91 books like Another Country

We all know the title. It’s become a record-breaking musical phenomenon. The book is a phenomenon in itself. It was a voyage I took for a few spellbound weeks, and I read it in a stone house in a small village in the South of France. It is a book of great sympathy and grace. 

Victor Hugo’s heart is large—at least measured by this story of an escaped prisoner who tries to do good with his life but is pursued relentlessly by a police officer, Javert. I found with this book, as the great writers always show me, that character is all. Hugo drew me into the struggles and losses of his people so ably and memorably that I still think of them years later. 

A book from the 1920s. The Jazz Age. This book will take you back to that age and time. A book about romance, class divide, and the ‘libertine.’

All the people you cheer for will die. And all the people who you don’t want to survive thrive! And yet, when you finish the book, the story will occupy your mind and heart for a long time. That is the impact of this book! 

I was obsessed with this novel when it first came out, and every time I go back to it, it offers me another gift.

The writing is lean yet elegant, a perfect combination to tell such a heartbreaking story—of three women connected through time by Virginia Woolf’s singular novel Mrs. Dalloway.

It’s a book about how to sustain ourselves through challenging times—how to literally survive—but it’s also a treatise on creating remarkable characters, the call to be an artist, and a rare glimpse into the imagined writing process of one of the English language’s greatest wordsmiths. (I’m referring to Woolf, but I could just as easily be talking about Cunningham.)

The structure is inventive and compelling, but it is really what he shows us of the characters, how he opens their hearts and whispers their secret sorrows into our eager ears, desires they barely understand themselves, that makes this… show more.

Love in the Time of Cholera sets a moody yet magical vibe and brings the city of Cartegena to vivid life. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writing is gorgeous even when not read in its original Spanish. While reading the book I could almost experience the languid, feverish haze one might dwell in, the delirium one might experience when struck by cholera.

 This is an unconventional romance that follows the doomed lovers through their respective lives before life finally brings them together in their old age. It’s not a particularly large book, but its depth and brooding quality is why I return once every couple of years to re-read it.

Like pretty much every Taylor Swift song, this book made me feel big emotions.

Over the course of one summer in Italy, the main character, Elio, falls in love with a visiting scholar named Oliver. It’s a gay love story filled with all the tension, heat, and anguish that accompanies first love.

It brought me back to my own experiences of falling in love for the first time when every exchange and every gesture felt latent with meaning. 

Set in 1920s Harlem, this book opens with a shock. A teenaged girl is dead, shot by the middle-aged man she was having an affair with.

The man’s wife takes a knife to the funeral, intending to cut the face of her dead rival. So how did it come to this? Morrison paints a picture of Jazz age Harlem, hopping between past and present to show not only the history of this ill-fated couple, but that of Black Harlem. 

A young Louis Armstrong as an amateur detective – if that concept doesn’t draw you in, I’m not sure what will!

The year is 1919 and there’s a terrifying serial killer on the loose in New Orleans. This is the first installment in Celestin’s City Blues Quartet. I love all four books but The Axeman is probably my favourite because of the New Orleans vibe. You get jazz, mafia, Pinkerton detectives, crooked cops, and a taste of the macabre. 

I love reading books that look underneath what is shown to most people—how things work behind the scenes, or a glimpse into a different world.

This book takes what we think is a modern-day world and gives it a bit of a twist, with a special division of the London police charged with handling supernatural crimes that take place, well, in plain sight.

The thing that was most intriguing about this narrator was that I had the feeling I was learning with him about all the ghosts and goblins and beasties as he discovered them. I was as surprised as he was about the solving of the mystery.

The brilliant, searing insights of this book are hard to oversell.

Tóibín is a writer who defies category, and the book—part mini-biographies, part literary criticism, all heart—is a book for anyone who loves writers (not just writing).

He has an incisive yet tender eye for analysis, of not just literature, but of an author’s—dare I say it—soul, and he taught me more about writers I already knew and loved, like James Baldwin and Elizabeth Bishop, while introducing me to authors I’d only heard of, like Thom Gunn and Thomas Mann.

The sections on Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement blew my mind wide open. This book is a must-read for all queer authors writing today—to appreciate how far we’ve come and to celebrate where we’re going.

This novel broke my heart the first time I read it, as much as it thrilled me, and I wanted to step into the book and hug all of the main characters.

They felt so alive—through their pain and desperation, their anger—and it showed me how to weave a layered, complex plot with multiple points of view into a cohesive, meaningful, single story. It follows a jazz musician with a huge secret, one revealed only after his death, which threatens to destroy the family he’s made, on and off the stage.

I love a good family saga, especially one dealing with issues of identity, class, culture, and sexuality—but if that doesn’t grab you, read it for the simple pleasure of Kay’s writing.

Skilled at the art of concision, she imbues this novel with both lyrical and concrete imagery, leaving the reader with portraits so crisp and profound you will feel… show more.