Here are 100 books that I'll Leave You With This fans have personally recommended if you like
I'll Leave You With This.
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Researching the storylines for my family drama novels gives me the opportunity to speak to many different people about huge events and dilemmas in their families and lives. Through their honesty and generosity, I have gained a huge respect for the way in which people can cope with tragedy and also a fascination with how they deal with it. For me, reading – and writing – about these topics is immensely cathartic and makes me remember to grasp life with both hands. I’m a sucker for a happy ending, though, so I always look for the hope at the end of any story.
Ask Again, Yes is a drama about two generations of two families and the tragedy within the book centres on the events of one fateful day.
Mary Beth Keane’s prose is a real pleasure to read and the story itself brings home how often lives are changed irrevocably in a moment. What I also loved about this book was that it takes the central characters from childhood to adulthood and we see how this makes them view events differently.
It’s one of the reasons I enjoy books with multiple narrators – being able to see the way they can justify their own decisions while judging the actions of others. A terrific read.
The triumphant New York Times Bestseller *The Tonight Show Summer Reads Pick*
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by People, Vogue, Parade, NPR, and Elle
"A gem of a book." —Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
How much can a family forgive?
Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope, rookie NYPD cops, are neighbors in the suburbs. What happens behind closed doors in both houses—the loneliness of Francis’s wife, Lena, and the instability of Brian’s wife, Anne, sets the stage for the explosive events to come.
In Mary Beth Keane's extraordinary novel, a lifelong…
Researching the storylines for my family drama novels gives me the opportunity to speak to many different people about huge events and dilemmas in their families and lives. Through their honesty and generosity, I have gained a huge respect for the way in which people can cope with tragedy and also a fascination with how they deal with it. For me, reading – and writing – about these topics is immensely cathartic and makes me remember to grasp life with both hands. I’m a sucker for a happy ending, though, so I always look for the hope at the end of any story.
Mother and daughter relationships are a theme that I love to read – and write! – about and Joanna Glen does this brilliantly in All My Mothers.
From childhood, Eva had a complex relationship with her own mother and is convinced that there is more to her story than she’s been told. Glen uses a children’s picture book as a motif to explore the many kinds of mothers that Eva meets in her life and it affected me quite profoundly.
What kind of mother am I? What kind of mother do children most need? The relationship that made me most emotional was that between Eva and her best friend. Many tears were shed onto my kindle!
Researching the storylines for my family drama novels gives me the opportunity to speak to many different people about huge events and dilemmas in their families and lives. Through their honesty and generosity, I have gained a huge respect for the way in which people can cope with tragedy and also a fascination with how they deal with it. For me, reading – and writing – about these topics is immensely cathartic and makes me remember to grasp life with both hands. I’m a sucker for a happy ending, though, so I always look for the hope at the end of any story.
The Herd presents the experiences of two mothers – friends – on the subject of childhood immunisation.
The dual narrative takes you inside their thoughts and feelings and I love the fact that the author doesn’t guide you to pick a side. Through the characterisation, and the clever use of other voices, you are presented with all the facets of a complex debate.
At times, their reactions to the circumstances in this story are heartbreaking. It reminded me that there are always two sides to an argument and that it’s important that both sides are heard.
'It is hard to imagine a more timely novel. A fascinating exploration of all sides of a particularly knotty, politicized issue.' Jodi Picoult
'Will have book clubs across the country in hot debate! Brilliant.' Clare Mackintosh
****
You should never judge how someone chooses to raise their child.
Elizabeth and Bryony are polar opposites but their unexpected friendship has always worked. They're the best of friends, and godmothers to each other's daughters - because they trust that the safety of their children is both of their top priority.
But what if their choice could harm your own child?
Researching the storylines for my family drama novels gives me the opportunity to speak to many different people about huge events and dilemmas in their families and lives. Through their honesty and generosity, I have gained a huge respect for the way in which people can cope with tragedy and also a fascination with how they deal with it. For me, reading – and writing – about these topics is immensely cathartic and makes me remember to grasp life with both hands. I’m a sucker for a happy ending, though, so I always look for the hope at the end of any story.
I sobbed my way through this one! I was a few chapters in when I discovered that it was a sequel to The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes, but I was so invested by then that I couldn’t stop and go back.
Anna McPartlin has the enviable skill of combining comedy and tragedy to great effect. The Hayes family are a mess of grief and confusion and misplaced blame, but their love for one another, and their wonderful humour, meant that I took them to my heart immediately.
A book that makes me laugh out loud one minute and blub like a baby the next is always a winner for me. I would read anything that this author chose to write. (I read Rabbit Hayes immediately afterwards and loved that, too!
'Brilliant, funny and immensely moving' Catherine Isaac, author of You, Me, Everything
'Well, that was a tearjerker! Anna McPartlin's Below the Big Blue Sky is a MORE than worthy follow-up to The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes' Marian Keyes
***
There's no family quite like the Hayes, and yet they're just like any other - they love each other, they look out for each other and they drive each other mad. When their youngest, Rabbit, dies tragically at just forty, the Hayes are almost torn apart by their grief.
Without her beloved mum, twelve-year-old Bunny is adrift; without Rabbit, there…
I have always been fascinated by France and things French. In graduate school, no women’s history was on our required reading lists. As a young woman, though, entering a professional field in which women were few on the ground, much less studied, I became an avid reader of biographies of achieving women – partly to learn how they were able to surmount (or not) the obstacles that confronted them in a male-dominated world. The five stellar biographies of French women I present here are products of the newer work in retrieving women’s histories. They are deeply researched and engagingly written. They confirm the saying that “truth is stranger than fiction.”
Too many babies were dying at birth (or shortly thereafter) and French authorities had become obsessed with increasing the country’s population. Who would have thought, though, that King Louis XV of France would decide to sponsor and finance (for over 20 years) a remarkable Paris-trained midwife to tour France on behalf of the re-education of peasant midwives? As the King’s envoy, Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray (born c. 1715) toured France from 1760 to 1783 carrying out her mission in some 40 cities and large towns.
Her important textbook on obstetrics, first published in 1759 (5 editions by 1785) and her invention of an obstetrical cloth female mannequin (she called it her “machine”) facilitated her revolutionary hands-on method of teaching the craft of delivering babies. Du Coudray was an imposing presence and a remarkable exception amidst the ongoing illiteracy and superstition that plagued peasant women. Nina Gelbart’s biography, the…
This unorthodox biography explores the life of an extraordinary Enlightenment woman who, by sheer force of character, parlayed a skill in midwifery into a national institution. In 1759, in an effort to end infant mortality, Louis XV commissioned Madame Angelique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray to travel throughout France teaching the art of childbirth to illiterate peasant women. For the next thirty years, this royal emissary taught in nearly forty cities and reached an estimated ten thousand students. She wrote a textbook and invented a life-sized obstetrical mannequin for her demonstrations. She contributed significantly to France's demographic upswing after 1760.…
As a woman who started writing later in life, I know about reinventing oneself and overcoming obstacles along the way. At any age, there are many hurdles to climb in getting a novel published, though probably more for an older woman. Marketing is a whole other aspect of being an author and that’s where technology comes in. It can be daunting. I had to learn a whole new vocabulary, programs, and social media I never dreamed I’d use. It all seems easy now, yet in the beginning, it definitely created a lot of angst. My life has blossomed from it all and I’m proud I’ve climbed those hurdles. I want the same for my characters.
This suspenseful novel centers on the life of Hannah Isaacson, a female obstetrician in the early 1900s, a time when women’s choices for birth control and abortion were more than limited. A devoted women's advocate and suffragist, Hannah is determined to make a difference for her patients, even if it means going to jail or challenging the governor of New York.
We women stand on the shoulders of those strong, determined women who fiercely fought for our rights, and Rubin’s well-researched novel brings that home.
In the Hands of Womenis a suspenseful historical novel centered on the life of Hannah Isaacson, an obstetrician in training who was determined to improve medical safety for women in a time when women had few choices. This carefully researched work, set in 1900 Baltimore and New York City, when birth control and abortion were both illegal, leaves us contemplating whether history is repeating itself.
With the advent of obstetrics and anesthesia as distinct fields of practice in 1900, hospital births rapidly gained popularity. Midwives, who previously cared for these women, began supplementing their shrinking incomes with abortions, sometimes performing…
After giving birth in the hospital four times in what I experienced as “assembly-line obstetrics,” I decided that my fifth child would be intentionally born at home with just me and my husband present. It forever changed our lives and I’ve been an advocate since 1998, with the publication of Unassisted Homebirth: An Act of Love. I’m considered a pioneer in the unassisted birth community. Women are disappointed and disillusioned with their birth experiences and I help put to rest the idea of a painful, discouraging birth experience, replacing it with the manifestation of your inner desires. A satisfying and successful birth is within reach.
This classic and groundbreaking book is an exploration of the “interpersonal aspect of childbirth for husband and wife and its effect on their growth and development in two-in-oneness," says author Marilyn A. Moran, the first advocate for husband and wife unassisted homebirth. “Childbirth is a dialogue, not a monologue…It is imperative that couples abandon the doctors’ quasi-pathological approach to birth…When an obstetrician steps in between the lovers at the moment of birth to catch the baby, the cyclic giving and receiving of significant genital gifts is shattered.”
Women are the main connoisseurs of childbirth books, but when my husband opened this book, he devoured it within three days and was completely convinced of planning a husband and wife homebirth. The book made so much sense to us. After four hospital births, we went on to have two unassisted homebirths, and Birth and the Dialogue of Love was pivotal.
Marilyn A. Moran's seminal work on couples childbirth brought back to print for future generations to enjoy. From Marilyn's introduction in her own words - "This book is an exploration of the interpersonal aspect of childbirth for husband and wife and its effect on their growth and development in two-in-oneness." Author Marilyn A. Moran, the first advocate for husband and wife unassisted homebirth says, “Childbirth is a dialogue, not a monologue. The husband gives his wife a love gift and nine months later, she gives the gift of a baby into his loving hands. She’s present and accepting of his…
I am Associate Professor of Atlantic World Women’s History at the University of Oxford. The history of race, gender, and childbearing is my passion and my profession. The Dobbs decision pissed me TF off and inspired me to write this list. I hope you enjoy these books, and never stop questioning why women’s reproductive lives are controlled so minutely and why their reproductive labour is unpaid and unacknowledged.
It is a sign of our shocking historical amnesia regarding American women’s reproductive lives that this remarkable book is out of print. Leavitt discusses the long history of American women’s childbearing lives, moving from colonial times through the twentieth century and charting along the way women’s loss of control over their reproductive lives as they moved away from births at home, attended by friends and neighbors, and toward birth in hospitals where their freedom of choice was increasingly restricted. To understand the dark side of the ‘twilight sleep’ procedures depicted in The Crown or Mad Men, read Chapter 5 on the growing use, by the early twentieth century, of drugs that rendered women so passive that their babies could be pulled roughly from their bodies with metal instruments.
This is a comprehensive history of women and childbirth in America. Many of the basic changes that have occurred since 1750 resulted from two factors: the replacement of midwives and other female support systems by male doctors in the actual delivery process, and the movement of childbirth from the home to hospitals.
I'm a journalist and a historian who writes about how American evangelicals are complicated. I was trying to explain Left Behind in graduate school and I talked and talked about the theology in the book—all about the doctrines of the rapture, the antichrist, and the millennium. Then my professor said, “But it’s fiction, right? Why is it fiction? What are people doing when they read a novel instead, of say, a theological treatise?” I had no idea. But it seemed like a good question. That was the spark of Reading Evangelicals. But first, I had to read everything I could find about how readers read and what happens when they do.
I’m cheating a little here, but I made the rules and there’s a little clause in the rules I made that says I can break them as long as I announce that I am breaking them. Herewith, I announce.
This isn’t a book about readers. It’s a book about watchers—specifically the Dutch audience for the soap opera Dallas. But this book is so good and so wild, it changed forever the way I think about “reception,” including reading. I recommend this book all the time and if you want to understand the freedom and creativity of readers, you have to read it.
Dallas, one of the great internationally-screened soap operas, offers us first and foremost entertainment. But what is it about Dallas that makes that entertainment so successful, and how exactly is its entertainment constructed?
I believe deeply that, as messy and painful as life is, there is always joy, and usually humor, to be found. The book I wrote, Leaving’s Not the Only Way to Go, pulls from some of the painful experiences I’ve had, and I often find myself following my description of the book, about two women who meet in a grief group, with “but it’s not a downer!” It’s true, because Leaving is also inspired by all the joy and connections I’ve made for myself, even in the midst of loss. I learned how to balance the two sides of life through books like the ones on this list.
Fat Tuesday is the book that taught me what a lesbian was and what a joyful possibility that could be for me.
It’s about a high school senior named Rusty who decides, despite all the desperate circumstances of her life, to travel to New Orleans for Mardi Gras with her sick mother and dysfunctional friends.
Rusty and company are obsessed with soap operas as an escape from their current reality, and as their road trip proceeds, their reality becomes more and more like a soap opera plot, with all the drama, dramatic twists, and exaggerated exuberance that soap operas are known for!
What does Rusty Quinn do when her mom loses touch with reality, her best friend's dad explodes over a kiss, her other best friend gets committed to a psych ward, and the sanest person she knows is an egotistical Finnish exchange student who swears in a language nobody understands? She could write a soap opera, of course - or go to Mardi Gras. In fact, she could do both!
Funny how destiny comes down to single choices, focused moments, and split-second decisions. Can running away to Mardi Gras really change four lives forever?
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