87 books like Evening In Byzantium

This roman à clef about billionaire Howard Hughes has everything you covet in a great beach read: money, power, sex, betrayal.

The rugged tycoon Jonas Cord and the screen siren Rita Marlowe tussle, tangle, couple, uncouple, and everything in between over decades and continents, and Robbins’s talent for saucy dialogue and spicier plotlines furiously bubbles to the surface in perhaps the last great book he wrote before his own life—as dramatic as anything he penned—and his work both began to crumble.

It’s hardly short (the original hardback clocks in at a hefty 650-plus pages), but I could not get enough of its blazing, take-no-prisoners leads as they barreled through the worlds of show business, aviation, and business to conquer the world.   

The first great American trashy novel, Peyton Place today seems rather tame, but in its day, it was scandalous. Plucking it from my mother’s bookcase when I was 14, I was engrossed by its roaring passion and sensational secrets.

Set in a small New England town, the book set the stage for the modern soap opera, and I wolfed it down like a big box of candy. It reminds me of those great, heady melodramas of the 1950s (and was itself made into a fabulously sudsy film in 1957), an intoxicating mix of all things forbidden.

I adored the fact that it was literary, which it doesn’t get enough credit for. I think its opening line—“Indian summer is like a woman…”—is one of the best in mid-20th Century literature. 

I once asked Agnes Nixon, the creator of All My Children and other legendary daytime serials, how she became so good at plotting them. She replied, “I am a very good eavesdropper.”

I suspect O’Hara was, too. His 1959 epic (900 pages!) about a social-climbing, status-mad banker and the fashionable coterie of vipers he navigates to attain success at any cost is dipped in old-money style and privilege masking an ever-rotting core.

It’s packed with the one thing any great beach read needs: people keeping secrets who will do anything to protect them.    

Ok, so this is not technically midcentury (it was published in 1977), but I had to include one of those amazing 1970s yarns. I chose this one because I remember reading this as an adolescent and feeling it was sort of like a more adult, sophisticated Nancy Drew book, replete with cliffhangers at the end of each chapter.

This global potboiler, about a beautiful pharmaceutical heiress marked for murder, has enough twists and turns to keep anyone reading way past bedtime. I think it also planted the seed for me to write my own novels of courageous, Grace Kelly-style heroines caught up in the throes of romantic mystery and adventure. 

I fell in love with Lizzy and Ciaran as they tried to find their way back to each other after over a decade of not speaking. I loved the glamour of the Cannes film festival, which was a backdrop to the very real, human, unglamorous resentments they were harbouring, and I was gripped by the sense of time running out as the festival progressed.

The flashbacks to their time in France when they first met were gripping, and I was swept away by these two completely believable characters but was also caught up in the sizzle between them, and it’s such a funny, heartfelt book too. 

If intense and enthralling are what you are looking for, What I Would Do For You by Willow Winters is my recommendation. 

This gripping romance has an unforgettable anti-hero that left me with a lasting impression. The story tells of betrayal and all-consuming love, something that is all too close to my heart. What had me turning the pages was the depth of emotion. The emotion guides us into a journey of love, sacrifice, and redemption. All things that truly hit home. 

I picked up a copy of Sally Rogers-Davidson’s book Polymer in a bookshop in Glebe. I admit I took it from the shelf because of the chance resemblance between our names. It entertained me royally on a long bus ride and I instantly wanted to write to the author. I later met Sally R-D and found we had more in common than our names and our penchant for writing science fiction.

Polymer is one of the most wonderful lively, romantic, adventurous space operas I’ve ever read. It’s sharply written, and Polly Meridian herself is a heroine I wish I’d invented. Her hero is an antihero at first, but the story persuades the reader to give him a chance, as Polly does.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is a fantastic tale of two worlds. There is the Land, a mystical place of good versus evil, with inhabitants who use supernatural means to summon help against the darkness, and our world where the writer Thomas Covenant lives as an outcast to keep his leprosy in remission and to avoid his hostile neighbors. When he is magically transported to the Land and its people beg him to fight the evil for them, he refuses, believing it is a suicidal delusion that will reactivate his disease and kill him. The troubled hero Covenant could not be more compelling, or his dilemma better written, especially as the true-blue inhabitants of the Land struggle to understand why he can’t do the right thing.

I love this novel because it mixes Southern Gothic with speculative fiction in a hilarious epic struggle between man and hog. When middle-aged taxidermist Romie Futch becomes a research subject in the shady Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, he becomes both super genius and guinea pig, his middle-aged brain now brilliant beyond comprehension. Troubled by errant downloads that track his thoughts and actions, Romie turns taxidermy into pop art as he hunts down the legendary super pig “Hogzilla.” This is the funniest, wittiest book I’ve read in a long time. 

I personally love twisted relationship books, especially when the antihero is hard to distinguish. This book deals with a marriage that is far from typical. I can't say more without spoilers, but take my word that this makes for a fabulous suspenseful read. If you read a book that makes you want to kick and scream when you finally "get it" then this is a perfect read for you. All I can say about Black Lies is expect the unexpected!