Here are 98 books that Gold fans have personally recommended if you like
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If I were a supermarket pie, my label would say, ‘Made in the UK with Chinese ingredients.’ Born in Wales to parents from Guangzhou and Hong Kong, my Cantonese is appalling, I’m bad at maths, and I can barely ride a bike without falling off. In short, I am an example of a real-life person and not a cliché or stereotype from the sorts of books we used to have to read if we wanted to see diverse characters. It’s about time the stories we read and the shows we watch become so effortlessly diverse that we don’t even notice. I hope my novels are playing a part in making that commonplace.
This is another book I read that made me think that the story of immigration into a provincial, rather than big city, setting was something people would read. It also made me think, that all parents, immigrants or not, have a massive calling to be deeply embarrassing.
Marina’s story to publication is an inspiring one, too. She was fifty-eight when this, her debut novel, was published.
Concealed inside this comic tale of an octogenarian newly widowed father, finding romance with a much younger Ukrainian barmaid is a lesson that all immigrants must one day learn. Just because someone else is from the old country too, it does not necessarily mean they have your best interests at heart.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainianis bestselling author Marina Lewycka's hilarious and award winning debut novel.
'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.'
Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must aside a lifetime of feuding to save their emigre engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin…
My name is Annemarie and I’ve been reading stories almost as soon as I was taught how to read. I’ve also been writing them. My fascination with the supernatural came about, I guess because an active imagination for a small child comes almost naturally from a fear of the dark. The dark held many terrors for me, and in a perverse contrariness, this prompted an interest in supernatural beings. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all real, and the more we know about them, the better. Or at least, that’s what I deduce from my never flagging interest, and I guess that’s why there’s always an element of the supernatural/paranormal in all my stories.
This is part of a book series, and as soon as I plucked the first one off the shelf at the British Council Library, I was hooked. This was the first series of books I was able to start and finish since I gave birth. Having been such a voracious reader before, it was a relief to get back to it.
But the Prisoner of Azkaban held my heart because the boy who lived finally met someone who could be just his person. His grown up. And Sirius Black was just so cool. Magic counts as supernatural, right?
It's time to PASS THE MAGIC ON - with brand new children's editions of the classic and internationally bestselling series
The third book in the global phenomenon series that changed the world of books forever
When the Knight Bus crashes through the darkness and screeches to a halt in front of him, it's the start of another far from ordinary year at Hogwarts for Harry Potter. Sirius Black, escaped mass-murderer and follower of Lord Voldemort, is on the run - and they say he is coming after Harry.
In his first ever Divination class, Professor Trelawney sees an omen of…
A professor of television, I had my first child at 28 and was the first of my friends to give birth. The mothering support I received came from my mother, who (bless her heart) was convinced that all women should stay home with their children and devote their lives to mothering. A lifelong feminist, I knew that something was amiss (particularly for a single parent), and as I learned more about feminism and mothering, I realized there was something at odds with the way mothers were treated in the media and society. Learning why became my passion.
A much more recent book that can be read in conjunction with The Handmaid’s Tale.
I had no idea what to expect from this novel and was truly gripped by the unfolding tale of a world in which women are incarcerated for being deemed bad mothers. I am not going to give away any of the plot here, as the power of the book depends on its unfolding horror.
D W Winnicott's definition of the ‘good enough' mother resonated with me throughout this book, and I do worry that we are facing this dystopian reality in a 21st-century America that puts fetal rights before those of women and families.
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AN OBAMA'S 2022 SUMMER READING PICK
'A taut and propulsive take on the cult of motherhood and the notion of what makes a good mother. Destined to be feminist classic - it kept me up at night' PANDORA SYKES 'A haunting tale of identity and motherhood - as devastating as it is imaginative' AFUA HIRSCH 'Incredibly clever, funny and pertinent to the world we're living in at the moment' DAISY JOHNSON
'We have your daughter'
Frida Liu is a struggling mother. She remembers taking Harriet from her cot and changing her nappy. She remembers…
If I were a supermarket pie, my label would say, ‘Made in the UK with Chinese ingredients.’ Born in Wales to parents from Guangzhou and Hong Kong, my Cantonese is appalling, I’m bad at maths, and I can barely ride a bike without falling off. In short, I am an example of a real-life person and not a cliché or stereotype from the sorts of books we used to have to read if we wanted to see diverse characters. It’s about time the stories we read and the shows we watch become so effortlessly diverse that we don’t even notice. I hope my novels are playing a part in making that commonplace.
This is the most beautiful, poetic book packed with exquisite descriptions of the English countryside as we meet the seemingly perfect country family of mother and homemaker, Tess; her gardener husband, Richard; and the very non-identical twins, Sonny and Max.
Because Tess is a Londoner of Jamaican heritage–a pregnant bride that Richard brought back to his West Country family home after their student love affair–Sonny is dark and curly-haired like his mother while Max could ‘pass’ because he looks so much like his father.
This was an uncomfortable read for me–the micro-aggressions and casual racism of rural life stirred up unhappy memories–but it is also a hopeful story about what really counts and those times when actions speak louder than words.
I love history in all forms. I enjoy first-person memoirs, and I also love historical biographies if they are well-written. Native American history is one of my areas of fascination, and the founding of our country is another. World War two is another area that I have delved into in the last few years, and it's so complex. Ultimately, all of the books I recommended are connected to important historical events, but their real strength is the people whom they are about. Looking through my list, I see that all of the books are about underdogs or figures who ultimately did not prevail in terms of their specific situations.
This short book is apparently a classic of Japanese modern literature, but I was not aware of it until recently. It was written by a former Japanese soldier about his experience in Burma at the end of World War II. It's nonfiction and is a memoir. But it captures something culturally universal about the human condition and is heartwarming.
It also mostly takes place after the end of hostilities, in case you are not good with violent imagery, as there is almost none of that. I could not put it down and was sad to finish it.
Harp of Burma is Japan's classic novel of pathos and compassion in the midst of senseless warfare.
Winner of the prestigious Mainichi Shuppan Bunkasho prize and the basis for the critically acclaimed film The Burmese Harp by Ichikawa Kon, Harp of Burma shares a powerful human story about Japanese soldiers on the front lines in WWII. Losing a desperate battle against British forces in the tropical jungles of Burma, the young soldiers discover that the trials of war involve more than just opposing the enemy.
Distressed and disoriented by the alien climate and terrain, strange behavior of foreigners and the…
I grew up in a small, rural community that is perhaps best defined by cold, grey, rainy days – perfect reading weather. I developed an interest in learning about different places and cultures through books. Then I started traveling and my interest turned into a passion, that transformed my educational journey. I completed a Masters and PhD in Anthropology and did my field research for my degree in Australia and Nepal. I still love to learn about new cultures, though the children have meant less traveling and more adventuring via books!
On one of our first dates, my future husband gave me a book by Kazuo Ishiguro – it was love! Both with the future husband and the amazing author.
Ishiguro has a gift for cutting to the kernel of what it means to love, in a way that is beautiful and heartbreaking but in away that avoids being overly sentimental. When I first read A View of Pale Hills, a story centered on a woman reflecting on her time in Nagasaki before she moved to England, I was mesmerized.
I wanted to give the book to everyone I knew, it is a bit of mystery and I desperately wanted to talk about it! It is a touching, unsettling, and a powerful narrative about moving across cultures – the new possibilities that can provide and the complexities of the past.
From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day
Here is the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. In a novel where past and present confuse, she relives scenes of Japan's devastation in the wake of World War II.
Growing up in post-WWII Europe, young people’s anxiety was often channelled into searching for ‘lost worlds’, places hope could be nurtured and ancient solutions revived. So I encountered Atlantis and Lemuria and other imagined places but also learned, from training as a geologist, that once-populated lands had actually been submerged. Myths and legends often contain grains of observational truth at their heart. The more ‘submergence stories’ I research, from Australia through India and across northwest Europe, the more I realize how much we have forgotten about undersea human pasts. And how our navigation of the future could be improved by understanding them.
Written in the 1950s by a museum curator-geologist, Sunken Cities is one of the earliest expositions of ‘myth and legend’ and their plausible geological meanings. The author marries his deep knowledge of Welsh traditions about submerged places with contemporary geological understandings. Of course, geology was transformed the following decade but North’s book remains insightful and grounded in ways that many more recent accounts are not. If I lived in Wales, I would be off every weekend with it in hand!
I was lucky enough to be introduced to medieval Welsh literature when I was an undergraduate, and the Welsh language mesmerised me. It is so unlike any other language that I had come across and translating texts from Welsh into English was as absorbing as code-cracking. My apprenticeship as a scholar was long and hard and I soon realised that my particular contribution was to make Welsh literature accessible to non-Welsh speakers, not simply through translations, but by aligning the Welsh tradition with the wider literary cultures of Europe. I want Wales and its two literatures to take their place as two of the great literatures of Europe.
M. Wynn Thomas is the foremost literary critic writing in Wales today, and a writer I particularly admire.
He pioneered the concept of ‘Welsh writing in English’ as distinct from ‘Welsh writing’ (in Welsh), honouring the bilingual culture of Wales. Thomas’s twelve poems are selected from three key periods of Welsh history, the Middle Ages, the pre-modern period, and our own time.
Each poem is read in the context of its social and political background, educating us about the politics of Welshness, the cultural assumptions written into the literature, and above all what it means to be Welsh in a nation that is not a state.
This is such an elegant and original way to foreground the creativity of Welsh poets alongside the cultural forces that shaped them.
Down the centuries, poets have provided Wales with a window onto its own distinctive world. This book gives the general reader a sense of the view to be seen through that special window in twelve illustrated poems, each bringing very different periods and aspects of the Welsh past into focus. Together, the poems give the flavour of a poetic tradition, both ancient and modern, that is internationally renowned for its distinction, demonstrating how Wales boast one of the oldest and yet continuing vibrant poetic traditions, the former in the Welsh language and the latter in English and bilingually.
Although two of my nonfiction books—The Dream of Water and Polite Lies—are about traveling from the American Midwest to my native country of Japan, I'm not a traveler by temperament. I long to stay put in one place. Chimney swifts cover the distance between North America and the Amazon basin every fall and spring. I love to stand in the driveway of my brownstone to watch them. That was the last thing Katherine Russell Rich and I did together in what turned out to be the last autumn of her life before the cancer she’d been fighting came back. Her book, Dreaming in Hindi, along with the four other books I’m recommending, expresses an indomitable spirit of adventure.
When Pamela Petro traveled to Lampeter, Wales for the first time to enroll in a year-long master’s degree program, she had no idea that the open vista of sheep pastures and low hills around the town would strike a chord in her—she found herself nodding as if she was in agreement with the landscape—or that she would spend the rest of her life returning to Wales from the various American cities where she made a life as a writer and a teacher. The Long Field takes us on a journey through time and ideas as well as of places.
The book masterfully weaves together the accounts of various trips to Wales and elsewhere, the childhood spent in suburban New Jersey where, in spite of the family she loved and was loved by, Ms. Petro was overcome by a desire not to stay in one place, and most important of all,…
The Long Field burrows deep into the Welsh countryside to tell how this small country became a big part of an American writer's life. Petro, author of Travels in an Old Tongue, twines her story around that of Wales by viewing both through the lens of hiraeth, a quintessential Welsh word famously hard to translate. It literally means "long field," but is also more than the English approximation of "homesickness." It's a name for the bone-deep longing felt for someone or something--a home, culture, language, a younger self--that you've lost or left behind. Hiraeth is embodied by Arthur, King of…
I’ve been fascinated by England’s World War II evacuations since I was a child. Appropriately enough, I first learned of this extraordinary historical event in a story: it’s the reason the Pevensies are sent to the Professor’s house in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In the dark days of World War II, more than a million English children boarded trains, buses, and ships, to be picked up and cared for by strangers, in some cases for the duration of the war. It’s a historical event that is as astonishing to me now as it was when I first read of it all those years ago.
Not only is this a heartfelt evacuee story, it’s also a brilliant mystery. When Jimmy and his brother, Ronnie, are sent to the Welsh countryside to escape the bombings, Jimmy is angry at the adults responsible – “They think they know everything but all they do is leave or make wars or send their children away.” The boys eventually warm to their kind foster parents, but some of the villagers aren’t so welcoming. When Jimmy finds a skull in a hollow tree, he has no idea how it’s tied to an unsolved mystery, and the reader has no idea how it will figure in this story’s gripping, satisfying, and emotional conclusion.
"Beautifully told. This appealing book is about losses healed, lies uncovered, cruelty defeated and goodness rewarded." The Sunday Times
September 1939.
When Jimmy is evacuated to a small village in Wales, it couldn't be more different from London. Green, quiet and full of strangers, he instantly feels out of place.
But then he finds a skull hidden in a tree, and suddenly the valley is more frightening than the war. Who can Jimmy trust? His brother is too little; his best friend has changed.
Finding an ally in someone he never expects, they set out together to uncover the secrets…
