Here are 100 books that An Easy Death fans have personally recommended if you like
An Easy Death.
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I grew up in Boston and New York and currently live in Montreal. I have worked primarily in writing performance texts and plays. I founded the performance company Bluemouth Inc., with whom I have written and staged over a dozen works. In 2018, I completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Concordia University, where I was awarded the Dean of Arts and Sciences Award for Excellence in Creative Writing. As for my expertise in compiling this list, I am the daughter of a strong force-of-nature woman who fought for what she had and taught her kids they can get through anything as long as they have humor, music, and books.
This book was recommended to me by my firefighter brother, who often reads what I call “he-man” books. The titles always have words like mutiny, bullets, gangsters, firestorm, etc. So, when he suggested I read this book, I had my reservations. (In fairness, the books he recommends consistently end up on my list of all-time favorites–I guess that’s what I get for pre-judging!) In any case, over the years, I have learned the one thing we both love in a protagonist–and now I have a name for it–is grit. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by one of his own workers. Tom Chaney shoots him down in the street for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. Ross's unusually mature and single-minded fourteen-year-old daughter Mattie travels to claim his body, and finds that the authorities are doing nothing to find Chaney. Then she hears of Rooster - a man, she's told, who has grit - and convinces him to join her in a quest into dark, dangerous Indian territory to hunt Chaney down…
I started reading mysteries in elementary school: Nancy Drew, Agatha Christie, and Stephen King fed my thirst for story, puzzles, and the “super-psychological.” There’s so much about the mind we don’t understand—including our relationships with animals (like an octopus detective)—or the bond between twins (like the one in my Cici series). When I worked with Irene Webb as an associate literary agent in the 2000s, my fascination with the written word and “super-psychological” blossomed. I enjoy connecting motivations, secrets, and passions into a tapestry of humanity. At their core, stories teach us how to be more human, and I want to be part of that lesson. Please enjoy this book list I’ve curated for you.
I realize this book isn’t one of King’s supernatural thrillers like Kujo or The Shining, both of which petrified my middle-school self into turning the pages late, late into the night. But Misery is the best of King’s work because this “super-psychological” thriller pits two antithetical forces against one another.
The police interview setup seems a straightforward approach to story-telling, but it turns into a deeply emotion, personal journey for Paul, the book’s hero. We learn in subsequent pages that Paul’s “number one fan,” Annie Wilkes, refuses to allow Paul to continue on a journey of self-aggrandizement...to the point she’s willing to brutalize and imprison him…all while claiming to love his mind. Paul’s imagination becomes his only viable tool to escape Annie’s machinations.
Misery is powerful, brilliant work and the reason I now write mysteries and thrillers.
Growing up in West Texas, westerns were just as good as bedtime stories to me. I grew up with all the greats… and the not as greats. The quality didn’t always matter because the spirit was the same. Freedom, opportunity, and possible lawlessness. Survival of the quickest draw. An untamed place where anything could happen. Someone once said that the western genre was America’s genre. It was invented here and our frontier spirit inspired the world. When I decided to write Hour Glass, I channeled the independent spirit of those westerns I grew up with. I wrote the first draft in sixteen days out of pure passion for the subject matter.
This book is probably the closest title to my own. Doc is centered around everyone’s favorite dandy gunslinger, Doc Holliday. It is a truly entertaining and informative tale of the real Doc’s life before his legendary stand at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. While Wyatt and Morgan Earp play important roles in the story, Doc Holliday is definitely your Huckleberry.
If you love it like I do, the author wrote a continuation called Epitaph: An O.K. Corral Story. You won’t be sorry.
The year is 1878, peak of the Texas cattle trade. The place is Dodge City, Kansas, a saloon-filled cow town jammed with liquored-up adolescent cowboys and young Irish hookers. Violence is random and routine, but when the burned body of a mixed-blood boy named Johnnie Sanders is discovered, his death shocks a part-time policeman named Wyatt Earp. And it is a matter of strangely personal importance to Doc Holliday, the frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who has just opened an office at No. 24, Dodge House. Beautifully educated, born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given…
Growing up in West Texas, westerns were just as good as bedtime stories to me. I grew up with all the greats… and the not as greats. The quality didn’t always matter because the spirit was the same. Freedom, opportunity, and possible lawlessness. Survival of the quickest draw. An untamed place where anything could happen. Someone once said that the western genre was America’s genre. It was invented here and our frontier spirit inspired the world. When I decided to write Hour Glass, I channeled the independent spirit of those westerns I grew up with. I wrote the first draft in sixteen days out of pure passion for the subject matter.
I should preface this with some bit of transparency. One reason I love Tinsmith is because I personally know the author. Not only is she a great writer, but she’s one of the only female tinsmiths working in the United States. She makes her own cookware, and it is amazing.
The main character, Marie Kotlarczyk, moves to the Dakota territories with her tinsmith family. When the family encounters disaster, Marie has to learn the family trade in order to survive. It’s not an easy task when women were not meant to do such things.
Sarah puts so much of herself in this book, it’s enchanting. Since she’s a professional tinsmith, every scene is tangible. I can’t recommend it enough.
When her tinsmith father and brothers head West, Polish immigrant Marie Kotlarczyk has no choice but to go along. Family, after all, is family. The Dakota Territories are anything but welcoming to the Kotlarczyks, and as the months trip by, Marie must pick up the hammers she’s secretly desired but also feared. When she faces the skeptical people of Flats Town, the demands of the local Army commander, and her public failures, her inner voice grows destructively, forcing Marie to decide exactly who she is and what it means to be a woman smith.
I read voraciously and have been fortunate to interact with people and situations such as those on my list. I also grew up in New York City, the melting pot displayed in Humans of New York. There I lived, jumped double-dutch, studied, and worked in a multicultural community. After moving to St Louis, I discovered it was a place that did not always embrace “others.” That inspired me to write my first book,Sugar Hill. Living in St Louis also strengthened my appreciation for diversity in race, religion, and to appreciate people whose sexual identity, or mental and physical ability might differ from mine.
I’ve always been fascinated by American Indian culture. Girls wore intricately beaded dresses and headbands with feathers. Moms carried elaborately decorated baby backpacks. Also, I didn’t understand why the cowboys couldn’t get along with the Indians. In this novel, based on a historical event, the government strikes a deal with the Cheyenne, trading 1000 white women for 1000 horses.
The women are culled from poorhouses, prisons, and asylums, like May whose father committed her for living in sin. May jumps at the opportunity to escape the asylum. Once on the reservation, the newcomers bond and slowly adapt to their new lives and families. Readers too get an intimate portrait of Indian life, and compared to actions of the US Army, it begs the question, who should be labeled savages?
Based on an actual historical event but told through fictional diaries, this is the story of May Dodd―a remarkable woman who, in 1875, travels through the American West to marry the chief of the Cheyenne Nation.
One Thousand White Women begins with May Dodd’s journey into an unknown world. Having been committed to an insane asylum by her blue-blood family for the crime of loving a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope for freedom and redemption is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from “civilized” society become the brides of Cheyenne warriors. What…
I started reading mysteries in elementary school: Nancy Drew, Agatha Christie, and Stephen King fed my thirst for story, puzzles, and the “super-psychological.” There’s so much about the mind we don’t understand—including our relationships with animals (like an octopus detective)—or the bond between twins (like the one in my Cici series). When I worked with Irene Webb as an associate literary agent in the 2000s, my fascination with the written word and “super-psychological” blossomed. I enjoy connecting motivations, secrets, and passions into a tapestry of humanity. At their core, stories teach us how to be more human, and I want to be part of that lesson. Please enjoy this book list I’ve curated for you.
A friend recommended this series to me and, because we both enjoy British literature, I knew I’d give it a go.
What I didn’t expect was to be so utterly charmed, not just by the Britishism, but by the premise: literary detectives must stop her former professor before he can murder Jane Eyre…and have the heroine disappear from literature forever.
The alternative reality is a surreal, quirky 1985 that I reveled in (who wouldn’t want a pet dodo, airships, literary detectors, or a Prose Portal?), but it’s Thursday Next’s insights into her own mistakes, human motivation, and the beauty of the written word that gripped me until I’d finished the last page.
Meet Thursday Next, literary detective without equal, fear or boyfriend
Jasper Fforde's beloved New York Times bestselling novel introduces literary detective Thursday Next and her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England-from the author of The Constant Rabbit
Fans of Douglas Adams and P. G. Wodehouse will love visiting Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, when time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously: it's a bibliophile's dream. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic…
I have always enjoyed talking with others about books, including throughout my education at St. John’s College (the Great Books school) and my graduate work. Recently I was able to reunite online with college classmates; during Zoom sessions, we discuss fictions that are meaningful to us. Additionally, as a literature and women’s studies professor at a technological university, I am always looking for interesting texts to discuss with students and to analyze in my research. The books I selected have been book club selections, course readings for my classes in gender studies and in comparative literature, and/or have been the focus of my writing about women and feminism.
After this book received accolades from reviewers, I ordered it on a whim because I was intrigued by the description of a novel about an older woman who works as a night shift custodian at an aquarium, where she becomes friendly with one of its occupants, a clever octopus named Marcellus.
Both woman and octopus are keen observers, and they narrate their experiences and thoughts while reflecting on their pasts, presents, and futures. I will put this on the list for my book club.
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK
'Full of heart and humour . . . I loved it.' Ruth Hogan
'Will stay with you for a long time.' Anstey Harris
'I defy you to put it down once you've started' Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night cleaner shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Ever since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat over thirty years ago keeping busy has helped her cope. One night she meets Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium who…
I started reading mysteries in elementary school: Nancy Drew, Agatha Christie, and Stephen King fed my thirst for story, puzzles, and the “super-psychological.” There’s so much about the mind we don’t understand—including our relationships with animals (like an octopus detective)—or the bond between twins (like the one in my Cici series). When I worked with Irene Webb as an associate literary agent in the 2000s, my fascination with the written word and “super-psychological” blossomed. I enjoy connecting motivations, secrets, and passions into a tapestry of humanity. At their core, stories teach us how to be more human, and I want to be part of that lesson. Please enjoy this book list I’ve curated for you.
Agatha Christie's perfectly plotted stories, including the twenty short ones in this collection, remain crisply relevant even now, a century after their origination, which is the reason for her selling over two billion books.
I always believe I’ve caught her carefully dropped clues, only to realize I missed one…or three…that pointed toward the culprit. While Hercule Poirot remains my favorite Christie detective, I enjoyed meeting a slew of new characters in these fascinating tales of the “super-psychological” as noted in The Fourth Man. Plus, this collection is perfect for a quick evening read, though a few made falling asleep challenging!
“Reading a perfectly plotted Agatha Christie is like crunching into a perfect apple: that pure, crisp, absolute satisfaction.”—Tana French, New York Times Bestselling Author
From the Queen of Suspense, an all-new collection of her spookiest and most sinister stories, including an Agatha Christie story never before published in the USA, The Wife of Kenite!
For lovers of the supernatural and the macabre comes this collection of ghostly and chilling stories from legendary mystery writer Agatha Christie. Fantastic psychic visions, specters looming in the shadows, encounters with deities, a man who switches bodies with a cat—be sure to keep the light…
I can’t explain the fascination with Rasputin, but one hears the name so frequently via the Boney M pop song, so I took that as the inspiration - and the title - of my book. I saw a book about him in Waterstones one day and had to pick it up, even though it was so big it might’ve doubled as a doorstop. But from then I was hooked; I read everything I could, watched more, and researched until I actually went to Russia. And then I research some more!
This was the book that inspired me to visit Russia, while researching Rasputin and the Romanovs, and then to write my own take on the relationship between Rasputin and Alexandra.
It’s a great book but hard-going for a novice, but I like to dive in at the deep end.
On the centenary of the death of Rasputin comes a definitive biography that will dramatically change our understanding of this fascinating figure
A hundred years after his murder, Rasputin continues to excite the popular imagination as the personification of evil. Numerous biographies, novels, and films recount his mysterious rise to power as Nicholas and Alexandra's confidant and the guardian of the sickly heir to the Russian throne. His debauchery and sinister political influence are the stuff of legend, and the downfall of the Romanov dynasty was laid at his feet.
But as the prizewinning historian Douglas Smith shows, the true…
I can’t explain the fascination with Rasputin, but one hears the name so frequently via the Boney M pop song, so I took that as the inspiration - and the title - of my book. I saw a book about him in Waterstones one day and had to pick it up, even though it was so big it might’ve doubled as a doorstop. But from then I was hooked; I read everything I could, watched more, and researched until I actually went to Russia. And then I research some more!
The Romanovs were the most successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world's surface. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world's greatest empire? And how did they lose it all?
This is the intimate story of twenty tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy autocracy and imperial ambition. Montefiore's gripping chronicle reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence and wild extravagance, and peopled by a cast of adventurers, courtesans, revolutionaries and poets. Written with…
