Here are 66 books that Glass Souls fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a kid, Joseph DâAgnese did not feel quite normal unless heâd devoured at least two mystery novels in a weekend. Today heâs a journalist and author. His mystery fiction has appeared in Shotgun Honey, Plots with Guns, Beat to a Pulp,Ellery Queenâs Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, and Alfred Hitchcockâs Mystery Magazine. Heâs a past recipient of the Derringer Award for Short Mystery Fiction, and a contributor to the prestigious annual anthology, Best American Mystery Stories. DâAgnese lives in North Carolina with his wife, the New York Times Bestselling author Denise Kiernan.
If you diligently work your way down this list, youâll travel to Sicily, Venice, Florence, and Naples. But none of these cities beat Rome. Iâm biased, of course. My wife and I lived in Rome when we were first married. When I close my eyes, I swear I see Caravaggios and I can still smell the woodsmoke and simmering pasta sauce that perfume Romeâs air. All of which brings me to Hewsonâs Nic Costa novels. I donât think anyone nails Romeâs sinister criminal quality the way Hewson does, but he still manages to capture the Eternal Cityâs beauty, food, and art. (Hewsonâs a Brit who travels to Italy often; it's totally worth checking out his Instagram account.) Currently 10 books in the series. If you like them, investigate his standalone novels, some of which are also set in Italy.
'No author has ever brought Rome so alive for me - nor made it seem so sinister' PETER JAMES
'David Hewson's Rome is dark and tantalizing, seductive and dangerous, a place where present-day crimes ring with the echoes of history' TESS GERRITSEN
'Hewson keeps the reader guessing . . . relentlessly tightening the suspense until the end' Daily Telegraph
There's no rest for the wicked . . .
While Rome is sweltering in the height of summer, a serial killer is on the loose. Sara Farnese is working in the Vatican library,âŚ
As a kid, Joseph DâAgnese did not feel quite normal unless heâd devoured at least two mystery novels in a weekend. Today heâs a journalist and author. His mystery fiction has appeared in Shotgun Honey, Plots with Guns, Beat to a Pulp,Ellery Queenâs Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, and Alfred Hitchcockâs Mystery Magazine. Heâs a past recipient of the Derringer Award for Short Mystery Fiction, and a contributor to the prestigious annual anthology, Best American Mystery Stories. DâAgnese lives in North Carolina with his wife, the New York Times Bestselling author Denise Kiernan.
Can a mystery novel have supernatural elements and still be considered a mystery? I obsessed on this question when I was writing my book. (Youâll know why if you check it out.) Then, out of the blue, I stumbled across de Giovanniâs astonishing novels. His detective, Commissario Ricciardi, suffers from a bizarre affliction. He sees dead people. Specifically, he sees visions of murder victims just before their death. Naturally, this makes him the greatest cop ever, and the most tortured. If you can stand to read a little on the wild side, you will enjoy these historical mysteries, set in 1930s Naples. Currently 10 books in the series.
Introducing Italyâs Commissario Ricciardi. âDe Giovanniâs distinct brand of noir . . . will appeal to Agatha Christie and Manuel VĂĄzquez MontalbĂĄn fansâ (Publishers Weekly).
Commissario Ricciardi has visions. He sees the final seconds in the lives of victims of violent deaths. It is both a gift and a curse. It has helped him become one of the most successful homicide detectives on the Naples police front. But the horror of his visions has hollowed him out emotionally. He drinks too much and sleeps too little. Other than his loyal partner, Brigadier Maione, he has no friends. Naples, March 1931.âŚ
I love the novels of Charles Dickens and when I found out that he did go out with the London Police to research the criminal underworld for his magazine, I thought what a good detective he would make. He has all the talents a detective needs: remarkable powers of observation, a shrewd understanding of human nature and of motive, and the ability to mix with all ranks of Victorian society from the street urchin to the lord and lady. I love Victorian London, too, and creating the foggy, gas-lit alleys we all know from Dickens the novelist.
Another woman steps out of the shadows of history in this novel about seventeenth-century Italy. Gulia Tofana was a notorious poisoner of terrible men and Deborah Swift explores in a tale full of excitement and drama the imagined early career of Gulia whose mother was executed for murder. Gulia just wants to be an apothecary, but her friendship with the abused wife of an aristocratic, power greedy husband draws her into murder. It is full of rich detail â you can feel the heat, smell the perfume, hear the rustle of silk and taffeta, and you canât help being on the side of the women trapped in a corrupt and violent world.
Aqua Tofana â One drop to heal. Three drops to kill.
Giulia Tofana longs for more responsibility in her motherâs apothecary business, but Mamma has always been secretive and refuses to tell her the hidden keys to her success. But the day Mamma is arrested for the poisoning of the powerful Duke de Verdi, Giulia is shocked to uncover the darker side of her trade.
Giulia must run for her life, and escapes to Naples, under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, to the home of her Aunt Isabetta, a famous courtesan. But when Giulia hears that her motherâŚ
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: âAre his love songs closer to heaven than dying?â Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard itâŚ
I am grateful to my maternal grandparents, immigrants from southern Italy, who instilled in me a love for the Bel Paese that has inspired me all my life. I began to travel to Italy 45 years ago, and after writing for televisionâon the staff of Everybody Loves RaymondâI turned to travel writing. Iâve written 4 books about Italian travel, along with many stories for magazines. I also design and host Golden Weeks in Italy: For Women Only tours, to give female travelers an insiderâs experience of this extraordinary country.
I have always loved visiting the city of Naples â for the great food, the rich history, and the warm locals who remind me of my southern Italian relatives. Ferranteâs novels go deep into the complexities of a female friendship that spans many decades, while also bringing to life a wide range of characters who I grew to love and truly care about, while devouring this extraordinary series.
The complete four-volume boxed set of the New York Timesâbestselling epic about hardship and female friendship in postwar Naples that has sold over five million copies.
Beginning with My Brilliant Friend, the four Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante follow Elena and Lila, from their rough-edged upbringing in Naples, Italy, not long after WWII, through the many stages of their livesâand along paths that diverge wildly. Sometimes they are separated by jealousy or hostility or physical distance, but the bond between them is unbreakable, for better or for worse.
This volume includes all four novels: My Brilliant Friend; The Story ofâŚ
As a female grown up in a working-class neighborhood in East Naples (Italy), and as an academic researching political ecologies in Italy, Brazil, and the USA, I am especially interested in how sex/gender, class/work, and race/coloniality are intersected in peopleâs lives, and especially in how this shapes their perceptions and experiences of environmental problems. This approach has led me to look for the connections between labor and the environment both within and beyond waged/industrial work and formal trade unions, including the unpaid housework and subsistence production done in working-class, peasant, Black, and Indigenous communities and the social movements that represent them.
Though the book is set in a fictional neighborhood at the eastern periphery of Naples (Italy), manyâincluding myselfâhave recognized it as Rione Luzzatti, the place where I spent most of my childhood and puberty, from 1972 to 1982.
This is not the colorful Naples known to tourists, but rather a place where the silent majorities struggle to stay afloat, or even rise up above their pre-established place in the class and gender order, like the two main characters of the story do, each one in her own special way.
I could not help identifying myself with the narrating character LenĂş a and her struggles for keeping together intellectual creativity, friendship, love, and motherhoodâand with her need to never completely let go of her working-class origins.
OVER 14 MILLION COPIES OF THE NEAPOLITAN QUARTET SOLD WORLDWIDE
NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES
GUARDIAN 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY
58 WEEKS ON THE BOOKSELLER'S TOP 20 ORIGINAL FICTION BESTSELLERS LIST
SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2015
43 INTERNATIONAL RIGHTS DEALS
Now in B-format Paperback
From one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, comes this ravishing and generous-hearted novel about a friendship that lasts a lifetime. The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor butâŚ
Writing a mystery novel is no small task. You have to craft a clever plot, stay true to your characters, and bewilder, but ultimately satisfy, your readers, all the while not mixing up your theirs and your thereâs. Maybe thatâs why we writers like to saddle our heroes with even heavier burdens, forcing them to sort through complex webs of deceit, and fight against deeply rooted cultures full of corruption. When they win, we share their victories⌠even more so because it means weâve finished writing the darn book! Enjoy this list of detectives facing long odds, and let it inspire you in whatever creative endeavors are closest to your heart.
I love when authors mix genres. Dibdinâs Cosi Fan Tutti is a combination of mystery and a Mozart opera!
Combining the farcical elements of corruption, romantic longing, and mistaken identity, Dibdin pulls us through the beautiful streets of Naples, Italy, where everyone is thoughtful and earnest, and still, somehow, nothing like they appear.
His detective Aurelio Zen is supposed to be keeping the peace, but heâs not up for the job, much more interested in untying romantic entanglements and enjoying the countryside. A solid plan until the Italian sanitation department decides theyâre going to clean up the streets for him.
Lighthearted and breezy but with a genuine emotional core, youâll get through Cosi Fan Tutte in a single sitting and be happier for it.
At this point there is a welcome touch of comedy as the man's feet appear above the tail-gate of the garbage truck. Clad in highly polished brogues and red-and-black chequered socks below which a length of bare white leg is just visible, they proceed to execute a furious little dance, jerking this way and that like puppets at a Punch and Judy show - possibly a knowing allusion to the commedia dell'arte, which of course originated in this city.
Inspector Zen has been posted to Naples in disgrace, where he is asked to oversee the clean-up of the city's corruptâŚ
The Dark Backward is the story of the strangest case ever tried in a court of law. The defendant, who does not speak English or any other language anyone can identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed and charged with murder, rape, and incest.
War is perhaps the most extreme human activity. I have seen firsthand some of these extremes in Iraq and Afghanistan. I now write about the philosophy and ethics of war and geopolitics, exploring some of the impacts and enduring truths that war and its conduct tell us about ourselves that might be hidden under the surface of our everyday lives. The books I have chosen here explore, with elegance, sensitivity, and sometimes brutal and unflinching honesty, what the battlefield exposes, showing us that there is both tragedy and comedy at the extremities of human nature, and without one, you cannot really truly appreciate the other.
Out of all the war fiction and nonfiction I have read, this is the one book I wish I had read before deploying to Iraq as a soldier.
Lewis captures the post-invasion chaos, as the war-fighting military struggles to define its new mission as an occupying force, the farcical situations that arise through deep cultural misunderstandings between occupier and occupied, and the suffering and resourcefulness of the local population.
He is also an elegant writer who, like many of the best war writers, finds humour and intense tragedy in the extremes between the absurd and the sublime he encounters.
As a young intelligence officer stationed in Naples following its liberation from Nazi forces, Norman Lewis recorded the lives of a proud and vibrant people forced to survive on prostitution, thievery, and a desperate belief in miracles and cures. The most popular of Lewis's twenty-seven books, Naples'44 is a landmark poetic study of the agony of wartime occupation and its ability to bring out the worst, and often the best, in human nature. In prose both heartrending and comic, Lewis describes an era of disillusionment, escapism, and hysteria in which the Allied occupiers mete out justice unfairly and fail toâŚ
My memoir, Circling Home: What I Learned by Living Elsewhere, details my own trajectory in trying to find my voice and mĂŠtier as a writer. Iâve kept a journal since I was a teenager, trained to be a journalist in college, and worked as an investigative reporter on a newspaper column and a news show in my twenties. When my husband and I moved abroad, I got a book contract for my PhD thesis and also published my research in academic journals. I wrote travel articles and profiles of people I met while living in East and West Africa. Working with a writing group of friends, I finished two novels before embarking on my memoir.
The second of Ferranteâs four Neopolitan Novels is a gripping portrayal of the hardships faced by women who grew up in Italy in the 1950s and â60s.
The novel is packed with romantic liaisons, incidences of family violence, and the many hurdles that Italian women had to face in forging careers independent of their families. The detailed rendering of a complicated friendship between two women who disappointed each other at times shows how hard women in working-class Naples had to struggle to find their paths.
Being from a big family myself and facing many hurdles before finding my voice, I could relate to the characters in this book and Ferranteâs subsequent novel, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Behind.
The Story of a New Name, the second book of the Neapolitan Quartet, picks up the story where My Brilliant Friend left off.
Lila has recently married and made her entree into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighbourhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at timesâŚ
Life is pretty dull without passion. Since early childhood I was attracted to Chinese philosophy, then to all the cultural aspects that reflect it. At the same time, I felt the blood in my veins drawing me to ancestral roots. Learning about other cultures helps us learn about our own. Iâve been driven by sympathy for the immigrant experience, the suffering, and sacrifices made for a better, peaceful life. What prepared me to write Wuxia America includes my academic studies, living and working in Asia, and involvement in martial arts. My inspiration for writing stems from a wish to encourage ways to improve human relations.
My grandparents were from southern Italy. Over the years, I had always wanted to learn about the area, its history, and culture. Even in the Italian language, there is a lack of any quality publications dealing with the south.
Finally, a book was published in 2005 filling this gapâAstaritaâs book is praiseworthy for its in-depth coverage of south Italy. Rather than scavenging together hundreds of books and articles for information, there came this main reference work.
Written by Astarita, a professor at Georgetown University, it is a scholarly work. It doesnât read like a novel, but the thoroughness brings out the character of the people and their contributions to Italian and world culture. I praise the author for bringing this important topic out of obscurity to world attention.
The history of southern Italy is entirely distinct from that of northern Italy, yet it has never been given its own due. In this authoritative and wholly engrossing history, distinguished scholar Tommaso Astarita "does a masterful job of correcting this error" (Mark Knoblauch, Booklist). From the Normans and Angevins, through Spanish and Bourbon rule, to the unification of Italy in 1860, Astarita rescues Sicily and the worlds south of Rome from the dustier folds of history and restores them to sparkling life. We are introduced to the colorful religious observances, the vibrant historical figures, the diverse population, the ancient ruins,âŚ
Zoe Lorel, an elite operative in an international spy agency, is sent to abduct a nine-year-old girl. The girl is the only one who knows the riddle that holds the code to unleash the most lethal weapon on earthâthe first ever âinvisibilityâ nano weapon, a cloaking spider bot. But whenâŚ
Becoming a mother reshaped me in ways Iâm still wondering at now, two decades on. Iâve had to find ways to resist the repressive cultural mythology surrounding motherhoodâthe pressure I felt to suddenly become a perfect, self-sacrificing vessel for my childrenâs optimized development. When I read stories about flawed mothersâwomen, queer and straight, struggling beneath the magnitude of the job, yet fiercely loving their children all the way throughâI felt I could breathe a little bit, could handle the task with a little more good humor and forgiveness, for myself, my partner, and my kids. Read a book, bust a myth, go hug your mom.
I devoured Ferranteâs Neapolitan Quartet (four novels that trace a lifetime friendship between two women living in a deeply patriarchal mid-twentieth-century Italy) in a single summer a few years back, and when I got to the end of those few thousand pages, I felt as though I wanted to start right over at the beginning again. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the third novel in the series, and I name it here because itâs the novel in which Elenaâthe bookâs protagonist, and a writer herselfâbecomes a mother. Elena has a modern marriage compared to her friend Linaâs, but still, she finds the expectations and demands of motherhood difficult to reconcile with her own creative ambitions. Ferrante represents that central struggle with arresting honestyâa captivating read.