Fans pick 88 books like Harlot's Ghost

Of all the elements of this story, I feel the love triangle between Eustacia, Wildeve, and Clym is of secondary interest to the environment in which it takes place, which is the weird and lugubrious heathlands.

Perhaps I am unfamiliar with heaths; as far as I know, we don’t have any in the U.S. Hardy describes the British heathlands like the landscape of another planet. Largely flat with shallow hills and vales, it sometimes bursts with floral color, and depending on the weather, it can be beset with raking orange sunlight or gloomy palls of mist.

The locals are fond of lighting evening bonfires, and Hardy’s descriptions of the firelight dancing on their faces are mesmerizing and compellingly suggests an unbroken cultural link with Britain’s pagan past.    

This classic short story by Flannery O'Connor follows a family on a road trip through the South.

Included on the journey is the manipulative and deceitful grandmother, who somehow convinces the family to take a detour to visit an old plantation home that she remembers from her childhood. The consequences of this detour are chilling.

Spoiler alert, but in the context of the ongoing investigations of our former President, one of the passages really struck a chord, “I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it”

Peace’s gutsy novel is an epic literary treatment of The British Miners Strike of the mid-eighties and reads like one long brutal poem to that ugly time. From it I learned that you could be biased, partisan, and full-blooded in a political novel, providing your treatment of your characters and the world they inhabit is consistently honest. Following him I have tried to do justice to a neglected part of rural England in the build up to the Brexit Referendum, politics less a matter of choice, as the very air the characters breathe, informing their outlook and choices like a vast atmospheric bubble none of them are able to live outside.   

This is a volume that defies genre, in part a supernatural memoir, encyclopedia of horror films, and a treatise on the existence of other dimensions. I love a book that doesn’t conform to the rules and tropes of a single genre, where you basically know that what you are getting will adhere to what is or is not allowed, on the basis of the categories assigned to it by the publisher. Cronin testifies to her personal experience of ghosts, and what the nature of reality must be to support such entities. I follow her in looking to mix horror and the uncanny into supposedly banal and quotidian reality, the supernatural just another facet of life, and not a sensationalist realm that requires a world of its own. 

Schecter, a journalist, and Deriabin, a KGB officer who defected to the U.S., tell the inside story of Oleg Penkovsky, the history-changing Soviet GRU colonel who delivered critical information that helped the CIA and President John F. Kennedy avoid nuclear disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The inside account delivers fascinating details about Penkovsky’s motivations, actions, and tragic demise, as well as a gripping narration of how the CIA handled one of the Cold War’s most important intelligence operations.

Few people know more about the Kennedy family and are as fair-minded in telling their story as Leamer. (He also wrote a companion book on The Kennedy Women.)

What I really like about Leamer’s work is that he does his homework. Not only are his books deeply researched, but he has also clearly earned the trust of family members who share personal stories not found in other published accounts. 

I find that this book is as gripping and suspenseful as any Cold War novel. Yes, I knew the ending: the United States and the Soviets avoided nuclear war. But it is fascinating to read about the internal discussions and secret negotiations that took place throughout the crisis.

I tend to be skeptical of the mythology surrounding John F. Kennedy, but this book did give me a new appreciation for his leadership during this critical moment of the Cold War. 

I am recommending this book because Malhotra et al take on a series of very difficult negotiations that look like they are impossible to solve and they show you how it was done. The book is very practical and demonstrates to the reader that many negotiations can be solved with the right frame of mind, creativity, and persistence. 

Max Hastings is a journalist and author of several dozen books mainly on warfare. Being well-connected he is able to draw on a wide circle of friends and acquaintances to contribute their experiences, research, and ideas to his own analysis of one of the most potentially dangerous events in post-war history.

His books draw on a very wide range of sources and are invariably highly readable but also reliable. Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis and Abyss pulls facts together in a digestible way with references throughout and a useful but far from complete bibliography.

What is remarkable is that the work was undertaken within the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic that effectively closed off archives and libraries for up to two years.

On a basic level, this is a book about nuclear weapons and why humanity ought to eschew them. But it is also much more than that.

Published on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, this masterpiece examines three foreseeable scenarios for the human race: the end of human life, a decline to barbarism after a disastrous decrease of the world’s population, and a unification of the world under a single government.

Russell describes how “pride, arrogance and fear of loss of face have obscured the power of judgment.” This is sadly no less true today, as the emotionality of human beings continues to strongly influence international relations.