's grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognisable. The men and women had vanished from the…


Book cover of When Did You Last See Your Father?: A Son's Memoir of Love and Loss

Amitava Kumar Author Of My Beloved Life

From my list on fathers.

Why am I passionate about this?

When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.

Amitava's book list on fathers

Amitava Kumar Why did Amitava love this book?

A year before my own father died, I had read Blake Morrison’s tragicomic memoir about his father. I had marked several passages but the page I had book-marked with a card from a London restaurant contained the following lines: “I’ve become a death bore. I embarrass people at dinner parties with my morbidity. I used to think the world divided between those who have children and those who don’t; now I think it divides between those who have lost a parent and those whose parents are still alive.”

That line haunts me even more powerfully now, and I cannot think of a more true line.

By Blake Morrison,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked When Did You Last See Your Father? as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The critically-acclaimed memoir and the basis for the 2007 motion picture, directed by Anand Tucker and starring Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent

And when did you last see your father? Was it last weekend or last Christmas? Was it before or after he exhaled his last breath? And was it him really, or was it a version of him, shaped by your own expectations and disappointments?

Blake Morrison's subject is universal: the life and death of a parent, a father at once beloved and exasperating, charming and infuriating, domineering and terribly vulnerable. In reading about Dr. Arthur Morrison, we come…


Book cover of Experience

Amitava Kumar Author Of My Beloved Life

From my list on fathers.

Why am I passionate about this?

When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.

Amitava's book list on fathers

Amitava Kumar Why did Amitava love this book?

A writer’s book about a writer-father. In this remarkable memoir, Amis pays tribute to Kingsley Martin. The book is truthful about the anxiety of influence and about the collision of ambition, the competitiveness between writers, even when they happen to be father and son.

What made the book touching was Martin Amis’s love and sorrow not only for Kingsley Martin, his biological father but also for his literary father, the novelist Saul Bellow. Bonus: Amis’s probing, ruthless, but always burnished sentences: “The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental, and ineluctably trite.”

By Martin Amis,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Experience as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The author traces his life and career, examining his relationship with his father, comic novelist Kingsley Amis, and the changing literary scene in Great Britain and the United States.


Book cover of Home before Dark

Amitava Kumar Author Of My Beloved Life

From my list on fathers.

Why am I passionate about this?

When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.

Amitava's book list on fathers

Amitava Kumar Why did Amitava love this book?

When Susan Cheever was a young journalist, her father, the novelist and short-story writer, John Cheever, would often say to her that she ought to put her experiences down on paper. “I write to make sense of my life,” the father said to his daughter to explain why he kept a journal.

This book is Susan Cheever’s attempt to make sense of her father’s life: his decline and dissolution, especially owing to his alcoholism, and his struggle as a writer to nevertheless find coherence and control in life through the exercise of his art. 

By Susan Cheever,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Home before Dark as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The late writer's eldest child draws on her father's journals and letters and on her own memories to construct a sympathetic, insightful account of Cheever's life, career, literary relationships, problems, and family life


Book cover of Between Father and Son: Family Letters

Amitava Kumar Author Of My Beloved Life

From my list on fathers.

Why am I passionate about this?

When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.

Amitava's book list on fathers

Amitava Kumar Why did Amitava love this book?

Every Father’s Day, someone or the other on my social media feed will post Robert Hayden’s wonderful poem “Those Winter Sundays.” The poem takes me back not only to the many acts of kindness and unheralded small sacrifices that my father made but also to the ambition and the anxiety of Seepersad Naipaul on behalf of his son away at Oxford and starting in life as a writer, a writer who later in life will win the Nobel Prize.

The poignant part of this drama is the father’s own ambition and anxiety about making it as a writer. It doesn’t happen. Instead, the son receives a telegram with some terrible news. He sends his family a telegram in return: “= HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME = VIDO”

By V. S. Naipaul,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Between Father and Son as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An “extraordinary rich correspondence” (The New York Times Book Review) between a seventeen-year-old aspiring writer at Oxford who would go on to become a Nobel Prize winning author and his sacrificing, beloved father. 

At seventeen, V.S. Naipaul wanted to "follow no other profession" but writing. Awarded a scholarship by the Trinidadian government, he set out to attend Oxford, where he encountered a vastly different world from the one he yearned to leave behind. Separated from his family by continents, and grappling with depression, financial strain, loneliness, and dislocation, "Vido" bridged the distance with a faithful correspondence that began shortly before…


Book cover of Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution

Jeff Horn Author Of The Making of a Terrorist: Alexandre Rousselin and the French Revolution

From my list on the terror in the French Revolution.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been trying to understand revolutionary violence my whole life, in the classroom and through scholarship. I am fundamentally interested in questions of “how” and “so what” because even the best, most heavily evidenced historical reconstructions of collective decisions rely heavily on conjecture, especially when it comes to something as complex and controversial as revolutionary violence. My biography of Alexandre Rousselin, an eyewitness and participant in French politics across the Revolutionary era, brings to life the choices and pressures that influenced his actions without minimizing the price he paid for those choices. Rousselin’s extraordinary life story contextualizes and engages understandings of the Terror in the French Revolution like those reviewed below.

Jeff's book list on the terror in the French Revolution

Jeff Horn Why did Jeff love this book?

This book made me want to study with Lynn Hunt. 

Divided into “The Poetics of Power” and “The Sociology of Politics,” the better known first half explores rhetoric, symbolic forms of political practice, and imagery in novel ways that have influenced both my scholarship and my teaching. 

But I was even more struck by the second part where Hunt considered the backgrounds, age, occupations, and experience of Revolutionary political actors in four French cities as a way to understand the political geography of the Revolution, networks, culture brokers, and the emergence of a new political class. 

This approach shaped my dissertation and first book, but, more importantly it made me think about the link among and between cultural influences, socio-economic backgrounds, and the lived experience to understand the French Revolution.

By Lynn Hunt,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When this book was published in 1984, it reframed the debate on the French Revolution, shifting the discussion from the Revolution's role in wider, extrinsic processes (such as modernization, capitalist development, and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes) to its central political significance: the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by molding character, culture, and social relations. In a new preface to this twentieth-anniversary edition, Hunt reconsiders her work in the light of the past twenty years' scholarship.


Book cover of Enchantée

Ryan Graudin Author Of The Enchanted Lies of Celeste Artois

From my list on set in a magical version of Paris.

Why am I passionate about this?

I love Paris. It is one of my favorite cities on Earth. One of the reasons I adore it so much is because it has such a palpable sense of enchantment. There is magic in its cathedrals and catacombs, its pâtisseries and feal markets, its rich tradition of art and joie de vivre. You can feel it in your soul as you walk through the city, under the gazes of its gargoyles and the charm of its cafes. Thus, I’ve always been drawn to stories that take this one step further—exploring a Paris that harbors actual magic.

Ryan's book list on set in a magical version of Paris

Ryan Graudin Why did Ryan love this book?

This story is set in one of the most intriguing periods of Parisian history, starting at the cusp of the French Revolution. I loved how Gita Trelease introduced magic into the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Every detail, from the dresses to the pastries, is imbued with enchantments, while the darkness of the impending revolution serves as a taut backdrop.

By Gita Trelease,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Enchantée as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 12, 13, 14, and 15.

What is this book about?

A compellingly beautiful tale of magic, intrigue and deception, set against the backdrop of eighteenth-century Paris on the cusp of revolution.

Paris in 1789 is a labyrinth of twisted streets, filled with beggars, thieves, revolutionaries - and magicians . . .
When seventeen-year-old Camille is left orphaned, she has to provide for her frail sister and her volatile brother. In desperation, she survives by using the petty magic she learnt from her mother. But when her brother disappears Camille decides to pursue a richer, more dangerous mark: the glittering court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Using dark magic Camille…


Book cover of Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324
Book cover of The Temple of Memories: History, Power, and Morality in a Chinese Village
Book cover of Moroccan Households in the World Economy: Labor and Inequality in a Berber Village

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