Fans pick 100 books like Epping Forest

I visited Addison’s bookshop in Loughton in 1945 on my own, aged 6, and William Addison helped me spend my book token on a book on trees.

This book covers the Forest’s literary and historical associations in 23 chapters that cover the Tudor court, Elizabethan writers and musicians, Donne and Herbert, and Clare and Tennyson, with treatments of the Forest villages, including my own Loughton and Buckhurst Hill.

I recommend this book as I go back to it again and again, and as Addison started my interest in trees in 1945, with this book in typescript on his desk. My most recent book The Tree of Tradition will be out in 2024.

I recommend this book as I have often gone back to it.

It takes us from Chingford Plain to Fairmead Bottom, High Beach, Upshire, Waltham Abbey, Epping, Strawberry Hill, and Connaught Waters, all of which I often visited in my boyhood and youth. There are many lovely pictures, most in black and white and some in colour, and there are good maps.

It gives me pleasure to be reminded of pre-1968 local scenes in the pictures.

This is a massive book, 480 pages packed with pictures of old Forest houses, contrasting past and present views.

It begins with the Forest, deer, and ancient camps and soon devotes 20 or 30 pages to old pictures of each of the Forest villages and places, including Woodford, Buckhurst Hill, Chigwell, Loughton, Chingford, High Beach, Theydon Bois, Abridge, Epping and Waltham Abbey. Press reports from past centuries and the 1980s and quotations from books on Epping Forest can be found on every page to illustrate the pictures.

This book has a Foreword by Lord Murray, who lived near me and I often met.

It covers the area in eight sections, including Buckhurst Hill, Chingford Woods and Fairmead Bottom, Loughton Woods (Strawberry Hill and Loughton Camp), High Beach, and Ambresbury Banks. There are black and white, and coloured, pictures and maps. I used to run into Ken Hoy at events and we sometimes chatted.

This book gives information about over 200 of the Forest’s woods, plains, streams, and tracks.

In the first sentence of this novel Anna Lore falls madly in love with a man she happens to run into on the street of her hometown.

Even though she only vaguely recognizes him as they strike up a brief conversation, she becomes so obsessed with him that she is willing to give up everything for him, including her marriage of twenty years with a loving and reliable husband who she loves too.

Reading this novel, I was fascinated with Anna Lore's struggle to understand what's driving her towards a man, who almost against his will has such irresistable power over her. To follow her thinking as it makes her crazy infatuation appear reasonable and compelling is a fascinating experience of the uncanny nature of the unconscious.

I can’t tell you how many times I consulted Jonathan Mayo’s Titanic: Minute By Minute book, checking that the Titanic’s timeline fit in with what my characters were doing at any given time. It’s non-fiction, and it’s nail-bitingly intense. The book is written in present tense, giving you a sense of urgency as Mayo tells you where everyone is, and what is happening at varying parts of the ship at that exact moment. It helps ground you in reality: The truth was, many of Titanic’s crew and passengers didn’t know the ship was sinking. And many of those who did genuinely believed another ship would arrive long before anything serious could actually happen. Mayo uses both accounts from passengers who survived the sinking, as well as the crew member’s testimony from the British and American Titanic inquiries. 

If you’ve ever wanted to know exactly what happened the night… show more.

The shout line on the jacket is “This will overturn everything you thought you knew about…The First World War”, and it certainly delivers. No other conflict has been so misrepresented, and for most people, their idea of it comes straight from Blackadder Goes Forth. But men did not spend months at a time in the trenches; a whole generation did not die; the generals were not cowardly, incompetent fools.

When I first began to write about WW1 for my Morland Dynasty series, I knew as little as anyone, and what I thought I knew was all wrong! By the time I was researching for War At Home, I knew a lot more, but Corrigan opens my eyes to many more subjects. Informative, well-researched, but above all wonderfully readable, this book should be required reading for anyone who is interested in what really happened, not just the made-for-tv version.

Amid the industrial war of fire and fury, a key question remains on how the soldiers survived. Watson’s book explores the experience for British and German soldiers, drawing upon their letters and diaries. Enduring the Great War offers new ways to understand the war of the trenches, how morale was sustained, and it provides an inner portrait into the men who took in the grinding warfare.

What was war like for the average British soldier – ‘Tommy’ - taken from civilian life and sent into the inferno of battle? This magisterial study is the best book about British soldiers and their wartime experiences. It explores reasons for enlistment, training, tactics, life in the trenches, and experience of battle. Although vast in scope, it never loses sight of the human side of war. This book presents presents a nuanced, fascinating, and touching study of the common soldier.

What enabled soldiers to maintain their morale in the inferno of the Western Front? This unique book explores the question by studying the soldiers of the elite 2nd Scottish Rifles at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915. It presents a fascinating micro-history of how a British battalion functioned in peace and in war. What type of men served in an elite unit? Where had they come from? What rules did they follow? Where did their loyalties lie? How did they maintain their spirit in the face of dreadful conditions and severe casualties? This book answers these questions and many more.