100 books like Flights

A true marvel of a novel. It follows the famous jester Tyll Ulenspiegel and the Winter Queen and several learned and lethal Jesuit priests (among others). Most novels that cut between storylines lose momentum and direction. Tyll takes bold leaps and keeps transforming into new adventures, new truths, a new vision of the seventieth century that subtly mixes historical fact and magical possibility.  

Set on the beautiful island of Barbados, Edugyan’s take on the slavery/emancipation interface focuses on primary characters that are male. The relationship between two of them, one White and one Black, becomes an exploration of how slavery created a toxic psychological legacy that distorted the nature and possibilities of friendship and trust.  

I’ve loved Barbados since my first visit as a teenager, and I became more attached after some of my siblings called it home. Known as ‘Little England,’ a downside of this sunny paradise, and a relic of slavery, is its unequal economic and social class divisions. The population is over 90% Black but most of the valuable land and resources are owned by non-Blacks. I encourage readers to look beyond its surface beauty and explore its deeper history. 

It’s 1764 on Manhattan Island, and a stranger from London arrives at a small town called New York. He expects to receive a thousand pounds. A cast of dynamic characters appear. There are intrigues and adventures. All writers try to be vibrant on the page—to write smart, vivid, witty descriptions and dialogue. And then you come upon a writer like Francis Spufford, who is able, somehow, do it a degree or two better than everyone else.   

This isn’t just a book, it’s a magic trick—and I’m not sure how Flanagan pulls it off. Writing about the prisoners of war forced by Japanese soldiers to build the Thai-Burma Railway during World War II, he pulls no punches in his depictions of human cruelty, and readers will feel every single one. As he renders misery and starvation in relentless focus, the subject matter is pitch black… and yet, by bridging the story to the present, when the survivors and their captors are trying to live normal lives beneath the weight of their history and their actions, Flanagan turns this from a litany of human suffering into something far more complex and interesting. Black magic, maybe, but magic just the same.

I love this book so much, I blurbed it! In a world where women are often asked to be quiet, to make themselves small, Nafiza Azad’s unapologetically feminist book is breathtaking. Readers journey with Paheli and her collection of girls—the Wild Ones—helping to save girls from the pain they had to endure. On their journey, they seek Taraana, a boy with stars in his eyes, who once saved Paheli and now needs saving. While The Wild Ones is a fantasy, it is an unflinching look into the #MeToo movement, the tragedies and pain of being female, the saving grace of sisterhood, and the audacious power of resilience and hope.

I remember vividly the moment, while researching change, when I read an article by Jeffrey Pfeffer on power in organisations. It was an ah-ha moment for me in making sense of some of the behaviours I was witnessing at work. Marie McIntyre, who studied with Pfeffer, wrote Secrets to Winning at Office Politics and writes in a much more accessible and practical way on understanding and working with these politics, while maintaining your own integrity. Many a mentee has said to me, ‘I’m not interested in the politics, I just want to do my job.' And my response to that is that if you want to be successful in your career, then you need to not just understand but work with the politics. But there are ways to do this, while still being you. And this book helps with how.

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… show more.

Leavitt’s story is a fairytale and like all good fairytales, there is a handsome prince except this one is played by Lord Death himself.

I love Keturah. She is brave enough not to be afraid and big-hearted enough to see beyond Death’s terrifying purpose to the underlying sadness of the feared and hated outsider. Through the course of the book, she also comes to appreciate the meaning he brings to life.

“It was Death who…made her see the sun in the blue sky and hear the trees in a spring wind. He made her see how much she loved her friends…Made her love the breath in her lungs. She knew she had never been truly alive as when she met him. Never so happy and content with her lot until she was touched by the sorrow of him.”

This disturbing and sensual tale of a teenage girl kidnapped and held by an obsessive young man was something I had to read in a day. The writing has a kind of D.H. Lawrence quality in that every part of the Outback landscape, every object and garment and exchange seems to vibrate with physicality and sexuality. The story is also gripping, a page-turner, and such a wonderful examination of where love and obsession meet, of Stockholm Syndrome and survival, and the jumble of feelings from the most animal to the most selfless that we all have to pick our way through.

The eerie forces in Folk’s debut story collection aren’t so much mystical as they are technological.

Each story in this book could be its own episode of Black Mirror, and readers come away understanding how the messiest human impulses are eternal, no matter the advances we make as a society.

Folk’s characters are people trying (and often failing) to find love, meaning, and purpose while their lives are marked by encounters with artificial intelligence and imminent apocalypse.