Fans pick 100 books like Crocodile on the Sandbank

It is a book that deep dives into a historical event, in this case, the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Check. It is a nonfiction book that reads like a gripping thriller, in this case, the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who built a three-story building featuring secret rooms, torture chambers, and a crematorium. Check. Chicago leaps off the page. By the end of the book, I was able to envision the massive exposition, its hundreds of temporary buildings, all white colored, interlaced with ponds and canals.

Much like that exposition helped raise Chicago up from its Great Fire, so I could see a Chicago of the past, in a glorious triumph of industry and innovation. Oh, and yeah, a serial killer constructing a horrific murder building.

Some authors have an innate faculty for bringing the dim and distant past into such razor-sharp clarity that it’s hard not to believe that they were once present at the time. That’s how it is with Mary Renault (real name Eileen Mary Challans): any number of her books could have made this list.

What I particularly love about this duology (the sequel The Bull From the Sea isn’t quite as strong) is that Renault retold the ancient tale of Theseus and the Minotaur as historical fiction. Though she followed the main beats of the well-known story, she boldly stripped it of gods, monsters, and magic, and the narrative doesn’t suffer at all from it. If anything, it makes it even more compelling because it feels like she has stumbled upon a possible origin to the myth.

This book showed me how important it was for women to write ancient history and how different their interpretations of that history could be. Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra does full justice to her complicated subject and the fraught historical era she had to negotiate.

I appreciate how richly Schiff evokes Cleopatra’s world, from the palace in Alexandria she lived in as a child to the fleet she commanded in her last, fateful battle. Even more, I love how skeptically Schiff reads the ancient sources on Cleopatra and how thoughtfully she constructs her own more nuanced portrait of the powerful Egyptian queen.  

Ever since reading this book, I *can’t* think of the original version of the Iliad without referencing his haunting retelling from Patroclus’ perspective. Miller did such an incredible job putting me in the story and making the characters so real that I actively missed them when I put the book down.

It doesn’t hurt that it has some of the most beautiful poetic language I’ve encountered in story form. Helen is more of a background character playing her classic role, but I was still fascinated because Miller plays on the demigod aspect of both Helen and Achilles in a way that makes them steal any scene they’re in. There’s a quiet power to them that transcends the page.    

The book offers an in-depth exploration of how an anarchist, anti-capitalist society without money or government would work and juxtaposes it against a more familiar, wasteful, capitalist world. It's thought-provoking and can be a great tool for self-exploration because this world isn’t easy to live in and has its own challenges.
Even though it took me a long time to get into the story, once I did, I was fascinated by all the details. It's unlike other stories. It offers ideas that don't often get explored in speculative fiction, and it left me with a lot to think about.

This book wrecked me; it’s such a deep dive into the lives of the woman brutally murdered by Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold reconstructs their lives with great empathy, bringing them to the forefront of the story. The five were real women who felt love, pain, and hope—not faceless victims of sensationalized murder.

These women are often portrayed as “five prostitutes” in pop culture, but Rubenhold shows that there is no evidence of sex work for most of the women. This book pulls back the curtain on the tension, violence, poverty, and heartbreak in Victorian London. This book brought me to absolute tears. 

This was one of the first books I read when I began researching my family’s passion for Egypt, and it was one of the most interesting.

When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 his troops were astonished to find countless ruins, covered with hieroglyphs – but what did they mean? Being able to read the ancient texts would be the key to unravelling many of the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Determined to be the first to do so was 16-year-old Jean-Francois Champollion, the brilliant son of an impoverished bookseller. This book is a true story of adventure, obsession, and triumph over extreme adversity, and is well worth reading.

Marking a turning point in women’s travel writing and scholarly publications, British artist, writer, and Egyptologist, Amelia Edwards, brought unparalleled expertise and knowledge of Egyptian antiquities to her narrative, in the process helping to found the modern study of Egyptology. Written by a gifted writer and accomplished novelist, her book follows her trip up the Nile River to investigate some of the world’s most important ancient archeological sites and is beautifully illustrated with her own watercolors as well as witty, insightful stories of everyday life in nineteenth-century Egypt.

This was my introduction to ancient Egypt. I was twelve when I was given this book. I was immediately entranced by the beautifully told stories not only of the gods, but also of magic, shipwrecks, princesses, and thieves.

Egypt is an extraordinary country entirely reliant for thousands of years on the annual inundation of the river Nile. If the water levels were too low there was starvation, and too high there were devastating floods. In some places, the fertile area is a little wider than the flight of an arrow. With life so precarious, it is not surprising that the afterlife became so important to all Egyptians and that they spun so many myths to explain the inexplicable, and give structure to their world.

I was immediately attracted to this volume of poetry, particularly when I realised that fragments from the original Tale of Sinuhe papyrus, had at one time been in the collection at Didlington Hall.

Professor Richard Parkinson introduces each poem from the Middle Kingdom and sets it in the context of its time. The Tale of Sinuhe is one of the most famous poems and was written around 1875 BC. It is an illuminating tale of adventure in foreign lands, but one in which Sinuhe reflects on life in Egypt and his relationship with the king. While The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor is an entertaining account of fantastic and exciting adventures with a universal moral. These, and the other eleven poems provide fascinating insights into the minds and culture of the ancient Egyptians.

For someone who enjoys poetry and wants to experience the literature of these ancient people ‘first hand’,… show more.