Here are 98 books that Night Boat to Tangier fans have personally recommended if you like
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Growing up on a diet of The Godfather, The Sopranos, thrillers, and gangster novels, and living in New York City with eye-opening trips to Sicily, I became slightly obsessed with the Mafia. I came to see the American Mafia as a quintessentially American fabric, woven of family, power, immigrants, money, history, loyalty, legacy, and, yes, crime.
A history of the early 1960s in America, leading up to the assassination of JFK, seen through the eyes of the mobsters and criminals, crooked cops, spies, and sleazos who power the machines of history.
A comprehensive romp through the underbelly of American crime and politics (and you might, after reading this book, wonder what’s the difference), it’s a novel about characters you don’t like—but they’re vivid and fascinating.
Much more than a gritty gangster novel, it’s a tale about the people in history’s shadows, and, ultimately, history and the “never innocent” America itself.
The first novel in Ellroy's extraordinary Underworld USA Trilogy as featured on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read.
1958. America is about to emerge into a bright new age - an age that will last until the 1000 days of John F Kennedy's presidency.
Three men move beneath the glossy surface of power, men allied to the makers and shakers of the era. Pete Bondurant - Howard Hughes's right-hand man, Jimmy Hoffa's hitman. Kemper Boyd - employed by J Edgar Hoover to infiltrate the Kennedy clan. Ward Littell - a man seeking redemption in Bobby Kennedy's drive against organised crime.…
I’ve always loved a good crime drama/suspense thriller novel–the way they keep you glued to the pages, and you think you’ll just sit down for a quick couple of chapters before dinner, and the next thing you realize, it's 12am, and you’re on the last chapter. The depth of the character studies that you get with this genre is the other reason I enjoy it so much, there’s nothing worse than having main characters that are one dimensional and unreachable as a reader. I have always tried to create this kind of character depth and gripping narrative in my own books.
I really liked the way Puzo really nails the intricate plot with his straightforward writing style. He takes you through intricate events that jump around in time, keeping you hooked and on the edge of your seat.
The progression of the characters is another great bit. As a reader, you watch as Michael turns from a war hero with the potential to be a great guy into a ruthless mafia boss, almost as if it were destiny or repercussions for his father’s mistakes.
_________________________________ The classic novel that inspired 'the greatest crime film of all time'
Tyrant, blackmailer, racketeer, murderer - his influence reaches every level of American society. Meet Don Corleone, a friendly man, a just man, a reasonable man. The deadliest lord of the Cosa Nostra. The Godfather.
But no man can stay on top forever, not when he has enemies on both sides of the law. As the ageing Vito Corleone nears the end of a long life of crime, his sons must step up to manage the family business. Sonny Corleone is an old hand, while World War II…
Growing up on a diet of The Godfather, The Sopranos, thrillers, and gangster novels, and living in New York City with eye-opening trips to Sicily, I became slightly obsessed with the Mafia. I came to see the American Mafia as a quintessentially American fabric, woven of family, power, immigrants, money, history, loyalty, legacy, and, yes, crime.
Few writers inhabit history, distill it, and convey the feeling of an era with the verve or immediacy of E.L. Doctorow.
In Billy Bathgate, he trains his lens on the 1930s and introduces us to Billy Behan, a fatherless Irish-Jewish kid from the Bronx, who has a chance encounter with New York gangster Dutch Schultz and decides “whatever my life was going to be in this world it would have something to do with Mr. Schultz.”
Add a love triangle, a colorful cast of mobsters, murder, blackmail, a special prosecutor, and you have the propulsive plot and rich characters that power this unforgettable novel.
'I was living in even greater circles of gangsterdom than I had dreamed, latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom'
It's 1930's New York and fifteen-year-old streetkid Billy, who can juggle, somersault and run like the wind, has been taken under the wing of notorious gangster Dutch Schultz. As Billy learns the ways of the mob, he becomes like a son to Schultz - his 'good-luck kid' - and is initiated into a world of glamour, death and danger that will consume him, in this vivid, soaring epic of crime and betrayal.
Growing up on a diet of The Godfather, The Sopranos, thrillers, and gangster novels, and living in New York City with eye-opening trips to Sicily, I became slightly obsessed with the Mafia. I came to see the American Mafia as a quintessentially American fabric, woven of family, power, immigrants, money, history, loyalty, legacy, and, yes, crime.
Retired hitman Frankie Machianno thinks he’s left the past behind and can focus on the things that matter—wife, mistress, daughter, surfing, perfect kitchen, roasting coffee, cooking.
But someone is coming for him and wants him dead. The problem is: Frankie doesn’t know who. As he tries to figure it out, we learn about Frank, his family, his lover, and his past, from San Diego beach bum to mafia “button man.”
He’s my favorite kind of gangster—the good guy bad guy—and I couldn’t help but like Frank and fear for his life, as the novel hurtles toward its bittersweet conclusion.
Frank Machianno is the guy, a late-middle-aged ex-surf bum who runs a bait shack on the San Diego waterfront. That's when he's not juggling any of his other three part-time jobs or trying to get a quick set in on his long board. He's a beloved fixture of the community, a stand-up businessman, a devoted father to his daughter. Frank's also a hit man. Well, a retired hit man.
Back in the day, when he was one of the most feared members of the West Coast mob, he was known as Frankie Machine. Years ago, Frank consigned his mob ties…
Dugan was my grandmother’s maiden name. Her family was from County Wexford, Ireland near Rosslare on the island’s east coast. In recent years I have extensively studied my Irish heritage and have discovered much about my family, and about the DNA running through my own Irish blood. The inquiry has revealed much about my love of storytelling, good conversation, and generally about the way I move through the world. As a writer of several books of personal narrative and fiction, I have tried to write books that capture a certain emotion, and now through my own ancestral discoveries, I understand how those emotions and familial ties are so tightly linked.
What could be more Irish than two old friends meeting in a pub to tell stories?
Thing is, one of the friends has a life-changing secret to tell. He’s left his wife and kids for another woman, a woman they both know from their school days. Throughout the night, in pub after pub, and pint after pint, the story of the friend’s new love is revealed as the conversation delves deeper into each man’s version of the past they have shared—their fathers, their lovers, and even their collective memories of their Irish childhoods.
At times the story is both amusing and genuinely moving.
'A profound examination of friendship, romantic confusion and mortality' John Boyne
One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Old friends, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy a grief he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be.
As two pints turns to three, then five, Davy and Joe set out to revisit the haunts of their youth. With the ghosts of Dublin entwining around them - the pubs, the parties, the…
In 2006, I told a friend I wanted to write a book about grieving the death of a friend. Despite the fact that I’d never written a book before, she gave me her enthusiastic approval. Six months later she was dead. She inspired me to turn that book idea into a series of little books: the Friend Grief series. Just as I was finishing the last one, I began work on a full-length book that took me back to my work in the early days of AIDS. When COVID began, I returned to writing about friend grief. And I lost over a dozen friends while I wrote the book.
College friends gathering after the suicide of one of their friends. If it sounds like the ‘80s film The Big Chill, you would be right…and wrong.
At first, I wasn’t sure I liked any of the characters. But Rowley digs deep into the lives of a group of far-flung friends in ways that surprised me. Layers are peeled back throughout the book, proving that the characters, like our friends, really are complicated and annoying and precious.
New York Times Bestseller A TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick
A Big Chill for our times, celebrating decades-long friendships and promises—especially to ourselves—by the bestselling and beloved author of The Guncle.
It’s been a minute—or five years—since Jordan Vargas last saw his college friends, and twenty-eight years since their graduation when their adult lives officially began. Now Jordan, Jordy, Naomi, Craig, and Marielle find themselves at the brink of a new decade, with all the responsibilities of adulthood, yet no closer to having their lives figured out. Though not for a lack of trying. Over the years they’ve reunited…
I was born on the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin. Raised during the often troubled, often wonderful decade of the 1960s, I learned to stand up for what I thought was right. I joined forces with my beautiful wife during our high school years, and together, we ran away to build our own life aided by the Oneida principle of “looking ahead seven generations.” Encountering many obstacles along the way, including a poetry professor who said that what I wrote wasn’t poetry and a theater professor who said that if what I wrote was any good it was already being done. Still, I continue to write.
This was just a wonderful, very well-written story that moved my emotions. It is a love story between an old man and his grandson. It is a story we all may live someday as the old man disappears day by day. So much so that we all slowly face our inevitable sundowns and leave the world, giving only love and memories to those we leave behind.
The tender and moving novella from the author of A Man Called Ove and Anxious People
'I read this beautifully imagined and moving novella in one sitting, utterly wowed, wanting to share it with everyone I know' Lisa Genova, New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice _________
Grandpa and Noah are sitting on a bench in a square that keeps getting smaller every day.
As they wait together on the bench, they tell jokes and discuss their shared love of mathematics. Grandpa recalls what it was like to fall in love with his wife, what it was like to…
I’m not as old as some of the characters in the books I’ve mentioned, but I’m getting there. With age, one learns to hold grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. The importance of friendship and community can hardly be overstated. I love reading books that represent older characters, especially women, as complex, life-embracing individuals without resorting to condescension. I strove to write such a book with Toby’s Last Resort. I’m not always writing about older characters, but in all my work, I want to dive below the surface, discover meaning in the ordinary, and treat my characters with respect.
Lillian is an 84-years old woman walking around New York City on New Year’s Eve.
She loves the city, made her way there as a young woman in advertising in the 30s, became well-known as a poet of light verse. She alternately reminisces about her life and encounters people you would not expect.
She remembers her life in pieces, the way one does, so the reader puts together the mystery.
I found her to be a delightful and refreshing character. The book is a beautiful lacing of the past with the promise of unexpected things to come.
A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.
“In my reckless and undiscouraged youth,” Lillian Boxfish writes, “I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street…”
She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy’s to become the highest paid…
I’m a Panamanian American author and mother of two bilingual and bicultural children. I live a life between two beautiful languages and cultures, but that intersection is not always easy. In Squawk of Spanish, I explore the issue some children face when they don’t feel comfortable speaking the language of their grandparents. On this list, I’ve included a sample of books that celebrate some of the day-to-day joys and challenges of growing up Latine in the US. I hope you enjoy it!
Stories from our grandparents tie us to our roots if we are lucky enough to listen. This is a heartwarming book about a grandfather and his granddaughter sharing stories that drift out, all the way to Abuelo’s past in his island home, and come back to the present beach day, like the coming and going of the waves and the seasons.
The sensory details in the writing instantly transported me to the sand and salty air of the Caribbean. By the end of this book, my heart was aglow with nostalgia.
When this grandchild visits her abuelo, he takes her to the ocean. In the summer, they kick off their shoes and let the cool waves tickle their toes. In the winter, they stand on the cliff and let the spray of the sea prick their nose and cheeks. No matter the season, hot or cold, their favorite place to spend time together is the beach.
It's here that Abuelo is able to open up about his youth in Havana, Cuba. As they walk along the sand, he recalls the tastes, sounds, and smells of his childhood. And with his words,…
Having grown up in Minnesota, I didn’t even know about the existence of the Mafia until I saw The Godfather! After I moved to New York to work in journalism, I was stunned to see how intertwined mob guys were with every facet of life, from government to entertainment to grocery stores. I became a passionate reader (and now writer) of Mafia history so that I could understand it. I find mob stories endlessly fascinating because of what they reveal about human nature. Organized crime hasn’t gone away, and we ignore it at our peril. I think you'll enjoy these recommendations.
I loved this book about Meyer Lansky, the financial wizard of the mob because it is so thoroughly researched. Author Robert Lacey draws on firsthand interviews with family members and friends and archival records. His writing is intelligent and insightful.
This book skips the cliches and goes beneath the surface. Lansky emerges as a complicated, and determined and utterly human gangster. It is impossible to understand organized crime without understanding Meyer Lansky.
The story of Meyer Lansky and the criminal empire he supervised exposes the harsh reality of life in the underworld and demonstrates how Lansky's desire to achieve mythic status as an outlaw ultimately destroyed him
