Here are 100 books that Death and the Seaside fans have personally recommended if you like
Death and the Seaside.
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Through both a former career as an engineer and my writing, I have developed a craving (bordering on obsession) for all things scientific, historical, archaeological, metaphysical, and a more than avid interest in quantum physics which I like to introduce into my books and stories. I also have a fondness for the dark and macabre, for the bizarre, the wondrous, and the plain out there. The weirder the concept – the more I like it… get consumed by it.
I have read Foucault’s Pendulum several times and never tire of reading it again. The book takes me – through the main character, Casaubon – on a quest, delving into a place where the maybe possible, even probable, becomes reality and into that mysterious world where conspiracy theory laps around the edges of the real world.
It is a thought experiment, of sorts, and the perfect example of being careful what you wish for… or expect… or deem to be true. It’s also a fantastic read – as you might expect from Umberto Eco.
Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth
I read all kinds of thrillers, but the ones that intrigue me the most are those where you’re not only uncertain of who murdered who, or what happened when, but of whether what you’re reading is real or not. For me, those kinds of mysteries elevate the genre to something profound – philosophical problems worked out through the medium of murder and mayhem. Covering both conspiracy narratives and those strange stories where everything feels like a dream, here are some of my favourites.
This is Agatha Christie's creepiest novel. A love story between a chauffeur and an heiress, who move to a majestic house in the countryside and find themselves the victims of a local curse. Strange things start to happen. But is any of it real? The shocking truth doesn't become clear until the last few pages.
- combining love, death and melodrama blended together as only Agatha Christie can.
Gipsy's Acre was a truly beautiful upland site with views out to sea - and in Michael Rogers it stirred a child-like fantasy.
There, amongst the dark fir trees, he planned to build a house, find a girl and live happily ever after.
Yet, as he left the village, a shadow of menace hung over the land. For this was the place where accidents happened. Perhaps Michael should have heeded the locals' warnings: 'There's no luck for them as meddles with Gipsy's Acre.'
I am the author of the Black Viking and Hellbent Riffraff Thrillers and several volumes of dirty realism poetry. I am also the Founder and editor-in-chief of Bristol Noir, an indie publisher and ezine specialising in curiously dark fiction and crime noir. Since 2017 Bristol Noir has been publishing up-and-coming and best-selling authors from around the world. I’m a writer originally from Northumberland in Northern England. In the late 90s, I studied in Greater Manchester when the IRA bomb went off and during the infamous years of the Hacienda club. I now live in Bristol. I’ve devoted my writing to exploring my heritage and the environments I’ve been in.
This is Auster exploring all the themes he’s well known for now, and crafting them into a beautifully absurd almost surreal tale. Not strictly a noir book this has a protagonist struggling with his place in the world and his identity, whilst getting drawn into situations out of their control—all tropes which are seminal to the genre.
Auster’s first book released under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin, called Squeeze Play, is a more typical crime, or pulp noir. And it's easy to see his blend into literary fiction whilst holding the noir handles close for The Music of Chance.
Often writers start out literary then a genre attaches itself. Here, Auster appears to have hit big by penning a commercially aimed work, then shifting back to where his core themes ring out.
I’m a huge fan of these themes he’s so good at; stories within stories, back-tales of characters,…
Nashe comes into an inheritance and decides to pursue a life of freedom. He meets Pozzi, a gambler, who exerts a terrible fascination over, him and together they take a desperate gamble. By the author of "The New York Trilogy", "Moon Palace" and "The Invention of Solitude".
Growing up on a diet of The Godfather, The Sopranos, thrillers, and gangster novels, and living in New York City with eye-opening trips to Sicily, I became slightly obsessed with the Mafia. I came to see the American Mafia as a quintessentially American fabric, woven of family, power, immigrants, money, history, loyalty, legacy, and, yes, crime.
A history of the early 1960s in America, leading up to the assassination of JFK, seen through the eyes of the mobsters and criminals, crooked cops, spies, and sleazos who power the machines of history.
A comprehensive romp through the underbelly of American crime and politics (and you might, after reading this book, wonder what’s the difference), it’s a novel about characters you don’t like—but they’re vivid and fascinating.
Much more than a gritty gangster novel, it’s a tale about the people in history’s shadows, and, ultimately, history and the “never innocent” America itself.
The first novel in Ellroy's extraordinary Underworld USA Trilogy as featured on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read.
1958. America is about to emerge into a bright new age - an age that will last until the 1000 days of John F Kennedy's presidency.
Three men move beneath the glossy surface of power, men allied to the makers and shakers of the era. Pete Bondurant - Howard Hughes's right-hand man, Jimmy Hoffa's hitman. Kemper Boyd - employed by J Edgar Hoover to infiltrate the Kennedy clan. Ward Littell - a man seeking redemption in Bobby Kennedy's drive against organised crime.…
I am a huge fan of logic puzzles and can find myself wasting hours on these. A locked room mystery is similar to a logic puzzle. We are presented with a limited number of characters and a setting where no one can arrive or leave. Thus, the killer must be one of these characters, leaving the reader to try and find the guilty person before the end of the book. As Sherlock Holmes said, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." I love to try my hand at being Sherlock both as a reader and a writer.
I first met Laura at Theakston’s Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate not long after reading her debut novel, Friend Request and I’ve been a fan of her writing ever since.
And so, when I was offered an advance copy ofMy Husband’s Killer, I jumped at the chance. Laura does interpersonal relationships brilliantly and I knew I was in for an intriguing read.
The novel opens as the victim’s widow prepares for his funeral, having learned a shocking secret about her husband who drowned off the Amalfi coast.
What she thought had been an accident now looks very different and so we go back in time, gradually filling in the gaps until the truth emerges.
When author Rosemary Mahoney took a solo trip on the Egyptian Nile in a seven-foot rowboat, she discovered modern Egypt for herself. As a female, she confronted deeply-held beliefs about foreign women while cautiously remaining open to genuine friendships; as a traveler, she had experiences that ranged from the humorous to the hair-raising--including an encounter that began as one of the most frightening of her life and ended as a chastening lesson in cultural misunderstanding. Whether she's meeting contemporary Egyptians or finding connections to Westerners who traveled the Nile long ago, Mahoney's informed curiosity about Egypt never ceases to captivate the reader.
At the age of seventy-two, William Golding, British author of Lord of the Flies, set off on a trip down the Nile with his wife and an Egyptian guide. Golding had long had a burning passion for Egypt, stating that ". . . for the last sixty years I must have read every popular book ever written about Egypt." But as his journalistic observations illustrate, there was still so much more to be learned by personal experience. I love this book for Golding's wry, gentle sensibility, his cozy erudition, his intellectual warmth, his wisdom about life and interpersonal relationships in general, and his wonderful sense of humor. I laughed aloud at many points in this book.
William Golding's interest in ancient Egypt has previously been expressed in two essays, and in the novella "The Scorpion God". This account covers his journey down the Nile in today's Egypt. He recalls his trip honestly and humorously, and shares his feelings about Egypt past and present.
I'm a writer who’s always been obsessed with early childhood. No experience we have later in life is any more emotionally charged, resonant, intense, bewildering, or wondrous as those we have as young children. A day can feel like forever; what we imagine can be so vivid as to be indistinguishable from reality; we’re not wholly sure what’s animate and inanimate; we're still at least half-feral. My interest in childhood led me to write about children’s psychology for Psychiatric Times and for the UCLA/Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. Recently, I designed two related university courses that I teach at Antioch University Los Angeles: Representations of Childhood in Literature and the Trauma Memoir.
Robert Goolrick does not pretend in this memoir to have overcome or prevailed or found redemption from his horrendous childhood. Instead, he tells us the number of psychotropic prescriptions he must take every day just to be able to function. Something unthinkably awful happens in his seemingly genteel family at the hands of the father who is supposed to protect him, and as a result, he will never be the same. When he tries to tell what happened and seek comfort, let alone redress, his whole family turns on him. Yet Goolrick tells this story with an amazing lyricism and compassion. He unravels his tale slowly, protecting and preparing the reader in a way that no one in his family ever protected or prepared him.
It was the 1950s, a time of calm, a time when all things were new and everything seemed possible. A few years before, a noble war had been won, and now life had returned to normal.
For one little boy, however, life had become anything but "normal."
To all appearances, he and his family lived an almost idyllic life. The father was a respected professor, the mother a witty and elegant lady, someone everyone loved. They were parents to three bright, smiling children: two boys and a girl. They lived on a sunny street in a small college town nestled…
I am a psychological scientist, BBC science communicator, and best-selling author. I am also bisexual. As an academic, my tendency is to immediately look for research and scholarly writing about topics that interest me. But for bisexuality, I found that this was incredibly hard to do. So, I dug into archives and journals, connected with hundreds of bisexuality researchers and activists, and after much searching, I finally found the answers to questions I had had my entire life. I wrote them all down in my new book Bi.
For academic perspectives on bisexuality, this book is a great resource. Because many books on bisexuality are centred in or around North America this is a welcome addition. It is the first to bring together academic research on bisexual people from around Europe. It also won the Bisexual Book Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020 (if you’re looking for more bi books the annual Bi book awards by the Bi Writers Association is always a good place to search!).
The book includes research from different disciplines, showcasing the many ways that scholars have approached bi+ issues. It provides fascinating insights that are a great stepping stone for venturing deeper into the topic.
Textbooks can be expensive, and many academic articles are locked behind pay-walls, so the authors made sure that there’s an open access version of the textbook (click the direct link below).
Bisexuality in Europe offers an accessible and diverse overview of research on bisexuality and bi+ people in Europe, providing a foundation for theorising and empirical work on plurisexual orientations and identities, and the experiences and realities of people who desire more than one sex or gender
Counteracting the predominance of work on bisexuality based in Ango-American contexts, this collection of fifteen contributions from both early-career and more senior academics reflects the current state of research in Europe on bisexuality and people who desire more than one sex or gender. The book is structured around three interlinked themes that resonate well…
As a human, I struggle with staying connected during conflict. Because conflict naturally shows up in all relationships, I had to figure out how to do it better, or die alone! My path has woven through studying conflict resolution, becoming a relationship therapist, doing deep learning within my own life partnership, and exploring the realm of somatic psychology in my doctoral work. I long for a world where we have the skills we need to work through conflict without resorting to violence. In my dreams, the world is able to coexist with love and conflict. Our relationships thrive when we speak our full truth, and embody our values in action.
The teachings of NVC are essential for those wishing to deepen their compassionate hearts.
NVC has helped my partner and me navigate many difficult conversations while remaining connected, present, and caring. Instead of communication breakdown, NVC teaches a focus on identifying needs and expressing emotions before making a doable request. The skills of this practice are essential building blocks for kind and honest communication.
5,000,000 COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE • TRANSLATED IN MORE THAN 35 LANGUAGES
What is Violent Communication?
If “violent” means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate—judging others, bullying, having racial bias, blaming, finger pointing, discriminating, speaking without listening, criticizing others or ourselves, name-calling, reacting when angry, using political rhetoric, being defensive or judging who’s “good/bad” or what’s “right/wrong” with people—could indeed be called “violent communication.”
What is Nonviolent Communication?
Nonviolent Communication is the integration of four things:
• Consciousness: a set of principles that support living a life of compassion, collaboration, courage, and…
I’ve been fascinated with the subjects of forgiveness and reconciliation most of my life. I’ve spent years researching people of the Old Testament, and as I read their stories, I see their need for these things in their relationships. It is a universal need of humans. Because I write about people who actually lived, I read books that deal with the things we all face. Truth is, time may change, but the human heart does not. I’m an amateur theologian and avid reader of books that will help me grow as a person and allow me to understand these ancient people who walked before us.
In The Prince and the Prodigal, Joseph has suffered a huge injustice from the people who should have loved him the most. Lysa’s book deals with the subject of familial hurt and pain, and though Joseph’s situation was not exactly the same, the principles of forgiving those who have wronged us even when we can’t forget what they did is the same.
Everyone experiences hurt or pain from another person. Unfortunately, the ones who hurt us the most tend to be the ones we love the most. I’ve read other books on forgiveness because it’s a subject I’ve had to deal with most of my adult life. When I picked up Lysa’s book on forgiving what you can’t forget, I did a lot of underlining because her words resonated with deep places in my own heart.
One underlined place says, “Destructive choices always affect more people than just the…
You deserve to stop suffering because of what other people have done to you.
Have you ever felt stuck in a cycle of unresolved pain, playing offenses over and over in your mind? You know you can't go on like this, but you don't know what to do next. Lysa TerKeurst has wrestled through this journey. But in surprising ways, she’s discovered how to let go of bound-up resentment and overcome the resistance to forgiving people who aren’t willing to make things right.
With deep empathy, therapeutic insight, and rich Bible teaching coming out of…
