Here are 100 books that Behind Closed Doors fans have personally recommended if you like
Behind Closed Doors.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Very little has been written in English about Sicilian women. Most of the studies written in English about the women of southern Italy are the work of foreigners who discovered our region in adulthood. While some non-Italian colleagues have produced fine work, my books reflect the perspective of a scholar who, being Sicilian, has been familiar with the region and its people all her life. This is seen in my knowledge of the Sicilian language, from which I've translated texts, and even the medieval cuisine mentioned in my books. Viva la Sicilia!
This is a different story about a different kind of woman. And no, it's not about the Mafia; that's only a peripheral theme.
The typical novels written in English about Sicily by women are built around themes like a foreign girl going to Italy to find love. This one breaks that mould into a thousand pieces, dealing with familial history and tradition in the context of Sicilian and American society. It actually held my interest.
Leigh Esposito's complex story eclipses most of what came before.
Very little has been written in English about Sicilian women. Most of the studies written in English about the women of southern Italy are the work of foreigners who discovered our region in adulthood. While some non-Italian colleagues have produced fine work, my books reflect the perspective of a scholar who, being Sicilian, has been familiar with the region and its people all her life. This is seen in my knowledge of the Sicilian language, from which I've translated texts, and even the medieval cuisine mentioned in my books. Viva la Sicilia!
Even an academic tome can be written with sensitivity. Here, the Sicilian angle is Joanna, the daughter who became Queen of Sicily as the wife of King William II.
The author brings us a perception of these women as real people without the kind of adulation or reverence too often directed at royalty. The phrase "crowned in a far country" suits Joanna, who was only eleven when she was betrothed to a man in his early thirties in what today would be called an "age gap" relationship. This is just one of many challenges she faced.
The three daughters of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine all undertook exogamous marriages which cemented dynastic alliances and furthered the political and diplomatic ambitions of their parents and their spouses. It might be expected that the choices made by Matilda, Leonor, and Joanna with regard to religious patronage and dynastic commemoration would follow the customs and patterns of their marital families, yet in many cases these choices appear to have been strongly influenced by ties to their natal family. Their involvement in the burgeoning cult of Thomas Becket, their patronage of Fontevrault Abbey, the names they gave to their…
Very little has been written in English about Sicilian women. Most of the studies written in English about the women of southern Italy are the work of foreigners who discovered our region in adulthood. While some non-Italian colleagues have produced fine work, my books reflect the perspective of a scholar who, being Sicilian, has been familiar with the region and its people all her life. This is seen in my knowledge of the Sicilian language, from which I've translated texts, and even the medieval cuisine mentioned in my books. Viva la Sicilia!
Here is the appeal of a different kind of story. This novella tells the story of an aristocratic Sicilian woman who, in the wake of the unification of 1860, becomes a brigand, which is to say, a partisan, fighting against the new regime.
The protagonist's unique experience is the key to this narrative, which translates into English very well.
Who was the man who would become Caesar's lieutenant, Brutus' rival, Cleopatra's lover, and Octavian's enemy?
When his stepfather is executed for his involvement in the Catilinarian conspiracy, Mark Antony and his family are disgraced. His adolescence is marked by scandal and mischief, his love affairs are fleeting, and yet,…
Very little has been written in English about Sicilian women. Most of the studies written in English about the women of southern Italy are the work of foreigners who discovered our region in adulthood. While some non-Italian colleagues have produced fine work, my books reflect the perspective of a scholar who, being Sicilian, has been familiar with the region and its people all her life. This is seen in my knowledge of the Sicilian language, from which I've translated texts, and even the medieval cuisine mentioned in my books. Viva la Sicilia!
Memoirs authored in recent years tend to get excessively personal, even intimate, and a number have been written by foreign women who end up living in Sicily.
Theresa Maggio is a bit different because she is the granddaughter of Sicilians, so she already has a keen sense of the culture. She ends up with a fisherman who leads the Mattanza, a method of capturing large tuna in huge nets. Alas, the Mattanza is no longer practiced, but this is an interesting story. There's also a sequel with a focus on visiting small towns.
A magnificent journey inside the world of a Sicilian fishing community and its thousand-year-old rituals. Every spring for untold centuries, great schools of giant bluefin tuna have swum through the Strait of Gibraltar to spawn in the Mediterranean Sea. And there, for untold centuries, men have been waiting for them. In this stunning debut, Theresa Maggio brings us inside the insular world of the tonnara-the ritual trapping and killing of bluefin enacted by fishermen since the Stone Age. In a single, bloody spectacle-called the mattanza-the fishermen harvest the bluefin, lifting them by hand from the Chamber of Death, the last…
I'm a Frenchman with a great interest in the history of the Second World War, specializing in the correspondence of Allied soldiers. Almost 20 years of collecting WWII letters led to the publication of my first book Till Victory which was an award-winning bestseller in France, before it was released in English worldwide in 2021. I also host a podcast (Till Victory: a podcast about WWII and Peace), where I interview British and American veterans, and have made documentaries such as Red Beret & Dark Chocolate or The Missing Highlander. It's all about trying to understand what the young men who fought and died to liberate my country went through when they were my age.
Alright, this is not technically a book about WWII letters, but it’s very close, and my favorite historical accounts’ book ever. Just like with wartime correspondence, Ernie Pyle wrote from the battlefield about the daily routine of the regular GI while experiencing it himself. Just like in a personal military letter, you get to know a tired civilian in uniform rather than a multi-medal bearing superhero with a thirst for action. With his exceptional writing, Pyle painted touching and realistic portraits, not of the Generals we've already read all about, but of the simple soldier who simply did his job and won the war with his sweat and blood.
Europe was in the throes of World War II, and when America joined the fighting, Ernie Pyle went along. Long before television beamed daily images of combat into our living rooms, Pyle's on-the-spot reporting gave the American public a firsthand view of what war was like for the boys on the front. Pyle followed the soldiers into the trenches, battlefields, field hospitals, and beleaguered cities of Europe. What he witnessed he described with a clarity, sympathy, and grit that gave the public back home an immediate sense of the foot soldier's experience. There were really two wars, John Steinbeck wrote…
Tim Parks moved to Italy in 1981 and is still there today. He has written five bestselling books about the country, brought up three splendid Italian children and translated some of the country’s best-loved authors. There cannot be many foreigners more familiar with the country, its literature, its history and its people.
“COMES over one an absolute necessity to move.” Has there ever been a more appropriate opening line to any travel book? D H Lawrence moved to Sicily right after the First World War and from there got the itch to board a ship and visit Sardinia to the north with his wife Frida. He was hoping to find a primitive, pre-modern society, where men were men and women were women. He did indeed find them and was appalled. But delighted too. It’s hard to think of a book with more fun in it, more self-mockery, more pathos, and more poetry. Not to mention the descriptions of Sardinia. To die for.
Nine Stories Told Completely in Dialogue is a unique collection of narratives, each unfolding entirely through conversations between its characters. The book opens with "God on a Budget," a tale of a man's surreal nighttime visitation that offers a blend of the mundane and the mystical. In "Doctor in the…
I am grateful to my maternal grandparents, immigrants from southern Italy, who instilled in me a love for the Bel Paese that has inspired me all my life. I began to travel to Italy 45 years ago, and after writing for television—on the staff of Everybody Loves Raymond—I turned to travel writing. I’ve written 4 books about Italian travel, along with many stories for magazines. I also design and host Golden Weeks in Italy: For Women Only tours, to give female travelers an insider’s experience of this extraordinary country.
This memoir of a Sicilian year beautifully weaves together Simeti’s personal experience in rural Sicily and Palermo with her extensive knowledge of history, mythology, and culinary traditions. Simeti’s honesty truly prepared me for my first trip to Sicily – giving me a full picture of the island’s light and dark sides.
This is a year of Sicilian life, its seasons and its sacred festivals, its gorgeous fruits and demanding family life, its casual assassinations and village feasts, its weather and the neighbours. It chronicles a life divided between an apartment in the city of Palermo with the weekends and summer devoted to sustaining life in an old family farm. What makes this journal truly exceptional is that Mary Simeti is both an outsider, (an American who had studied medieval history and worked as a volunteer on a social welfare programme) and an insider. For this journal was written after twenty years…
Often, historians choose their field or specialty, but sometimes, the field chooses the historian. Being a historian of southern Italy, the land of my ancestors reflects far more than a merely academic interest. As a personal pursuit, it isn’t just what I am but who I am. I write the kind of books that I wish had existed when I wrote my first peer-reviewed article in 1984. This has come to include everything from general histories to specialised studies to translations of medieval chronicles. Through the website Best of Sicily, online since 1999, my work has reached a readership of millions over the course of two decades.
The most powerful woman in Europe for at least five years, Margaret of Navarre, was all but ignored until this 512-page biography appeared. Reading a “secret” story drawn from original sources in Italy and Spain was part of the book’s appeal for me.
Born near Pamplona in 1135 to a descendant of El Cid, Margaret wed William I, son of Roger II, first King of Sicily. Following her husband’s death, she was queen regent for a young son, William II, for five eventful years. Ruling two million in a multicultural realm that encompassed Sicily and almost half of the Italian peninsula, she undertook all kinds of decisions, some with Roger’s widow and other women.
Sometimes it takes just one strong woman to tame a pack of zealous men. Meet Margaret of Sicily.
For five years during the twelfth century, Margaret of Navarre, Queen of Sicily, was the most powerful woman in Europe and the Mediterranean. Her life and times make for the compelling story of a wife, sister, mother and leader. This landmark work is the first biography of the great-granddaughter of El Cid and friend of Thomas Becket who could govern a nation and inspire millions.
In Margaret's story sisterhood is just the beginning. The Basque princess who rose to confront unimagined adversity…
Like many travelers and writers, I was drawn to the Mediterranean Sea because of its vibrant cultures, sun-drenched landscapes, and delicious foods. As a medieval historian, I am attracted to stories of people and cultures in communication with each other across religious and cultural divides. I found the perfect combination in the history of Sicily, which in the Middle Ages had populations of Greek Christians, Latin Christians, Muslims, and Jews living together in both peace and conflict. I study the histories of travel, trade, and exchange in and around Sicily, which allows me to think about big questions of how medieval people related to each other even when they came from different religions or cultures.
The thing that first drew me to medieval Sicily was its history of Muslim habitation.
I am deeply interested in questions of how Muslims, Christians, and Jews interacted with each other during a period of history in which religious identity was one of the most prominent public facts about a person and their community.
Alex Metcalfe is one of the leading scholars studying the Arabic texts that give us insight into the cultures of Muslims in Sicily and southern Italy and their legacies after the Norman conquest of an island that had been in Muslim hands for nearly two centuries. He has written several other works, but this is the one most accessible to a general audience, and the one that covers both Sicily and the southern parts of the mainland that were also strongly impacted by Muslim presence and culture.
This significant new work focuses on the formation and fragmentation of an Arab-Muslim state and its society in Sicily and south Italy between 800 and 1300, which led to the formation of an enduring Muslim--Christian frontier during the age of the Crusades. It examines the long- and short-term impact of Muslim authority in regions that were to fall into the hands of European rulers, and explains how and why Muslim and Norman conquests imported radically different dynamics to the central Mediterranean. On the island of Sicily, a majority Muslim population came to be ruled by Christian kings who adopted and…
Shahrazad’s Gift is a collection of linked short stories set in contemporary Cairo — magical, absurd, and humorous.
The author focuses on the off-beat, little-known stories, far from CNN news: a Swedish belly dancer who taps into the Oriental fantasies of her clientele; a Japanese woman studying Arabic, driven mad…
I grew up in New Orleans around Cajun French and Italians. My father spoke Cajun French, English, and Sicilian. I grew up thinking his Sicilian was Italian mixed with Cajun French. We considered ourselves Italian, never aware that my grandparents, paternal and maternal, emigrated from Sicily and were born just after Sicily became part of Italy (1861). Knowing nothing of Sicily, including the Sicilian spelling of my own surname and my father’s Sicilian first name, I used the computer to contact distant relatives in Sicily, discover records online, and eventually visited Sicily to find actual documents. My research led to my passion and my first book, After Laughing Comes Crying.
Dr. Gaetano Cipolla is the retired head of the Foreign Language Department at St. John’s University, New York. He has spent his academic career researching and writing about the Sicilian culture and its people in order to counteract the stereotypical image of Sicilians and Italians as primarily spaghetti eaters and mafia. Dr. Cipolla understands the many dialects of the Sicilian language and, through his writings, has reclaimed the literary greatness of forgotten Sicilian writers by translating their poetry and other works. To overcome the pending extinction of Sicilian, he has written and developed a two-part course that teaches the language. His course is steadily being adopted in a number of universities.
This is revised and expanded edition of Sicilian: Studies on the Sicilian Ethos. It contains 4 new chapters and a new index of names. Eight chapters are devoted to the characteristics of Sicilians, their history, and their culture. The other 8 are devoted to the literature produced by writers and poets of Sicily, including Veneziano, Meli, Martoglio, Pirandello and Camilleri.
