Fans pick 72 books like Agatha Christie

Daphne has numerous elements that I particularly adore in a story: a classic writer as a character, an English manor house setting, and a mystery. Layer in a Brontë connection, and it’s a perfectly pleasing literary page-turner. In 1957, Daphne du Maurier is at her remote, seaside mansion in Cornwall, distracting herself from personal woes by researching a biography about Branwell Brontë, reprobate and possibly misunderstood brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Intertwined is a second storyline set in present-day London, as a lonely young woman, newly married to a mysterious older man seemingly still in thrall to his first wife, becomes caught up in a fifty-year-old mystery involving du Maurier and the Brontës. 

How much would you be willing to give up for fame and greatness?

By 1895, Henry James had written a number of all-time classics, including Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady, but had never achieved the kind of commercial or popular success he thought he deserved. So in his fifties, he started writing for the theater, hoping to break through.

The Master begins with the London opening of his play Guy Domville, which turns out to be a flop, and follows James as he comes to terms with this failure, and all the other sacrifices he has to make – in his personal and sexual life, too – in order to become the writer he wants to be. 

“Long ago Virginia decreed, in the way that Virginia decrees, that I was the painter and she the writer.” Vanessa and Her Sister is a portrait of two extraordinary and unconventional women, Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell. The story is told in the form of a diary kept by Vanessa, beginning at the turn of the 20th century with the formation of the Bloomsbury Group in London. Priya Parmar has created a sympathetic yet honest portrayal of Virginia Woolf, her genius and her often precarious mental state, and the impact it had on her family—in particular Vanessa, who was an important and steadying influence for her sister and a talented artist in her own right.

Emma Tennant was one of Ted Hughes’s lovers in the 1970s, at the height of Sylvia Plath’s early fame. I arrived at her memoir as research for Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, but I stayed because Tennant’s writing is so witty and clever, full of riotous anecdotes of her time publishing chic literary magazines in 1970s London (she tries to steal, and sell, a family snapshot of Princess Margaret, nude on a French beach, for seed money, which ends in hilarious disaster).

Tennant never descends into self-pity or high drama in describing the dark and mysterious Hughes, who believes a random fox on the road is his dead wife returning to him and tries to convince Tennant that frozen salmon at a third-rate London restaurant is fresh and delivering life force to him. Instead, she sneaks in the violence done to her by Hughes in moments drenched in myth… show more.

This book is a bible for women in midlife. One of Levy’s ‘living memoirs’, it captures the author’s experience of leaving her marriage at fifty and remaking her life as a writer.

The pose is beautiful: spare and elegant. Importantly, the book explores how it is possible to create a life focused on artistic pursuit, children, and friendship, as opposed to romantic partnership, material wealth, and conservative notions of stability.

I reread it every year to remind myself of what is possible.

This memoir and Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other, opened my eyes to the struggles of writers and actors in the UK—especially women of color and immigrants—as they tried to find their voices and places and in literary circles.

Raised in a big family by a Nigerian father and British mother, Evaristo describes her upbringing and her efforts to find her voice when there were few venues for writers of color. Her theory of unstoppability is deeply inspiring for anyone who faces roadblocks in pursuing their passions, particularly writers who experienced the sting of multiple rejections before having their work accepted.

The Treehouse series of books have got thousands of reluctant readers hooked on books, so all the books in this series are winners, in my view. With the fun premise of characters living in a multi-layered treehouse, making books and having fun adventures, who wouldn't love these stories? The books are a perfect blend of a page-turning story and fantastic illustrations that will keep children turning the pages. 

Kit and I share some life similarities, she’s a working-class girl with a Birmingham background, published later in life, and I was keen to read her story. Written as scenes from childhood with sharp observation and wit, her book illustrates an unpredictable childhood. The daughter of an Irish mother and Caribbean father in a large and sometimes chaotic family, where there is love in the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but not always at home. There are the familiar places, the family dynamics observed with the clarity of a child, and the tit-for-tat games her parents play - dad buys a new car, the next week, mum a harmonica and Davy Crockett hat. All quirks observed and challenging situations related with a lightness of touch and wit, a genuine pleasure to read.

The Cry of the Lake was published in 2020, the same year as my book, and around that time, I had gotten to know many authors, including Charlie.

From the first line, I was drawn into the story which is told with impeccable detail, its characters clearly defined to create the dark and mysterious tale.  

I didn’t think I could appreciate this memoir of a son searching for his imprisoned father in Gaddafi’s Libya until, suddenly, I did. This book showed me that the bonds between all fathers and their sons transcend things like nationality and religion. It is part of the core of what it means to be human.

I knew from the very first pages that the author would never again see his father, even as he tirelessly spends most of his adult life trying to. By extension, I understood that as much as we want to, we can never really know our fathers.

I raced through the pages.