Fans pick 100 books like Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

Speaking of authors who combine stylistic daring with profound emotion, I give you George Saunders. Saunders’s strange and funny stories prompted me to try my hand at writing fiction, and his first novel is one of my favorite books.

Inspired by the true story of Abraham Lincoln sneaking, on multiple occasions, into a Washington D.C. crypt to cradle the corpse of his young son, Willie, this book also breathes life into a sizeable cast of ghosts squatting in the “Bardo”—a liminal space between life and death. As the American Civil War rages, President Lincoln and the unwilling ghosts must all come to terms with the inevitability of death. This book is a great American novel, equally hilarious and heart-breaking.

The HBO series was great, but the book was even better.

Prior viewing of the series in no way detracted from my enjoyment of this book. Dexter’s writing is quirky and unique. Existential insights are slipped seamlessly into scenes of violence and vulgarity. The sacred and profane coexist in ways that shatter notions of duality.

As someone who has lived in the West most of my adult life and studied Western history in depth, I appreciated his nuanced exposure of humanity in the midst of darkness on the frontier. Also, this Western novel features unique female characters who defy stereotypes, which are rare in the Western genre. 

Vivid details and excellent writing bring the Western frontier to life in this unique novel that avoids cliché.

A greed-driven frenzy for buffalo hide based on market speculation decimated the species in the late 1800s.

The tragedy of the buffalo is paralleled by the plight of William Andrews who, inspired by transcendental philosophy, sets out to find his true self on the Western Frontier, yet ends up losing more than his innocence as he follows the buffalo into the abyss.

The tragedy of the buffalo is conveyed through story and is in no way pedantic or political. This novel taught me a lot about the economic forces of Western expansion in narrative form. 

This book is a bit of a departure from my other picks because it’s nonfiction and doesn’t take place in the nineteenth-century United States.

Even though this book has a lot of scholarly and historical references, I found it riveting. I’ve always been interested in the ancient world and Jezebel made me feel like I was there. The scholarly digressions from the story are both relevant and fascinating.

This book taught me that propaganda and spin doctoring are ancient practices. The power of the Jezebel story still influences modern culture and attitudes. Zealotry and intolerance are as old as history and still plague our society. 

Jenny Uglow looks at the Napoleonic Wars period from the bottom up -- what life was like, how political issues affected the person in the street. Bankers, clergymen, working men and women, manufacturers, and statesmen all play roles in her narrative. Through the letters and diaries of ordinary people, she produces a vibrant picture of life in a period of unprecedented political, social, and economic turmoil. She still ends with the Battle of Waterloo, but Waterloo as experienced by the junior officers and enlisted men. A fascinating book, that shows how high politics and world events affected ordinary people and is highly accessible to general readers.

A book about a group of London intellectuals – sometimes friends, sometimes frenemies – who expressed their influential ideas with an elegant style that I find irresistible. (Dr. Johnson strongly influenced Jane Austen, so if you like Austen, you’ll like Johnson.) This book is filled with anecdotes of friendships, rivalries, partying, and bickering, with a fair amount of Georgian bawdy humor sprinkled throughout. You’ll meet writers, poets, playwrights, legislators, and bluestockings. The Club gives you multiple biographies plus a portrait of London in the late Georgian period. Spending time with this book is like spending a few hours with Dr. Johnson and his witty friends at a London coffeehouse.

What were the lives of ordinary people like during Austen’s day?

They were far removed from the elegant folk depicted in her novels. The authors look at topics such as child miners, chimney sweeps, crime and punishment, personal hygiene, and how to do the laundry.

True stories look at the horrors of surgery and childbirth in those days of no anesthesia and little understanding of infection. 

I enjoyed commenting on early drafts of this dramatic Georgian historical fiction written by my wife Elizabeth about her great-great-great-grandmother: painstakingly researched and vividly portrayed, it’s about love, betrayal, and survival. Lucy, strong-willed daughter of English landed gentry, born in the late 18th century, married Sam Lord, a plantation owner and fortune hunter from Barbados, at a time when women were their husband’s chattels with no rights even over the children. Abused and imprisoned by him in Barbados, she escaped with the help of enslaved people after giving birth at sea, braving disease and cruelty, and witnessing the abject misery of slavery in her descent from a life of pampered luxury to a struggle for survival in a far-off land.  

Winner of the Historical Writers’ Association Debut Crown Award, Blood & Sugar is a page-turner of a crime thriller set in London and Greenwich 1781. Captain Harry Corsham must discover why his old friend the abolitionist Tad Archer was murdered. Corsham’s quest may do irreparable damage to the slave trade. I live in Greenwich, much of which is unchanged architecturally since the eighteenth century. Walking the streets portrayed in the novel brings alive that world. Slave trade monuments are currently being taken down in the UK and US and Blood & Sugar depicts the beginnings of that emotional and necessary journey.

While most Jane Austen variations center around Pride and Prejudice’s famous couple, Elizabeth and Darcy, Katherine Cowley’s book takes a completely different tactic. The heroine of her book is the often-ignored middle Bennet daughter. After their father’s untimely death, Mary is visited during the night by a pair of distant relations, who invite her to live with them. Lady Trafford and her nephew are training Mary to be a governess—or so she thinks. I loved seeing Mary in the role of a detective, trying to solve the murder that takes place shortly after she arrives in her new home and discovers what Lady Trafford is really up to. Katherine Cowley’s carefully placed clues lead the reader along the adventure with Mary Bennet, and we get to see new sides of this character that were not explored in Austen’s original novel. Other characters from Pride and Prejudice make brief appearances,… show more.