Here are 100 books that Daughters of the New Year fans have personally recommended if you like
Daughters of the New Year.
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I am a published author, memoir-writing instructor, and retired clinical psychologist. I wrote an initial memoir as a chronological account of my dysfunctional marriages and recovery from them, but lately, I have become very interested in what is termed “hybrid memoirs.” Hybrid memoirs combine personal memoirs with major incidents and research into issues similar to those in the memoir or the culture and laws surrounding them. Since my new book combines my memoir with an account of a crime that affected all the citizens in the country village where I grew up, I have gravitated to memoirs featuring crime as part of the story.
I love murder mysteries, and this is the story of a real-life murder. Marzano-Lesnevich’s memoir, as well as her journalistic story of the murder, intertwines to make a compelling book.
She unveils her own personal story as well as the personal story of the murderer and his victim.
'Part memoir, part true crime, wholly brilliant.' - Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train.
When law student Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is asked to work on a death-row hearing for convicted murderer and child molester Ricky Langley, she finds herself thrust into the tangled story of his childhood. As she digs deeper and deeper into the case she realizes that, despite their vastly different circumstances, something in his story is unsettlingly, uncannily familiar.
The Fact of a Body is both an enthralling memoir and a groundbreaking, heart-stopping investigation into how the law is personal, composed of individual stories, and…
As a lifelong bookworm, I have always loved curling up with a book, especially one that takes me on an emotional journey through the characters within. I especially love stories with an ensemble cast of characters linked through one common thread and always knew my first novel would be of this format. A fascination with the stories that lie beneath the surface of everyday life keeps me constantly inspired to create new characters that can bring comfort and familiarity to readers but still explore important life lessons in a gentle way.
I love how perfectly The Faraday Girls captures the dynamics of being part of a big family, in all its messy glory. It is a story that is hilariously funny in some parts and quite dark in others, but ultimately the strength of family ties is what shines through. Being part of a big family myself, there is a wonderful familiarity about The Faraday Girls that kept me engaged right until the last page.
BONUS: This edition contains excerpts from Monica McInerney's Lola's Secret, At Home with the Templetons, Family Baggage, The Alphabet Sisters, Greetings from Somewhere Else, and Upside Down Inside Out.
From internationally bestselling author Monica McInerney comes a captivating and charming new novel of family secrets, the loyalty of sisters, and the power of redemption.
As a child, Maggie Faraday grew up in a lively, unconventional household with her young mother, four very different aunts, and eccentric grandfather. With her mother often away, her aunts took turns looking after her–until, just weeks before Maggie’s sixth birthday, a shocking event changed everything.…
I wrote a novel whose characters fight to survive depression, grief, loss, and abuse. Though it’s got a sense of humor, it gets dark. People ask, why read a book like that when real life is dark enough? Because we don’t just read to escapefrom the world—we read to understandit. Fiction can help explain the awful things we might witness or experience or hear about. It can also help us feel less alone in our own sadness and grief. Without darkness, light is meaningless. Without pain, we have no use for hope. Who wants to live in a world without hope?
I could recommend this book for the writing, which is remarkable—layered and incisive and beautiful—or for the plotting, which is dense and chaotic in all the best ways, even as Veselka displays the patience of a confident master. Or for the multitude of richly drawn, intriguing characters and how they move around the country and one another. As they wander from Alaska to Seattle to New England in search of a family secret—and in search of themselves—Veselka brings readers along on their quest as she slowly reveals the mystery of a dysfunctional family dynamic and the systems that create so many others like it.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE • A wildly original, cross-country novel that subverts a long tradition of family narratives and casts new light on the mythologies—national, individual, and collective—that drive and define us.
On the day of their estranged father’s wedding, half sisters Cheyenne and Livy set off to claim their inheritance. It’s been years since the two have seen each other. Cheyenne is newly back in Seattle, crashing with Livy after a failed marriage and a series of personal and professional dead ends. Livy works refinishing boats, her resentment against her freeloading sister growing as she tamps down dreams of…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
Although I’m neither a healthcare professional nor a historian, my passions are reading great fiction and continually striving to write it. Degrees in literature led to college teaching and then full-time writing. And that, to the publication of six works of fiction, including four historical novels. So, add to the mix, then, the years spent studying and teaching literature as well as those spent writing and rewriting—and, too, being an inveterate reader—and you have, in brief, the sum of my expertise. Each of the works listed below, I feel, has super qualities. I certainly enjoyed reading such masterful work and hope you will as well.
As a writer, I found so much to admire in The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally. Simply put, it’s epic. I was blown away by Kenneally’s Tolstoian precision of narrative and by the drama of two sisters who leave their confined lives in Australia and serve as nurses in WWI, first on a hospital ship in the Mediterranean and then on the Western Front. Keneally recreates a full sense of the times, showing how individuals can become enmeshed and shaped by huge historical events. The sisters confront not only the terrible effects of war but also a secret that haunts them. This is a stunning, multi-layered novel by a master, The Daughters of Mars has earned numerous accolades—and no wonder. It’s beautifully written and deeply affecting.
In 1915, two spirited Australian sisters join the war effort as nurses, escaping the confines of their father's dairy farm and carrying a guilty secret with them. Used to tending the sick as they are, nothing could have prepared them for what they confront, first in the Dardanelles, then on the Western Front. Yet they find courage in the face of extreme danger and become the friends they never were before. And eventually they meet the kind of men worth giving up their precious independence for - if only they all survive.
At once epic in scope and extraordinarily intimate,…
I love the novels of Charles Dickens and when I found out that he did go out with the London Police to research the criminal underworld for his magazine, I thought what a good detective he would make. He has all the talents a detective needs: remarkable powers of observation, a shrewd understanding of human nature and of motive, and the ability to mix with all ranks of Victorian society from the street urchin to the lord and lady. I love Victorian London, too, and creating the foggy, gas-lit alleys we all know from Dickens the novelist.
Miss Austen is Cassandra, sister of the more famous Jane, who takes centre stage in this story, though Jane is there, too, as the beloved missed sister, not the novelist. The year is 1840, Jane has been dead for twenty years, Cassandra is in her sixties and though frail is on a quest to find some missing letters which may reveal secrets about Jane and Cassandra which must not be known. It’s a mystery and we want to know if Cassandra will find those letters, but it is also a touching portrait of sisterly devotion. Cassandra makes an admirable heroine, determined and resourceful despite her frailty. It also tells much about the way in which spinsters, usually ignored by society, have a rich and complex inner life.
The Sunday Times bestselling novel, set to be a major TV drama ________________________ 'You can't help feeling that Jane would have approved.' OBSERVER
'So good, so intelligent, so clever, so entertaining - I adored it.' CLAIRE TOMALIN ________________________ Throughout her lifetime, Jane Austen wrote countless letters to her sister. But why did Cassandra burn them all?
1840: twenty three years after the death of her famous sister Jane, Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury, and the home of her family's friends, the Fowles.
She knows that, in some dusty corner of the sprawling vicarage, there is a cache…
From my early days of reading Fire and Hemlock and various books of mythology, I’ve loved traditional tales from all around the world. In college I didn’t aim to major in things that would be useful to me as a fantasy writer, but anthropology and folklore made a great background for that job. Nowadays, I actively seek out books based on traditional stories, especially those that go beyond the most well-known European fairy tales and myths. Sometimes, they inspire me, in turn, to write my own stories!
This is an absolutely gorgeous, lyrical read that does my favorite thing: blending folklore–in this case, Eastern European Jewish traditions–with historical individuals and events. It’s melancholy without being unrelentingly grim, hopeful without ignoring the hard edges of history, and it does a beautiful job of weaving its various strands together.
I don’t tend to read a lot of books that captivate me from the first page with their prose, but this was one of them.
A SPELLBINDING TALE OF LOVE AND LOSS, SISTERHOOD AND THE TANGLED THREADS OF FATE.
'Blending folktale with history, hope with tragedy, its touch will linger on your heart long after you put it down' Marie Brennan, author of the Memoirs of Lady Trent series
This is how a fairy tale begins . . .
Deep in the Hungarian woods, the sacred magic of King Solomon lives on in his descendants. Gathering under the midnight stars, they perform small miracles and none are more gifted than the great Rabbi Isaac and his three daughters.
Ava Winston likes her life of routine in Lexington, Kentucky. Then a tornado blows it away. Ava is safe in the basement, but when she emerges, only one corner of her home stands. Rather than crumbling under the loss, she feels a load lifted. Maybe something beyond the familiar is…
I inhabit the past. You may find me lurking in my four-hundred-year-old Devon cottage, or spot me thinly disguised as the formidable Mistress Agnes, a good wife of a certain age who leads a somewhat chaotic life during the mid-seventeenth century. I write, I read, I research, I share my passion, I write some more. My life revolves around reading, writing and researching history. Having spent the past forty-five years unravelling my own family’s story and loving both historical and crime novels, what could be better than a book that combines all these elements. I have to say that if genealogy was as dangerous a career as some of these books imply, no one would be advised to take it up!
When Esme Quentin’s sister, Elizabeth, is assaulted, Esme discovers that her sister has a secret. Who is the elderly, Mrs Roberts and what is her connection to Elizabeth? Esme’s attempt to unravels the sixty-year-old family mystery becomes a hazardous mission and she has to reassess her perception of blood ties.
A desperate crime, kept secret for 60 years...but time has a way of exposing the truth...Esme Quentin is devastated when her sister Elizabeth is beaten unconscious, miles from her home. Two days later Esme discovers that Elizabeth has a secret past. Desperate for answers which the comatose Elizabeth cannot give, Esme enlists the help of her friend Lucy to search for the truth, unaware of the dangerous path she is treading. Together they unravel a tangle of bitterness, blackmail and dubious inheritance, and as the harrowing story is finally revealed, Esme stumbles upon evidence of a pitiful crime. Realising too…
As a teenager, I loved reading past my bedtime, getting lost within a story, then having it fill my dreams and leaving me on the hunt for another book just as good. The best books to read are those that draw me in with their voice and storytelling and leave me needing to turn page after page. Getting in trouble as a kid for reading too late was the best type of trouble to get into and even now, when I need to make a second pot of coffee after a night of reading, I walk away with no regrets.
If you happen to like the type of books that end with a gut punch, then you are going to love Sister Dear. This had an ending that I didn’t see coming, which is probably why I love it so much. I have a few authors on my ‘must read’ list and this one holds the title for #1 because of her endings. Warning: you start reading the book thinking you know where it’s headed, but trust me when I say you don’t!
When Eleanor Hardwicke’s beloved father dies, her world is further shattered by a gut-wrenching secret: the man she’s grieving isn’t really her dad. Eleanor was the product of an affair and her biological father is still out there, living blissfully with the family he chose. With her personal life spiraling, a desperate Eleanor seeks him out, leading her to uncover another branch on her family tree—an infuriatingly enviable half sister.
Perfectly perfect Victoria has everything Eleanor could ever dream of. Loving childhood, luxury home, devoted husband. All…
I’ve been fascinated by haunted houses and the lore behind them ever since childhood. I spent my summers walking our neighborhood cemetery and devouring novels by Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Shirley Jackson. It was only natural, then, that my debut novel had to be a haunted house story—my own love letter to the genre. Having lived in a haunted house myself, the experiences I had within those walls did little to discourage my fascination with the paranormal. While I may have left my ghosts behind me, you can still sense their lingering presence inside Parting the Veil.
There’s no place like home, especially when it’s Wakefield Manor, where ghosts and memories are trapped in an endless loop. When the introverted, quirky protagonist Sam (who reminded me of my favorite Shirley Jackson character—Merricat Blackwood) is forced to welcome her estranged, pregnant sister back to the decaying family manor, Sam’s already-frayed nerves are pushed to the limit. But when her sister’s arrival becomes the catalyst for disturbing visions of a faceless boy with a penchant for cruelty, Sam seeks answers in the claustrophobic halls of her ancestral home. Who is this monstrous, cruel boy? What does he want? Seething with tumultuous family dynamicsand a plot as complex as it is unsettling, the atmosphere of It Will Just Be Ushad me enraptured from the very first pages and didn’t let go until the gasp-inducing ending.
A terrifying new gothic horror novel about two sisters and a haunted house that never sleeps, perfect for fans of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
They say there's a door in Wakefield that never opens...
Sam Wakefield's ancestral home, a decaying mansion built on the edge of a swamp, isn't a place for children. Its labyrinthine halls, built by her mad ancestors, are filled with echoes of the past: ghosts and memories knotted together as one. In the presence of phantoms, it's all Sam can do to disentangle past from present in her daily life.
Return to Hope Creek is a second-chance rural romance set in Australia.
Stella Simpson's career and engagement are over. She returns to the rural community of Hope Creek to heal, unaware her high school and college sweetheart, Mitchell Scott, has also moved back to town to do some healing of…
They say your childhood shapes your life. By the time I reached thirteen, work began to teach me how to survive. After working a wide range of jobs, I ended up teaching students aged from fifteen to fifty. It was a joy. They opened my eyes. They were my inspiration. They kept me writing around the paid job. I was there to teach them, but I also learned from them. They gave me another special gift. To share their truly amazing stories with you.
I was initially drawn in by the period, title, and intrigue. I loved the premise of this novel, yet it felt so heart-wrenchingly sad.
It’s New Year’s Eve 1969 when little Alice goes missing. For me, a parent’s worst nightmare. And when poor young farmhand Bobby James is convicted, well. With twists, lies, and deceit, I desperately wanted the truth to come out, and have injustices righted. Years later architect Willow James discovers the truth. Thank goodness. Hold on tight. No spoilers here. I found it a good read.
From the author of global bestseller THE GIRL IN THE LETTER, a gripping, powerful and heartbreaking new novel of two families and the devastating secret that binds them. The perfect read for a long winter's night...
'A hugely addictive story...full of twists, turns, class divides, betrayal and deceit ****' Heat magazine
'A gripping story' Woman & Home
'One of the best books I've read this year! I adored every single page! A gripping and emotional mystery. If you love Kate Morton then Emily Gunnis is the author for you *****' Real reader review
'Spellbindingly good! Heartbreak, intrigue, mystery. I was…
