Fans pick 100 books like Flashman at the Charge

I came to this book by accident. I had overindulged in fantasy and was tired of recycled plots and worn tropes. I picked it up on holiday as a last resort and found a very different sort of fantasy, which rekindled my enthusiasm for the genre.

Inquisitor Glokta is a character I wanted to hate. He is a torturer, and a cripple, having been tortured himself. He’s ruthless and focused and possibly the meanest of anti-heroes. But I think I came to imagine what it was like to be the dashing hero, loved by everyone, feted by royalty, and then ruined by malice and torture, and yes, as this tale unfolded, I began to like him and the rest of the misfits that populate Joe Abercombie’s world very much indeed.

My copies of this series are so worn by reading and re-reading that they are falling apart. There’s no higher praise from me as a reader. 

This is my comfort read, which is odd because it’s about the fall of a civilization—and The Dark, in particular, is terrifying. We never really see them. That’s partly because they aren’t entirely corporeal and can change size and shape at will. It’s also because anyone we know in the story who encounters them is almost certainly fighting for their life.

Are The Dark one character or many? Certainly, what one of them knows, they all know. The key to this conundrum is what motivates them to do as they do, and alien as they are; their motivations are as unexpected as they are profound. 

This is beautifully written classic fantasy in all its glory. If you only read one book of these five,… show more.

One of the first modern cozy mysteries I have ever read, Stephanie Plum is zany, ridiculous, and laugh-out-loud funny. Basically, she’s a bounty hunter, and she gets her man and solves mysteries despite herself. Her Grandma Mazur is quite possibly one of the best sidekick characters ever invented. Funerals may or may not involve dead bodies, but Granny Mazur will be there anyway, even if it means stealing a corpse. Especially if it means stealing a corpse! Stephanie has a habit of losing cars and getting stuck driving a very old boat of a car (Big Buick), which deprives her of looking as cool as she’d like. Well, she isn’t exactly a put-together gal, so that’s okay. 

The initial books in the series are almost a coming of age—a chance at a career, a chance or two at romance, and family shenanigans that almost kill her with good intentions. This… show more.

George Smiley is a most unlikely hero for a spy thriller. He’s old, tired, and just wants to be left with his books and his research. He wears big, comical glasses, and his wife, the lovely Lady Anne, refers to him as her “Toad.” He doesn’t look like a spy at all.

George is old-school—careful, meticulous, and precise. In this book, we are gifted with an insider's view of a gimlet mind as he sifts through the traces of all that’s been buried, in pursuit, not only of the truth but of the foul trick that has turned the British Secret Service inside out. I came to deeply respect George’s integrity, his ability to self-evaluate, and see clearly not only the strategies and ploys of his enemy but also his own flaws and weaknesses.

Mara Kozelsky contributed a fantastic essay to Russia’s People of Empire on Archbishop Innokenty, the Orthodox official sent to Crimea in the 19th Century. In this book, she offers the most complete account yet of the effects of the Crimean War fought on that peninsula and elsewhere in the Russian Empire from 1854 to 1856.

The war is known here mostly for the Charge of the Light Brigade (made famous by Tennyson’s poem) or the crucial role played by Florence Nightingale, but as Kozelsky writes, the war had far-reaching, devastating consequences for imperial minorities within the Russian Empire and the Empire itself.

I found the chapters dealing with civilians affected by the war and the tragic stories of the Crimean Tatars after the war to be particularly gripping. Russia’s illegal annexation of the peninsula in 2014 makes Kozelsky’s work all the more relevant.

Long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia and pro-Russian forces tried to reclaim Ukraine through armed conflict after it declared independence in 1991. More than 500,000 people died in consecutive wars from 2014, among them Volodymyr Pavliv, a soldier in the Ukrainian Armed Forces who died of shrapnel wounds in 2017. His sister, Olesya Khromeychuk, a historian, scholar, and director of the Ukrainian Institute of London, narrates her brother’s death in this meditation on grief and war.

As a memoirist, she reveals the nuances of her brother, at once patriotic, brave, complicated, and difficult. Her reflections on his splintered life add color and humanity to a flawed yet loved brother. Her portrayal of her own and her family’s grief is tender and wrenching. However, given her unique stature as a Ukrainian historian, this most personal book about the human cost of war also serves as a study of… show more.

I loved this highly readable history of Ukraine. Written in the early 1990s, when I too worked in Ukraine, Borderland begins with the newly independent nation’s struggle to build itself a national identity. Reid captures this time and its people so well – the peasant women in the covered market, the old men playing chess in Independent Square. Ukraine is literally translated as, ‘on the edge’ or ‘borderland’ and Reid explores the toll of its history – pograms, famine, purges, war, Holocaust, and Chernobyl… She travels through villages of whitewashed cottages, bringing their hardy inhabitants to life with her often quirky observations. She meets old folk who were alive during the famine of 1932/33, others who survived the gas chambers. At every turn, the magnificent Ukrainian spirit is in vibrant evidence. 

This modern classic is still a must-read for my students nearly twenty years after its first publication. Nothing else comes close to its sweep over time and space as it explains how the legacies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth continue to shape the relations between its successor nations and their founding narratives. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the protests in Belarus have made this well-written book even more essential to understanding the region.

I loved this beautifully written novel which embraces and honours the Ukrainian spirit. It is 1942 and the Germans have arrived in a small town in Western Ukraine. When the schoolmaster and his wife are rounded up and murdered along with all the other Jews, Yaisa, a local peasant girl, instinctively hides their two young sons away. The massacre is witnessed with horror both by a Ukrainian Auxiliary, now remorseful at having joined the German police, and by a German engineer who is building roads with forced Ukrainian labour. Now the hunt is on for the Jewish boys – and for Yaisa too. An incredibly moving read that both hones in on one small town and pans out across the vast and varied landscape of Ukraine. 

Andrew Wilson is the foremost British historian of Ukraine. This book offers the most authoritative and readable single-volume history of Ukraine available in English.

Given the astonishing lack of knowledge about Ukraine, particularly evident in so much ‘expert’ commentary on the war, Wilson’s work is required reading for anyone wanting to understand what is happening today in Ukraine. The fifth edition takes the story up to the outbreak of the war and into the summer of 2022.

The author concludes that Putin’s war to destroy Ukraine has paradoxically helped Ukraine to overcome its internal divisions and transform itself into a genuine nation-state, supported by all sections of the population.