Here are 86 books that Angel of Ruin fans have personally recommended if you like
Angel of Ruin.
Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
My first mentor was Arthur C Clarke, the science fiction megastar. I’ve always been drawn to epic fantasy, science fiction, and techno-thrillers. Stories that push the boundaries of reality. While I’ve been a professional author for over thirty years in multiple genres, I keep returning to speculative fiction, much of which is published under my pen name “Thomas Locke”. I serve as Writer In Residence at the University of Oxford. In writing Island of Time, my aim was to apply a classical heroic structure to neartime fantasy. Use the naturally occurring elements of light and dark, good and evil, and magnify them by adding magic to this world.
Should an angsty teen girl (or her mom) be relieved when she’s taken under the wing of an eccentric art dealer?
After all, not many people make seventeen-year-old Cera Marlowe feel understood. She’s too into poetry and art and suffers from seizures… The mystery in Mortal Sight is of a much more personal nature than the other books on this list. While this urban fantasy tale is young adult, the blend of modern-day with ancient mythology drew me in and I was reminded of my own childhood. I enjoyed the concept of a girl with a mysterious past and a dangerous destiny awakening to her true identity – all accompanied by lines of Milton in her head that help her to navigate her strange new world.
Seventeen-year-old Cera Marlowe wants a normal life; one where she and her mom can stop skipping town every time a disturbing vision strikes. But when a girl she knows is murdered by a monster she can't explain, Cera's world turns upside down.
Suddenly thrown into an ancient supernatural battle, Cera discovers she's not alone in her gifting and vows to use her visions to save lives. But why does John Milton's poem Paradise Lost keep interrupting her thoughts?
In a race against time and a war against unearthly creatures, will decoding messages embedded in…
As an essayist, literary critic, and professor of literature, books are what John Milton calls my ‘pretious life-blood.’ As a writer, teacher, and editor, I spend my days trying to make meaning out of reading. This is the idea behind my most recent book, On Purpose: it’s easy to make vague claims about the edifying powers of ‘great writing,’ but what does this actually mean? How can literature help us live? My five recommendations all help us reflect on the power of books to help us think for ourselves, as I hope do my own books, including The Midlife Mind (2020) and Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2018).
Written at the height of the English Civil War, this is perhaps the single most important manifesto for free speech in the English language. But it’s also surprisingly good fun, composed in a vivid, memorable style that brings abstract concepts to life.
Advocating what he terms ‘promiscuous reading,’ Milton encourages us to think for ourselves and resist intellectual authoritarianism. I love his argument for the importance of reading in cultivating independent thought: "A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life." As a writer and literary critic, this life-blood is precious to me, too.
John Milton was celebrated and denounced in his own time both as a poet and as a polemicist. Today he is remembered first and foremost for his poetry, but his great epic Paradise Lost was published very late in his life, in 1667, and in his own time most readers more readily recognised Milton as a writer of prose. This superbly annotated new book is an authoritative edition of Milton's major prose works, including Of Education, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and the Divorce tracts, as well as the famous 1644 polemical tract on the opposing licensing and censorship,…
Mike Vasich has a lifelong obsession with stories about gods, superheroes, and giant monsters, and he has been inflicting them on 7th and 8th graders for the better part of 20 years. He wrote his first book, Loki, so he could cram them all into one book and make them beat up on each other. He enjoys (fictional) mayhem, sowing disrespect for revered institutions, and taking naps.
The title is taken from the John Milton poem, Paradise Lost: “Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n,” and tells the story of the War in Heaven before the Creation from the point of view of the bad guys. So basically, we get the Devils’ (not a typo, by the way) point of view, and, like in Milton (arguably), they are the heroes of the story. Instead of the classic two-dimensional villains who exist solely to oppose the hero, Brust flushes them out so well that you can’t help but root for them. Nor can you understand why anybody would like this God dude or his weird ‘son’, Jesus. The devils in question are Satan and Lucifer, curiously split into two characters for this story, which provides further opportunities for plot and character development.
Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels (Dragon) and his swashbuckling tales of Khaavren (THE PHOENIX GUARDS and FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER) have earned him an enthusiastic audience worldwide. But TO REIGN IN HELL, his famous novel that does for the epic of Satan's rebellion what Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light did for Hindu myth, has been out of print for years - causing used copies to trade for improbable sums. Now, at last, TO REIGN IN HELL returns to print in a paperback edition, with an introduction by Roger Zelazny.
I have spent my life both in the classroom (as a university professor) and out of it as a passionate, committed reader, for whom books are as necessary as food and drink. My interest in poetry dates back to junior high school, when I was learning foreign languages (first French and Latin, and then, later, Italian, German, and ancient Greek) and realized that language is humankind’s most astonishing invention. I’ve been at it ever since. It used to be thought that a writer’s life was of little consequence to an understanding of his or her work. We now think otherwise. Thank goodness.
This is where it all started. The beginning of modern criticism.
Samuel Johnson was the first and greatest English literary critic, whose life and work were memorably recorded by his friend James Boswell.
Johnson himself, an exemplary, even obsessive, man of letters, wrote these 52 short biographies of figures, many still canonized today (John Milton, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, William Congreve, but no women, alas) and he shows with sympathy and good sense how an understanding of a writer’s life helps us to understand his work as well.
Johnson was luminous. His prose is dazzling. He was a prodigious writer and thinker.
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
My choice of books reflects a lifelong passion for literature and the natural world. I’ve always enjoyed travelling, to cities or more remote locations, learning as much as I can about the people that live there, and my first published article was about a hotel in Mali, photographed by my sister. Ten years later we published our first book, The Foraged Home. With Living Wild we wanted to look more deeply at how people lived, not just where, focussing not only on day-to-day life and their work, but their relationship with the surrounding landscape, asking big questions about our place in the world.
At once a voice arose among / The bleak twigs overhead / In a full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited; / An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, / In blast-beruffled plume, / Had chosen thus to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom . . .
Hardy’s nature poems deal in darkness and light (but mostly darkness), the changes wrought not only by seasons, but by human activity and our relationship with the natural world.
In The Darkling Thrush, the poet listens to the ‘ecstatic sound’ of the bird, ‘some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.’ A troubled ending, but, given WWI was just around the corner, a reminder how fragile it all is.
A selection of the writer's greatest nature poetry, selected by Tom Paulin, published in a beautiful new edition by Faber.
At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom . . .
My passion for historical thrillers comes from the excitement I felt as a lad when I immersed myself in the classics like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Robinson Crusoe. Then a book on WW2 shocked me with the images of the brutality inflicted on the innocent caught up in the madness. On exercise with the Royal Navy in the Brecon Beacons, the gem of a story planted itself in my imagination. What if the Germans did invade Britain? What if the people chasing me over this bleak countryside were intent on killing me? What if I was desperately trying to get my family to safety? Dark September was born…
Excellent story - set in 1666 during the fire of London it captures the religious tensions and conflicting politics of the era. Charles 11 is on the throne and in pursuit of anyone involved in the execution of his father. No-one feels safe. James Marwood, son of a Puritan, and Cat Lovett, daughter of a renegade Protestant are in a fast-paced murder plot through the narrow streets and ruins of London. Cat is manipulated by her untrustworthy uncle.Marwood is pursuing the murderer while trying to protect his elderly father. Cat tries to escape her uncle’s home and disguises herself as a servant. The intricate plot takes you through the Royal Court, the plans to rebuild St Paul’s and the intricacies of society of that time in history.
The first book in the No. 1 Times bestselling series
'This is terrific stuff' Daily Telegraph
'A breathtakingly ambitious picture of an era' Financial Times
'A masterclass in how to weave a well-researched history into a complex plot' The Times
A CITY IN FLAMES London, 1666. As the Great Fire consumes everything in its path, the body of a man is found in the ruins of St Paul's Cathedral - stabbed in the neck, thumbs tied behind his back.
A WOMAN ON THE RUN The son of a traitor, James Marwood is forced to hunt the killer through the city's…
I have long been struck, as a learner of French at school and later a university professor of French, by how much English borrows from French language and culture. Imagine English without naïvetéand caprice. You might say it would lose its raison d’être…My first book was the history of a single French phrase, the je-ne-sais-quoi, which names a ‘certain something’ in people or things that we struggle to explain.Working on that phrase alerted me to the role that French words, and foreign words more generally, play in English. The books on this list helped me to explore this topic—and more besides—as I was writing Émigrés.
This is a sparklingly funny play. I love its contemporary freshness, its fleetness of foot, and its irreverence. It satirizes the fashion for all things French among London’s social climbers. It sugars the pill of all that satire by bringing a fast-paced plot to a comic ending of marriage and reconciliation. It taught me that writers in seventeenth-century England like the play’s author, John Dryden, were importing words and ideas from France as they sought to trace a middle way between a servile mimicry of French culture and an insular rejection of it.
Dryden's audiences in 1671, both aristocratic and middle-class, would have been quick to respond to the themes of disputed royal succession, Francophilia and loyalty among subjects in his most successful tragicomedy. In the tragic plot, written in verse, young Leonidas has to struggle to assert his place as the rightful heir to the throne of Sicily and to the hand of the usurper's daughter. In the comic plot, written in prose, two fashionable couples (much more at home in London drawing-rooms than at the Sicilian court) play at switching partners in the 'modern' style. The introduction of this edition argues…
Internationally recognized mind-body science and design and health pioneer, Esther Sternberg M.D. is Research Director, Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, Inaugural Andrew Weil Chair for Research in Integrative Medicine, Professor of Medicine, Psychology, Architecture, Planning & Landscape Architecture, Founding Director, University of Arizona Institute on Place, Wellbeing & Performance, and Associate Director (Research), Innovations in Healthy Aging. Formerly a National Institutes of Health Senior Scientist and Section Chief, she received the U.S. Federal Government’s highest awards, authored over 235 scholarly articles, and two engaging and popular science-for-the-lay-public books: The Balance Within chronicling mind-body science underpinning stress and illness and belief and wellness, and Healing Spaces, which helped ignite the 21st-century design and health movement.
This book is a gripping story of the year 1666 in which three calamities befell London: the Black Plague, the Anglo-Dutch War, and the Great Fire of London. When I read the book in 2021, I found that we were re-living practically the same events in modern times. I live in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains in Tucson, Arizona, and in the spring of 2020, shortly after the COVID shutdowns, fires ignited by lighting swept through the canyons just north of my home. I found myself in a “get ready” zone of the region’s “Get Ready, Get Set, Go” emergency evacuation plan.
1666 shows the range of people’s responses to extreme and immediate danger: from Samuel Pepys’ quick thinking to get the critical government documents out of harm’s way, all the way to the panic and inability to act of others. All animals show a range of reactions…
1666 was a watershed year for England. The outbreak of the Great Plague, the eruption of the second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London all struck the country in rapid succession and with devastating repercussions.
Shedding light on these dramatic events, historian Rebecca Rideal reveals an unprecedented period of terror and triumph. Based on original archival research and drawing on little-known sources, 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire takes readers on a thrilling journey through a crucial turning point in English history, as seen through the eyes of an extraordinary cast of historical characters.
In a previous life, I was a City trader and as such have always been fascinated by the ridiculous and the absurd. Now a full-time writer and poet, I live on the west coast of Ireland and have written a number of books including A Curious Guide to London, A Splendidly Smutty Dictionary of Sex, and The Men Who Stare At Hens. I also have a blog on all matters arcane.
Through his jaundiced eyes we accompany our erstwhile hero into coffee shops, the arms of actresses, and experience the ebb and flow of London life. Later we watch as his beloved London undergoes the rigors of the plague of 1665 and then how he buries his beloved cheese in the wake of the Great Fire of London. A true classic.
Kris Marshall and Katherine Jakeways star as Mr & Mrs Pepys in this BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of the world famous diaries.
Samuel Pepys was 26 when he decided to start keeping a diary, in January 1660. For the next ten years he faithfully recorded the day's events and confessed his innermost thoughts. That diary has since become one of our most important, and fascinating, historical documents.
Pepys gave us eyewitness accounts of some of the great events of the 17th century, including the Great Fire of London and the Second Dutch War. He also told us what people ate…
I’m a writer who writes across genres, but everything has a dark edge. As a reader, I want to be able to relate, engage, and connect in some way to the characters and story, but as I come from an abusive childhood, that means they can’t be light and fluffy; there has to be something off-kilter and warped because that reflects how my life has been. In my own writing, I try to do the same and create something that is emotive and real while still allowing the reader to escape. I originate from Surrey, in the south of England, but I have lived in theNetherlands since 2002.
As an indie author, I’m always interested in what other fellow authors are writing, so when I befriended Mark Cassell, I wanted to read his work. The Shadow Fabric made me a fan of his writing, and now I read everything he publishes.
With this book, Mark has established what he calls the Shadow Fabric Mythos, which means he’s written more novellas and short stories along the same theme: an ethereal darkness that takes over people, sucking the life out of them and giving a whole new meaning to the term ‘getting stitched’.
Again we have paranormal darkness, which I enjoy as a reader. And with Mark’s writing, he gives a chilly and yet urgent feel to it. You know what is coming, but you can’t look away. My kind of horror.
Leo remembers little of his past. Desperate for a new life, he snatches up the first job to come along. On his second day, he witnesses a murder, and the Shadow Fabric – a malevolent force that controls the darkness – takes the body and vanishes with it.
Determined to get answers, Leo has no idea where to turn. Revelations come in the most unlikely places, and secrets of witchcraft and ancient artefacts unfold. In particular, a device used in the 17th century to extract evil from witches proves key to his discoveries. With these truths long hidden from humankind,…
Interested in
fallen angels,
London,
and
presidential biography?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
fallen angels,
London,
and
presidential biography.
