Here are 92 books that Deep Country fans have personally recommended if you like
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Why I chose to write about cold climates: I spent nearly seven years living in the North of Norway in the Sámi reindeer herding village called Guovdageaidnu, or Kautokeino in Norwegian. I cherish my time in that part of the world.
Perhaps one of the most classic Arctic memoirs, this book is Ritter’s account of the year she spent in the remote Arctic wilderness of Spitsbergen in the 1930s.
The nature writing is exquisite, and you can’t help but be transported to the time in place in which she lived, replete with polar bears and long, cold, (and dark) Arctic nights.
"Conjures the rasp of the skin runner, the scent of burning blubber and the rippling iridescence of the Northern Lights..." Sara Wheeler, author of Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica
"Ritter manages to articulate all the terrible beauty and elemental power of a polar winter" Gavin Francis, author of Empire Antarctica
In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least,…
In life and writing I’m torn between a desire for solitude and for connection with people. As a young woman I lived in a cottage miles from friends, working from home while my husband was at work, bringing up our first child. No email, no texting, few visitors. It was idyllic, and I was desperately lonely; that’s when I began to write. We moved, I found friends. But still I dream of solitude. Could I handle it now? It’s surely why I found myself writing a novel about a young woman who finds herself suddenly alone in the wild, with no friends – doesn’t everyone write about the things they fear?
I’ve just reread the opening of Our Endless Numbered Days and whoosh – I’m back in the story, with so many questions, prime among them why the narrator’s father – the liar, the north London survivalist – is removed from all photographs but this last, hidden one that she cuts and conceals under her breast.
Fuller’s story is a page-turner in all the best ways, going back in time to follow nine-year-old Peggy and her father as they run from their family home to a remote cabin in a European forest and a life of barely surviving despite all his plans.
Why? Who is the strange man on the mountain? And how does she get back home? Maybe that isolated mountain hut wasn’t so idyllic after all?
'Fuller handles the tension masterfully in this grown-up thriller of a fairytale, full of clues, questions and intrigue.' - The Times
'Extraordinary...From the opening sentence it is gripping' - Sunday Times
1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother's grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change.
Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote…
In life and writing I’m torn between a desire for solitude and for connection with people. As a young woman I lived in a cottage miles from friends, working from home while my husband was at work, bringing up our first child. No email, no texting, few visitors. It was idyllic, and I was desperately lonely; that’s when I began to write. We moved, I found friends. But still I dream of solitude. Could I handle it now? It’s surely why I found myself writing a novel about a young woman who finds herself suddenly alone in the wild, with no friends – doesn’t everyone write about the things they fear?
This novel has everything I love – a narrator who’s definitely not telling us everything, newly arrived in a remote house by a lake in Norway that is so clearly drawn I can see and feel it in my bones.
Trond has secrets and this is where he’s going to live now. There’s a man down the track whose window he can see when it falls dark. A river flows fast beyond the trees. Petterson’s beautiful, spare writing creates a filmic atmosphere in which past mysteries unfold as Trond begins to learn to live alone with his past.
Stunning story-telling, wonderful place-setting, and a character utterly unlike me that I loved reading in his solitude.
A bestseller and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, now in paperback from Graywolf Press for the first time
We were going out stealing horses. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and oneof the first days of July.
Trond's friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning was different. What began as a joy ride on "borrowed" horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance…
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.
In life and writing I’m torn between a desire for solitude and for connection with people. As a young woman I lived in a cottage miles from friends, working from home while my husband was at work, bringing up our first child. No email, no texting, few visitors. It was idyllic, and I was desperately lonely; that’s when I began to write. We moved, I found friends. But still I dream of solitude. Could I handle it now? It’s surely why I found myself writing a novel about a young woman who finds herself suddenly alone in the wild, with no friends – doesn’t everyone write about the things they fear?
This is one of the most beautiful novels of solitude I’ve ever read.
Conti immerses us in the strange, shifting world of the Paraná Delta in Argentina where Boga lives on a sandbank until the old man he used to fish with dies. Boga finally has the solitude he has craved for so long and sets off in his small boat.
This wondrous book carries us with Boga floating with the currents and tides, following fish, drifting. Though Boga’s chosen life feels aimless, we’re swept with him in the world of the delta and its people, where every storm, every encounter builds towards an unforgettable climax.
I read it four years ago, and I’m still there in the boat with Boga: it’s a quiet masterpiece.
'Neither the old man nor Boga ever said more than was needed. And yet they understood each other perfectly.' Over the course of a season, Boga and the old man work side by side on the sandbanks of the Parana Delta, cutting reeds to sell to local basketweavers. But when the old man falls sick and dies, Boga abandons himself entirely to the river and the life of solitary drifting he has long yearned for. Echoes of John Berger sound throughout the evocative prose of this great Argentinian writer. A twentieth-century classic, Southeaster is a central work in Haroldo Conti's…
I was raised with my seven siblings on Bernard Street in Mill Creek Valley—454 acres in downtown St. Louis, which comprised the nation's largest urban-renewal project beginning in 1959. I started writing short stories about my childhood memories of the dying African-American community after retiring at age 66. The Last Children of Mill Creek was published when I was 70 years old. This memoir is about survival, as told from the viewpoint of a watchful young girl -- a collection of decidedly universal stories that chronicle the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.
With polished language and measured pace, Blow tells a fascinating coming-of-age story of growing up in a small Louisiana town. As the youngest in a family of five boys raised by a schoolteacher mother, with the help of her extended family, he unveils his struggles with sexual identity and masculinity.
Charles M. Blow's mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a factory near their town in segregated Louisiana, where slavery's legacy felt close. When her philandering husband finally pushed her over the edge, she fired a pistol at his fleeing back, missing every shot, thanks to "love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel." Charles was the baby of the family, fiercely attached to his "do-right" mother. Until one day that divided his life into Before and After - the day an older cousin took…
My work has appeared in theAtlantic, Harper’s, andBest American Essays, among other places. My most recent book is Seventeen and Oh: Miami, 1972, and the NFL's Only Perfect Season. I grew up in Miami and as a writer had always intended to explore that wondrous year in Miami—when I was a nine-year-old fan—and I finally did so for its fiftieth anniversary. I wanted to write about much more than football; I hoped to bring alive the feel of old Miami, and to do so I reread many of my favorite books about South Florida. Here are a few of the best.
Edna Buchanan moved from New Jersey to Miami on
a whim in 1965 and found her calling in the journalistic life.
Calvin Trillin
would later write, “In Miami, a few figures are regularly discussed by
first name among people they have never actually met. One of them is Fidel.
Another is Edna.”
She had a nose for the
bizarre and the macabre—as well as for a good lead: “A man wandering along a
Miami Beach street in his undershorts and carrying a blood-stained knife Sunday
morning led police to the scene of a murder.”
In this memoir she recalls zipping
around South Florida from Hollywood to Homestead in her yellow Triumph Spitfire
to produce her almost-daily cataloguing of gruesome crime. The “polite” killer who abducted couples on dates, raped the
woman, and then allowed her to dress before shooting both.
Now in trade paperback, Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Buchanan’s classic nonfiction masterpiece detailing events from her eighteen years writing for The Miami Herald.
Nobody covered love and lunacy, life and death on Miami’s mean streets better than legendary Miami Herald police reporter Edna Buchanan. Winner of a 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Edna has seen it all, including more than 5,000 corpses. Many of them had familiar faces.
Edna Buchanan doesn’t write about cops—she writes about people: the father who murdered his comatose toddler in her hospital crib; fifteen-year-old Charles Cobb—a lethal killer; Gary Robinson, who "died hungry"; the Haitian who was…
Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood.
Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into…
Growing up in the South as the daughter of a single mother, I’ve always appreciated strong women, in reality and in fiction. Before I could read, I made up stories featuring me as the super heroine. Later, I devoured all the Nancy Drews I could get my hands on. I credit Ms. Drew for nurturing my fascination with mystery. I especially enjoy suspense with a psychological turn that frequently takes the form of gaslighting or manipulating someone into doubting their perception of reality. As an author of Southern suspense with heart and humor, my female characters fall victim to this device but are strong enough to persevere.
I was immediately pulled into a world of deception, greed, and murder.
Despite being traumatized, the main character stays strong. Her description of the luxury cruise ship made me feel as if I were onboard, too. The dark twists and turns throughout this novel, along with the gaslighting of the protagonist, were intense enough that I couldn’t stop reading.
Like the heroine in the story, I was determined to unravel the truth and decide who could be trusted and who might be a cold-blooded killer. For me, this wild ride was exhilarating. But it could be a few years before I consider booking my own cruise.
As a writer, reader, and human, I’m drawn to complex stories about motherhood. It’s something we can choose, or something that can be forced upon us. Our relationships with our own mothers shape our entire lives. For my book She’s Not Home, I spent a lot of time deepening Sheryl, the mother’s, character. Early versions of the manuscript received criticism for her being too easily villainize. Too two-dimensional. Readers wanted a complex, heartbreaking character. I went to a very painful place to give Sheryl a richer voice. Here are a few books I love that also face the pain and complexity of motherhood and mothering head-on.
I don’t even think I was through the first chapter before I cried over this book.
Mary Louise Kelly writes frankly and poignantly about the nature of time as it pertains to raising children. She does not apologize for being good at her job, nor for the essential part of herself who needs to be immersed in it.
At the same time, she is unsparingly vulnerable about the tradeoffs: the times, good and bad, she has missed with her kids. As a writer who couldn’t stop writing to be a full-time parent if I tried, Kelly’s words resonated with me from the first page to the last.
This memoir is a gift to ambitious, big-hearted moms everywhere.
“This voice-driven, relatable, heartfelt and emotional story will make any parent tear up.” ―Good Morning America, “15 Delightful Books Perfect for Spring Reading”
Operating Instructions meets Glennon Doyle in this new book by famed NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly that is destined to become a classic―about the year before her son goes to college―and the joys, losses and surprises that happen along the way.
The time for do-overs is over.
Ever since she became a parent, Mary Louise Kelly has said “next year.” Next year will be the year she makes it to her…
In addition to being an author, I’m an avid reader, averaging about a book a week. While I enjoy a good historical fiction or NYT bestseller, my go-to is mystery and suspense, and has been since the day my mother first introduced me to Nancy Drew. I’m especially drawn to cold case mysteries, multiple POVs, and complex plots and characters, but I can dive headfirst into a fast-paced beach read with equal pleasure. As a writer by profession, I truly believe reading is the best teacher and I have learned from, and enjoyed, every one of these recommendations immensely. It’s my hope that you'll discover a new-to-you author and love the book you choose.
As a former journalist and magazine editor, I’m all too familiar with the ongoing demise of print media, and so I found myself identifying with protagonist Kate Waters, a journalist fighting to keep her newspaper job by looking for the next big story. Kate thinks she may have found it after reading a short article in her evening newspaper: the discovery of the skeletal remains of a baby at a construction site.
Skillfully told from multiple POVs, this is as much a book about what could have been as what may—or may not—have happened, and Barton is undeniably equal to the task.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow comes a twisting novel of psychological suspense—as seen in People, Entertainment Weekly, Time, USA Today, Bustle, Good Housekeeping.com, HelloGiggles, The Boston Globe, PureWow, The Dallas Morning News, and more!
“The Child is a perfect blend of beach read and book club selection....[A] page-turning whodunit….A novel that is both fast-paced and thought-provoking.”—USA Today
As an old house is demolished in a gentrifying section of London, a workman discovers human remains, buried for years. For journalist Kate Waters, it’s a story that deserves attention. She cobbles together a piece for her newspaper,…
This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year search…
I have been a reader and a writer for as long as I can remember, so books about reading, writing, and storytelling have always interested me. As a school library media specialist for over 30 years, I have read thousands of picture books and placed wonderful books in the hands of thousands of young people. Several of these books were mentor texts when I wrote my picture book biography. I want young people to be inspired to read and write, and I hope these books will do that for the adults who select them and the children who read them.
I often wonder what inspires someone to write, and in this book, Lesa Cline-Ransome does a great job of explaining how Ethel Payne became such a groundbreaking journalist.
I love that this book will inspire young readers to listen to stories like Ethel Payne did her entire life. The distinctive illustrations complement the lyrical text beautifully. What I also like about this book is that it’s a great example of writing articles. The book shows Ethel’s passion for the written word as a journalist and her persistence in telling the stories.
"A worthy addition to children's biography collections." -Booklist
"A solid treatment of an important but little-known figure, and it may prompt kids to think about the role and composition of a free press." -BCCB
"Cline-Ransome tells [Ethel Payne's] story with economy and drive. 'Somebody had to do the fighting,' she quotes Payne saying, 'somebody had to speak up.'" -Publishers Weekly
Renowned author Lesa Cline-Ransome and celebrated illustrator John Parra unite to tell the inspiring story of Ethel Payne, a groundbreaking African American journalist known as the First Lady of the Black Press.
