Here are 100 books that Fortune's Hand fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been fascinated by the early modern period–the Tudors and the Stuarts–since falling in love with Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth, Henry VIII, and his wives when I was a child. I graduated from Horrible Histories as a child to lengthier nonfiction and fiction books about the era as a teenager before gaining a BA Honours, a Masters, and a PhD focussing on Elizabethan language and literature. I now teach English Literature at Strathclyde University. Because I never lost the urge to read everything I could about the Tudors and Stuarts, I began writing about them, too, and because I devour both fiction and nonfiction, I write both!
Elizabeth I is one of the most popular Tudors and her story has been told and retold in countless biographies and Anne Somerset’s weighty nonfiction study is my favourite. It details the big-picture moments of the queen’s life–her rivalries, successes, and failures–without losing sight of the human at the heart of the story. We can thus enjoy learning about Elizabeth the woman as well as Elizabeth the queen.
This is a book I occasionally dip into for a reference and invariably end up rereading in its entirety.
Elizabeth 1 ruled England in defiance of convention, exercising supreme authority in a man's world. With courage, brilliance and style, she reigned for nearly forty-five years. Anne Somerset's penetrating biography of this complex and uniquely gifted woman is unrivalled in its analysis of both Elizabeth's personal life and her career as leader. "By applying herself industriously to the evidence, Anne Somerset presents a convincing as well as complex character at the centre of her long, but ever lucid narrative" Antonia Fraser "I strongly recommend this book...the writing is a delight" Daily Telegraph "The fullest and best biography of the queen…
I’ve been fascinated by the early modern period–the Tudors and the Stuarts–since falling in love with Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth, Henry VIII, and his wives when I was a child. I graduated from Horrible Histories as a child to lengthier nonfiction and fiction books about the era as a teenager before gaining a BA Honours, a Masters, and a PhD focussing on Elizabethan language and literature. I now teach English Literature at Strathclyde University. Because I never lost the urge to read everything I could about the Tudors and Stuarts, I began writing about them, too, and because I devour both fiction and nonfiction, I write both!
The end of the Tudor dynasty is often rushed over; as everyone knows, Elizabeth I died childless, and her throne passed to her Stuart cousin, James. Leanda de Lisle shows why this transfer of power shouldn’t be glossed over in this sumptuous nonfiction.
In this book, she explores the wild, colourful, tumultuous politicking that went on in Elizabeth’s final years and in the years immediately after her death. What results is a story of plots, murders, and spies, as politicians employed every trick (clean and dirty) to ensure the Stuarts gained the Tudor crown.
Many volumes have been written about the long reign of Elizabeth I. Now, for the first time, comes a brilliant new work that focuses on the critical year her reign ended, a time in which England lost its childless queen and a Machiavellian struggle ensued to find her successor.
December 1602. After forty-four years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth is in decline. The formidable ruler whose motto is Semper eadem (I never change) has become a dithering old woman, missing teeth and wearing makeup half an inch thick. The kingdom has been weakened by the cost of war with Spain…
I’ve been fascinated by the early modern period–the Tudors and the Stuarts–since falling in love with Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth, Henry VIII, and his wives when I was a child. I graduated from Horrible Histories as a child to lengthier nonfiction and fiction books about the era as a teenager before gaining a BA Honours, a Masters, and a PhD focussing on Elizabethan language and literature. I now teach English Literature at Strathclyde University. Because I never lost the urge to read everything I could about the Tudors and Stuarts, I began writing about them, too, and because I devour both fiction and nonfiction, I write both!
This beautifully written nonfiction book brings to life Henry VIII’s tragic fifth queen. It reveals the complexities and colour of the ageing tyrant’s court.
It’s a book packed with detail and yet so rich in narrative that I couldn’t put it down. Henry’s wives are popular figures for biography–but Russell breathes new life into his youngest, most tragic consort.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2017
During one of the hottest summers on record the court of Henry VIII is embroiled, once again, in political scandal. The King's marriage to Anne of Cleves has failed, his closest adviser Thomas Cromwell is to be executed for treason and, in the countryside, an aristocratic teenager named Catherine Howard prepares to become fifth wife to the increasingly irascible, unpredictable monarch.
Her story is both a very dark fairy tale and a gripping thriller. Born into nobility and married into the royal family, Catherine was attended every waking hour by…
I’ve been fascinated by the early modern period–the Tudors and the Stuarts–since falling in love with Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth, Henry VIII, and his wives when I was a child. I graduated from Horrible Histories as a child to lengthier nonfiction and fiction books about the era as a teenager before gaining a BA Honours, a Masters, and a PhD focussing on Elizabethan language and literature. I now teach English Literature at Strathclyde University. Because I never lost the urge to read everything I could about the Tudors and Stuarts, I began writing about them, too, and because I devour both fiction and nonfiction, I write both!
Sarah Gristwood is one of our leading experts in Tudor history, and in this nonfiction study, she lays bare the complexities of love and passion at the Tudor court.
This is such a refreshing book because it explores both the similarities and the wild differences between ourselves and our ancestors. Gristwood provides a rich sense of what love, marriage, passion, and the performance of emotion meant to the Tudors.
One cannot quite look at Henry VIII or any of his wives in quite the same way after reading.
'One of the most important books to be written about the Tudors in a generation.' Tracy Borman
In this groundbreaking history, Sarah Gristwood reveals the way courtly love made and marred the Tudor dynasty. From Henry VIII declaring himself as the 'loyal and most assured servant' of Anne Boleyn to the poems lavished on Elizabeth I by her suitors, the Tudors re-enacted the roles of devoted lovers and capricious mistresses first laid out in the romances of medieval literature, but now with life-and-death consequences for the protagonists. The Tudors in Love dissects…
"History can become a dull and uninteresting subject, but the stories of the past are far more interesting and inspiring than the very best fiction. These stories tell us about how our world came to be, and the paths that our predecessors travelled; and they show us that, despite the decades and centuries that separate us, they were driven and inspired by the same factors that drive and inspire us today." Prit Buttar was a doctor, first in the British Army and then a GP, until retiring in 2019. Less than a year later, he volunteered to go back to work during the current pandemic.
This is an unusual book, in that it is effectively a biography of a city – known through the years first as St Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, and now once more St Petersburg. As he tells the story of the city that Peter the Great built in a desolate swamp, Lincoln brings together many of the different strands of Russian history and the strong-willed people who tried, with varying degrees of success, to direct that history in directions of their choosing. For anyone intending to visit St Petersburg, reading this book beforehand is an absolute must – it will make the experience of being there so much more valuable. If there is a flaw, it is that Lincoln sadly died when St Petersburg was perhaps at its lowest ebb following the end of the Soviet Union; it would be fascinating to know how he would have assessed the city…
For Russians, St.Petersburg has embodied power, heroism and fortitude. It has encompassed all the things that the Russians are and that they hope to become. Opulence and artistic brilliance blend with images of suffering on a monumental scale to make up the historic persona the late W. Bruce Lincoln's lavish biography of this mysterious, complex city. Climate and comfort were not what Tsar Peter the Great had in mind when he decided to build a new capital in the muddy marshes of the Neva River delta. Located 500 miles below the Arctic Circle, this area, with its foul weather, bad…
Since I was a little boy, long before I dreamed of becoming a Daoist monk, I sensed that there was far more beneath the pond of life than on the surface. I remember feeling jealous of a little turtle I saw in the Connecticut River. Why couldn’t I pop out of my world and see what was happening above, but he could? My spiritual questing led me to Asia and also deep into myself. Writing magical realism does not feel like engaging a fantasy; it feels like I can finally share how the world really is.
I grew up speaking Russian with my grandparents and always yearned to read classic Russian literature in the original. Perhaps it was my great love for those grandparents or the stories they told that led me to major in Russian at Yale University. Like any translated work, Russian literature loses something in translation. Still, it gains something, too, effectively juxtaposing a culture that is neither Eastern nor Western yet entirely alien to most of us today.
Satire, dark humor, and perfect pacing make this story a laugh-out-loud work, at least to me. Despite being ridiculous, its delivery is straight-faced, which at least makes the humor and the social commentary all the more powerful. The gritty reality of Russia in the age of tsars is so palpable you can taste it, and so is the humor.
'Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose.'
With this pair of absurd, comic stories Gogol indulges his imagination and delights readers.
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe.…
For three decades I have been the first violinist of the Takács Quartet, performing concerts worldwide and based at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I love the ways in which books, like music, offer new and surprising elements at different stages of life, providing companionship alongside joys and sorrows.
Suspicious of biography, Malcolm dissects various myths about Chekhov’s death in this engaging book that mixes travel writing with acute readings of Chekhov’s stories and plays. As Malcolm visits some of the places crucial to Chekhov’s life and work (the scenes in Ukraine are of course poignant), she moves seamlessly between her own everyday experiences and the predicaments of Chekhov’s characters. In amongst the despair, disappointment, and absurdity she discovers beauty, humor, and occasional visions of hope.
To illuminate the mysterious greatness of Anton Chekhov’s writings, Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer, and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov’s life and framed by an account of Malcolm’s journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yalta. She writes of Chekhov’s childhood, his relationships, his travels, his early success, and his self-imposed “exile”—always with an eye to connecting them to themes and characters in his work. Lovers of Chekhov as well as those new to his work will be transfixed by Reading Chekhov.
I am a writer and a filmmaker who has lived in New York City since 1982. In 1986 I started my own independent film production company, Starfish Productions, through which I produced and directed documentary films that won multiple awards, including an American Film Institute grant, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and an Emmy Award in 1997. I started writing fiction full-time in 2010. My debut novel, We Shall See the Sky Sparkling (Kensington Books) was published in 2/2019; my second novel The Weight of the Heart (Kensington Books) came out in 5/2020.
Set in 1820s Russia, Eugen Onegin is a novel written in verse, a story about love, loss, and repentance, where bored, superfluous Onegin lives to regret his rejection of the shy young dreamer Tatyana and to feel remorse for his fatal duel with his best friend Lensky. Eugene Onegin is the masterwork of Pushkin, whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature, and is an amazingly engaging piece of writing, ironic and passionate, full of suspense, and rampant with political satire and philosophical digressions that make for the most beautiful read. Honestly, I never thought I would fall so hard for a novel written in another language and in verse.
Widely acknowledged as the master work of the fountainhead of Russian literature, "Eugene Onegin" is a novel in verse, first published serially in 1825. This work, comprised of 389 verses, follows the destinies of three men and three women in imperialist Russia. Eugene is a dandy bored with the social whirl of St. Petersburg, and in moving to the country for a change of scene, he becomes the friend of the poet Lensky, changing their fates dramatically. "Eugene Onegin" is narrated by Pushkin himself, though an idealized version who frequently yet entrancingly digresses in the midst of the beauty Tatyana's…
I’m a longtime Moscow correspondent, having worked there for The Baltimore Sun in the 1990s and for The Washington Post in the 2010s. It was an exciting time to be in Russia, and I couldn’t help noticing parallels between the Russian revolutions of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I think American policymakers, in particular, profoundly misunderstood both events. In my newspaper career, I am a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Award, an Oversea Press Club award, and other honors. In the fall of 2018, I taught for a semester at Princeton University.
Thompson was a photographer from Kansas who went to Europe to cover the First World War and found himself in Russia as 1917 dawned. His book is drawn from letters he wrote home to his wife Dot, and his eyewitness reporting is better than his analysis. His account of the day police opened fire on protesters in Petrograd with machine guns is chilling. Thompson believed that the Germans were behind the revolution, which wasn’t the case, but his photos of soldiers and barricades and protesters amount to a great visual document of the moment. Read this in conjunction with Runaway Russia, by Florence MacLeod Harper, a magazine reporter with whom he teamed up to cover the revolution.
A few years before I had been husking corn in Kansas. For a few seconds I could not speak a word. The first thing that came into my mind was this King Albert, I said, I have never met a king before in my life. (it was hard enough for me to hold a pair of jacks in a poker game.) I do not know what to say except to tell you that I am here and what I want to do. I then ex plained that the world at large would believe the…
I particularly enjoyed writing this book about a city that I love and have visited many times (starting in the late 1970s, when I was a student), and whose history I know well too. Most books, by foreigners anyway, talk about the city from a distance; I wanted to write something visceral, about sounds and smells as well as sights, and above all, how locals themselves think about their city, the way in which its intense and in some respects oppressive past shapes St Petersburg’s life today – yet all the same, never gets taken too seriously. Readers seem to agree: as well as an appreciative letter from Jan Morris, whose travel writing I’ve always admired, I treasure an email message from someone who followed my advice and tramped far and wide – before ending up in the room for prisoners’ relatives to drop off parcels at Kresty (the main city prison) when he wrongly assumed he was using an entrance to the (in fact non-existent) museum.
An extraordinary, high-pitched, Munchausenesque account of a visit to only-just-post-Soviet Leningrad during an especially overheated period of recent history. Not at all like the genteel memories of champagne receptions at the Mariinsky Theatre followed by strolls down the Moika during the White Nights that one gets in other travelogues.
An account of Fallowell's time spent in St Petersburg during the summer of 1992. He was there to write a novel, but was seduced away from his work by the world of clubs, bars and restaurants, and the extraordinary architecture. He also fell in love with Dima, a 17-year-old naval cadet.
