Fans pick 100 books like Lavinia

I loved this book for the way Madeline Miller creatively retells Greek myths with a female protagonist. As Circe grows up, she discovers her power of magic, which can transform enemies into monsters and even challenge the gods.

Bold and inspiring, Miller vividly strings together figures like Prometheus, Medea, Calypso, Odysseus, and the Minotaur in a feminist reimagining of Circe's life. I find it to be a thoughtful and well-crafted biography of a complex and engaging mythological character with both divine and human strengths and flaws. I have read it several times, and the story has maintained its appeal.

I’m embarrassed that I only read this book recently because it’s a wonderful engagement with ancient evidence to create a vision of Roman Britain. Evaristo uses the burial of the so-called Spitalfields Lady – a woman buried in a sarcophagus with scallop shell decorations and a rich range of grave goods – to create Zuleika, a lively girl who lives with her Nubian parents in Roman London; in blank verse, the story follows her life from being married off as a child bride to catching the eye of the emperor Septimius Severus. Evaristo mixes historical detail with contemporary slang and references, bringing her vision of London under a multi-cultural Roman Empire vividly to life.

Some authors have an innate faculty for bringing the dim and distant past into such razor-sharp clarity that it’s hard not to believe that they were once present at the time. That’s how it is with Mary Renault (real name Eileen Mary Challans): any number of her books could have made this list.

What I particularly love about this duology (the sequel The Bull From the Sea isn’t quite as strong) is that Renault retold the ancient tale of Theseus and the Minotaur as historical fiction. Though she followed the main beats of the well-known story, she boldly stripped it of gods, monsters, and magic, and the narrative doesn’t suffer at all from it. If anything, it makes it even more compelling because it feels like she has stumbled upon a possible origin to the myth.

One of the classic novels about monsters having internal lives. Grendel doesn’t even survive the first half of the Beowulf poem.

But what was his life like? This creature who went into rages over music and merriment? This outsider who clearly had no one to commune with? Where there could just be pathos, Gardner injects surprising dorkiness and humor that further round out Grendel’s existence. And there’s a huge bonus in the poem’s dragon also showing up as an utter weirdo neighbor.

This is the first book in Downie’s Medicus series, a series of crime novels based around Ruso, a Roman military doctor. Ruso finds himself based in Britain, in an attempt to escape his past, and finds himself reluctantly drawn into a series of mysterious deaths of women working at a local bar. He also finds himself unexpectedly buying Tilla, a British woman, to rescue her from her abusive previous owner – so with a new job, a new household, and a new set of questions to answer, he has plenty on his plate. Downie spins an excellent murder mystery and gives her reader liberal doses of both comedy and tragedy.

Clarke transports the reader to England during the time of the Napoleonic Wars. There is, however, one small twist: magic once existed in this world and has now returned through two men, drastically changing the course of history and society.

The story is rich in gothic atmosphere and wry humour, and is positively bursting with ideas (there are almost 200 footnotes!). Clarke imbues her protagonists with conflicting approaches to the pursuit of knowledge, with Norrell representing cautious rationality and conservative methodology, while Strange embodies an adventurous spirit and a willingness to embrace the arcane and often the dangerous.

This is probably the most powerful example of literary pastiche novels I’ve read, not just because it takes on one of the most beloved novels in English literature—Jane Eyre—but because it brutally turns that novel’s premises on their gentrified heads.

I am truly awed by how vibrantly Rhys inhabits Antoinette, Rochester’s doomed wife, weaving in themes of colonialism and gendered power into Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic romance and, in the process, making it a kind of subversive and gritty feminist and anti-colonial manifesto.

Rhys’s depiction of Antoinette’s descent into madness is so visceral and believable that you are (or at least I am) all but cheering as she literally burns the patriarchy to the ground. I also love that while it’s generally considered Rhys’s masterpiece, she wrote it in her seventies. 

Oh, Was, how I love your relentlessly bleak, depressing sadness.

This is a strangely inventive novel that twines reality and fantasy into a brutal, desolate, yet gorgeous story of pain and survival. Told from the points of view of numerous characters, each story is tethered in some way to The Wizard of Oz, that venerable fable about good versus evil in the search for home.

Ryman introduces us to a main trio of characters whose lives are all equally harrowing–Dorothy Gael (the imagined inspiration for The Wizard of Oz heroine and the victim of familial sexual abuse), Frances Gumm (who becomes the tragic Judy Garland), and Jonathan (an actor experiencing AIDS-related dementia)–whose stories he intricately weaves together like a master craftsman. And while the novel is not a “happy” read by any stretch of the imagination, what has stayed with me throughout the past thirty years is its… show more.

Swear on This Life is not your typical romance—and I absolutely love it. It’s a soul journey to heal childhood wounds. It’s a “the one who got away” love story. It’s heart-wrenching and elating. 

It feels like real life. 

(But you do get the HEA!)

Renee Carlino doesn’t stick to the formula for romance novels in the traditional sense, but her writing is still safely classed in the genre. That’s why I love it. It’s not fluff (don’t get me wrong, I love fluffy romcoms as well!) and it’s not a guy with 8-pack abs (also love those heroes!). Carlino writes about vulnerable humans daring to feel even though they know that love, like life, comes with hurt. 

Don’t grab Swear on This Life when you need a lighthearted read. Grab it when you want to sit in your feels. I think you’ll love it!

Beautiful Player is my go-to steamy, fun reread. I love Will and Hanna’s quick-witted love story. I love that Hanna is a brilliant chemistry grad student. I love that part of the narrative is her opening up to her sensuality, not being afraid of it. And I love sexy Will and how hard he falls for his protégé!

Christina Lauren was my gateway into romance. While I have read all of their Beautiful Series, this one stands out as my favorite. Intelligent, driven main characters who go running together? Plenty of steam? A woman owning her value as a scientist and lover? Yes, yes, yes please!