100 books like Mac Undercover

This is a story of redemption at its sweetest. Although written in 1911, it stands the test of time for today’s girls who think all is lost and find their happy place in the natural world.

I loved nine-year-old Mary Lennox’s exotic beginnings. Born in India to an absent mother and an often ill and busy English father, Mary’s frequent illnesses, lack of attention, and permissive nannies had turned her into an unlikable human. I had a hard time imagining this girl doing anything positive.

I thought for sure she was unretrievable. But when Mary, a seeming lost cause, is sent to live with a distant uncle, she is transformed. Inspired by a secret garden and determined to bring it back to life, she ultimately finds healing and happiness. Lost causes who are saved by birds and nature are my favorites! 

By the time I learnt to read, Enid Blyton had already written six or seven children’s books. One of my early reads was likely to have been this one, the original adventure. Eventually, I read them all.

I learnt the characters so well; their looks and personalities, they were embedded in my mind until the next book – and the remaining nineteen! So clear were their identities, my friends and I were able to re-enact the Five’s escapades taking the roles of the siblings and cousin. 

Although some of her writing comes in for criticism these days (from adults), it’s for things that went unnoticed by the average child swept along by the book’s adventures.

In my writing I work hard to create memorable characters and I’m always delighted when they are mentioned by readers.

An old-time favourite and, like Enid Blyton, a good link between picture and chapter books. It was one of my childhood favourites and one I have read to my son more than once. It is a story of the bullied overcoming the bullies and perhaps something that resonates with kids as the small foxes manage to outwit three rich men and their machines trying to dig them out. The fox characters are anthropomorphised and so outside of the ‘real’ and yet there is a strong sense of place, and although the characters of Boggis, Bunce, and Bean are exaggerated, they are recognisable and realistic.

Similar to the Mac B books, this is a series about a character who likes to solve crimes/mysteries, and the characters and settings are realistic. Even more wonderful is that the setting is Botswana and it gives much insight into the country and people. I was fortunate enough to be able to read this with my son while travelling with him in Botswana. Perfect.

This is my all-time favourite novel by Rosemary Sutcliff—an author whose works inspired me to become a writer of historical fiction, and, long in the future, encouraged me to craft my own Tudor young adult novel.

Set in early Britain, it tells the story of Aquila, a young man of British birth. A Viking raiding party destroys Aquila’s home and family. After he is left to die by the original raiders, a leader of another Viking group takes Aquila across the sea to his home as a slave. For years, bitterness and hopelessness also enslave Aquila.

The Lantern Bearers is such a beautiful, richly layered story of healing, redemption, and the victory of the human spirit. It even introduces the reader to the young Arthur Pendragon as he steps towards his destiny. Believe me, I still read this book when the world seems dark, and I need reminding of hope.

BOX 88 is a thoroughly modern-day spy story set in two timeframes. Lachlan (‘Lockie’) Kite, the protagonist, is poles apart from Lawton’s Joe Wilderness. An apparently chance meeting at the funeral of an old school friend leads him to be abducted. Flashback 30 years, and we see how he was recruited to a secret cell of intelligence operatives (Box 88) when barely out of his upper-class boarding school. He is trained and asked to undergo a mission while spending the summer at the house of a school friend in France. While there, he falls heavily in love, and somehow manages to carry out his mission—albeit with devastating consequences. This portrayal of an intelligent young man growing up feels real and is beautifully handled. The start of a great series.

The author is the BBC's Security and Defence Correspondent and his range of contacts enriches this book. 

It is full of anecdotes about the secret world and Russia looms large in his narrative. 

He explores the psychology and motivation of why British and Russian intelligence officers spied for the enemy during the Cold War and there is an excellent chapter on how the UK security services produced some inaccurate intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Harry Cole was a criminal who grew up in an East London slum. In 1939 and fresh out of prison he enlisted in the army, before absconding with the mess fund. As France fell, he had a shot at redemption—and having been left behind after the evacuation at Dunkirk, set about organising escape lines. His ability to outwit the enemy made him a star of the various resistance and special operations networks, but shortly after capture in 1941 he began to betray every contact he had made in France.

Murphy’s book is unlike any other wartime biography. It plays out like a gripping piece of fiction. It shows too that while we might comfort ourselves ‘we’ were the good guys in WW2—we had plenty of very bad guys among us. Makes you look at WW2 through a different prism.

This novel represents a sharp turn for me. Until I snapped up Zero History in an airport bookstore many years ago, the science fiction I’d read seemed like dry, intellectual exercises. The characters didn’t have depth. They never made me laugh (or cry). But Zero History unleashed a passion in me for speculative fiction, and eventually, it turned my own writing in that direction as well. To this day, it’s one of my all-time favorite novels. While it’s the third book in a William Gibson trilogy, it is entirely complete on its own. There’s a pop culture, cool vibe about it as the story taps into the lives of three people with unusual gifts – which a global marketing magnate dearly wants to use in various ways.

This biography of Guy Burgess has been selected because of the sheer impressive material which Lownie brings together as a result of 20 years of research. He has provided an illuminated and extensively researched biography that does not shy from laying out the full extent of Burgess’s deception and hedonistic behaviour, as well as the real risks he posed to Western intelligence services and State Secrets. The publicly educated and privileged Cambridge Five, who betrayed their country for ideological motives, arrogantly believed that they had the right to pass Western secrets to Russia. In spite of the brutality of the Stalinist regime, they believed in the communist cause and deceived everyone around them in Britain—their work colleagues, families, and friends. That deception ran dangerously into the Cold War and led finally to the defection of Burgess and his friend Donald Maclean to Moscow in 1951. Their defection caused huge ramifications… show more.