Here are 88 books that O Brother fans have personally recommended if you like
O Brother.
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I've penned 11 novels and numerous essays, and if there's one thread that ties them all together, it's rawness. I gravitate towards reading books and watching films where writers peel back the layers of their lives, exposing past wounds and delving into what they've learned from them. As an entrepreneur with a master's degree in marketing, I’ve found that this kind of vulnerability is not only compelling but essential in any form of storytelling. Whether I’m crafting a narrative for a new startup or reflecting on my own experiences for a novel, it’s this unfiltered honesty that resonates deeply with audiences.
Westover’s memoir is a fascinating exploration of the clash between ignorance and enlightenment, with a plot twist that involves her eventually realizing she was raised in a real-life survivalist cult. Her journey from a sheltered, isolated upbringing to earning a PhD is nothing short of extraordinary.
But what really hooked me was her biting wit and the way she grapples with the contradictions of loving a family that’s as endearing as they are exasperating. It’s like watching someone untangle a lifetime’s worth of emotional knots, one revelation at a time, and somehow finding humor in the most unexpected places.
Selected as a book of the year by AMAZON, THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, NEW YORK TIMES, ECONOMIST, NEW STATESMAN, VOGUE, IRISH TIMES, IRISH EXAMINER and RED MAGAZINE
'One of the best books I have ever read . . . unbelievably moving' Elizabeth Day 'An extraordinary story, beautifully told' Louise O'Neill 'A memoir to stand alongside the classics . . . compelling and joyous' Sunday Times
Tara Westover grew up preparing for the end of the world. She was never put in school, never taken to the doctor. She did not even have a birth certificate…
I am an author and adventure activist who believes passionately in the power of big and small adventures to change your life for the better when you’ve been through dark and difficult times. I have written three books, all of which I describe as ‘alternative adventure stories’ because they don’t look like the usual ‘Boy’s Own’ tales of danger and derring-do (although they do include some of that, too!). I’m drawn to the words of wonderful women warriors who give me strength in times of sadness. These books have inspired me to live big and bravely in what is often a challenging but (mainly) wonderful world.
I loved this book for the wallop of its beginning, which details that the narrator, Raynor (and her husband, Moth), were driven to walk England’s 630-mile South West Coast Path because they became homeless.
This is an extraordinarily powerful example of how when life gives you lemons, an adventure can make you lemonade.
"Polished, poignant... an inspiring story of true love."-Entertainment Weekly
A BEST BOOK OF 2019, NPR's Book Concierge SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK AWARD OVER 400,000 COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE
The true story of a couple who lost everything and embarked on a transformative journey walking the South West Coast Path in England
Just days after Raynor Winn learns that Moth, her husband of thirty-two years, is terminally ill, their house and farm are taken away, along with their livelihood. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South…
As a gay man born into an evangelical Christian family, my coming out story was wrought with pain, trauma, and separation from family and loved ones. In the same year I lost my best friend in an accident. My world tumbled and I had to crawl back to a place of reckoning. Walking became my path to healing. So when my brother Reuben, who has Down's syndrome sent me a message from the isolation of a care home in the pandemic, I knew he was in trouble. Those five words - ´brother. do. you. love. me.´changed our lives. I thought I might know a way to save him.
As a guy with no children, motherhood has always intrigued me.
What does motherhood actually feel like? How does it change you? How to describe the bond between mother and child? I had questions that would be difficult to ask any mother. In this soaring memoir, Clover has answered them all for me. She has a skill to convert the most mundane into life-changing and the routine into extraordinary.
Clover’s style is engaging and intimate. She leaves no stone unturned in this ‘heart on her sleeve’ book about what it really means to be a mother.
'Raw, elemental and beautiful.' Telegraph 'This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read.' - Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times
Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like - how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be.
My Wild and Sleepless Nights examines what it means to be a mother, and reveals with unflinching honesty the many conflicting emotions that this entails: the joy…
As a gay man born into an evangelical Christian family, my coming out story was wrought with pain, trauma, and separation from family and loved ones. In the same year I lost my best friend in an accident. My world tumbled and I had to crawl back to a place of reckoning. Walking became my path to healing. So when my brother Reuben, who has Down's syndrome sent me a message from the isolation of a care home in the pandemic, I knew he was in trouble. Those five words - ´brother. do. you. love. me.´changed our lives. I thought I might know a way to save him.
William and his wife lost their baby in its last term and had to endure the torment of an induced stillbirth.
The same thing happened to a dear friend years ago so when I heard William as embarking on this brave endeavour to write about it, I was intrigued. The publisher, Little Toller Books, decided to create a space for William’s male voice in a publishing genre that is dominated by women’s.
The result is a heart-wrenching tale of grief as William clamours to contextualise the world he has been thrown into. William’s skill as a writer lies in his depiction of the indescribable. I’m sure there were months of soul searching and pen holding before he finally hit upon a way of converting his pain into the stunning prose. I am so grateful he did. And you will be too.
In the summer of 2017, Will and his wife Amy lost their baby, Elowen, a few days before their due date. After a traumatic induced birth, they returned from hospital to their cottage in the New Forest, grief-stricken and struggling to make sense of what happened to them. Unmoored by sadness, what became clear in the weeks and months following Elowen's death is that there is no established vocabulary with which to understand this experience, either for Will or the people around him. Indeed, as he discovers, there is no word in the English language for a parent who has…
Hello, I write poems, lots of them, and also lots of books about Christianity. I grew up in London and lived for my first thirteen years deep within myself, in a kind of fog that prevented anyone from knowing me, including myself. Then, one day, when I was thirteen, in the middle of a math class, everything changed for me. I entered a wholly new world. I went from being at the bottom of the class to the top of the class; I started publishing poems. I started a quest to find myself anew, cutting through the fog, and that quest ended with me teaching Divinity at Duke University.
I can’t possibly remember how many times I have read this wonderful journal and all the ones that follow it. No one captures conversation better than Boswell, and hardly anyone preserves the sense of a place or a character better than he does.
Boswell is searingly honest about himself, including his many shortcomings. Although he may not intend to be hilarious, he surely is. I sometimes feel I know Boswell better than I know anyone living.
Edinburgh-born James Boswell, at twenty-two, kept a daily diary of his eventful second stay in London from 1762 to 1763. This journal, not discovered for more than 150 years, is a deft, frank and artful record of adventures ranging from his vividly recounted love affair with a Covent Garden actress to his first amusingly bruising meeting with Samuel Johnson, to whom Boswell would later become both friend and biographer. The London Journal 1762-63 is a witty, incisive and compellingly candid testament to Boswell's prolific talents.
As a writer, I want my novels to be deeply humane and beautifully written, with characters who are worth your time and love and worry. And as a reader, I want my plots to keep you up past bedtime. Unsurprisingly, these same qualities show up in novels I remember the longest. In days of yore (the 1980s) the rap on “literary novels” was that they had poetic writing and no plot. I’m glad to say that’s no longer true (if it ever was). Gorgeous writing and riveting plots can and do go together! In that spirit, I hope you’ll love my book selections.
Two boys find a gun in the woods. Over the next few hours, which are rendered in a series of unforgettable scenes that travel forward and back in time, the gun will resonate through the lives of the boys, their teachers, their parents, and others.
I could not put it down, and when I finished I began reading it again. The prose is the loveliest you’ll find, and the story takes gentle and surprising turns that will stop your heart and make you feel deeply human. I loved this short, gorgeous novel and learned something about the lives of men.
There is good reason why William Lychack's writing has been called 'Precise, exhilarating, sometimes wonderfully funny and always beautiful' (Margot Livesey). In prose you can practically feel moving in your hands, Cargill Falls takes you through a series of unforgettable scenes that coalesce into an extended meditation on the meanings we give or fail to give certain moments in our lives. The story begins when an adult William Lychack, hearing of the suicide of a childhood friend, sets out to make peace with a single, long-departed winter's day when the two boys find a gun in the woods. Taking place…
Like most people I know, I have always been fascinated with serial killers, and more importantly why they do what they do. What makes one man murder multiple victims while another with a similar upbringing sells white goods and wouldn’t attract a traffic ticket. In my books, I am as interested in showing my readers why a killer kills, as I am in the hunt to catch him. My goal is to not so much get the reader to ‘like’ the antagonist but to understand, and dare I say even feel sorry for him. We are all products of our environment and upbringing, yet some of us murder others for fun.
Trust me when I say that any book by Michael Robotham will not disappoint, but this one is something special. Shatter features psychologist Joe who has his own problems and aids the police in tracking down a serial killer who can destroy his victims by getting them to kill themselves. Never have I read a book that has taken me on such an emotional roller-coaster.
A naked woman in red high-heeled shoes is perched on the edge of Clifton Suspension Bridge with her back pressed to the safety fence, weeping into a mobile phone. Clinical psychologist Joseph O'Loughlin is only feet away, desperately trying to talk her down. She whispers, 'you don't understand,' and jumps.
Later, Joe has a visitor - the woman's teenage daughter, a runaway from boarding school. She refuses to believe that her mother would have jumped off the bridge - not only would she not commit suicide, she is terrified of heights.
I was a painfully awkward teenager, two years younger than the rest of my class and a little too “extra” to fit in anywhere. I spent all of high school desperately seeking my weirdos—people who would accept me the way I was, rabid-puppy enthusiasm and all. One night I met a colorfully-dressed trio on the street who invited me to a loft party that changed my life. That night I fell in love with NYC’s underground party scene: the high-energy music, grimy locations, and most of all the people. I had found my weirdos. When the Beat Drops is my love letter to discovering your people and finding your scene.
When I was pitching my book, I used this book as a comp: it’s like This Song Will Save Your Life, but at raves! There are definitely some similarities (credit to Leila Sales: hers came first). They both feature geeky girls, and Sales’ Elise Dembowski is one of the truest awkward-teen first-person voices I’ve ever read. They’re both set against the backdrop of underground music scenes, and the way Sales describes indie dance parties made me feel like I was back in the basement of NYC’s Lit trying to look cool while bopping around awkwardly to Joy Division. Both of our protagonists have weird relationships with older guys, and they both learn lessons that suck at the time but make them stronger. So is there room in the world for two girl-DJ books? Yes! Check out This Song Will Save Your Lifeand you’ll see exactly why.
Making friends has never been Elise Dembowski's strong suit. All throughout her life, she's been the butt of every joke and the outsider in every conversation. When a final attempt at popularity fails, Elise nearly gives up. Then she stumbles upon a warehouse party where she meets Vicky, a girl in a band who accepts her; Char, a cute, yet mysterious disc jockey; Pippa, a carefree spirit from England; and most importantly, a love for DJing. Told in a refreshingly genuine and laugh-out-loud funny voice, Leila Sales' THIS SONG WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE is an exuberant novel about identity, friendship,…
I grew up on the ocean, surrounded by stories of pirates and mystery. Back then, I became enthralled with old detective series like Nancy Drew. Today, I am hooked on Agatha Christie. Though I primarily read and write nonfiction, they retain that mysterious element that has always intrigued me. In my teaching, writing, and research, I work with genealogy and true crime. I’m also obsessed with true crime books and podcasts. I hope you enjoy the list I have picked for you!
I have long enjoyed Gregg Olsen's books for their empathetic and well-researched narratives. In this book, he teams up with journalist Rebecca Morris to recount the details surrounding Susan Cox Powell's disappearance.
The authors detail the search for the young mother and the grisly aftermath that ensues over the years following her disappearance, culminating in the deaths of her two young children and her husband. This story is full of unexpected twists and heartbreaking accounts that I still remember long after reading the final page.
The tragic story of Susan Powell and her murdered boys, Charlie and Braden, is the only case that rivals the John Benet Ramsey saga in the annals of true crime. When a pretty, blonde Utah mother went missing in December of 2009 the media was swept up in the story. Susan's husband, Josh, said he had no idea what happened to his young wife, and that he and the boys had been camping. Over the next three years bombshell by bombshell, the story would reveal more shocking secrets, Josh's father, Steve, who was sexually obsessed with Susan, would ultimately be…
I’m a Canadian writer, and a mother of three. I think I do qualify as an ACOH (Adult Child of Hippies). My mom taught elementary school, and my dad was a university professor, but otherwise they fully embraced the hippy movement. It was a rich childhood in terms of nature, literature, art, and foreign cultures, but dysfunctional and confusing on the emotional front. Sadly, dropping a lot of acid leads to a lifetime of anxiety and depression. My father descended into mental illness and opiate addiction when I was an adult, eventually leading to his suicide. I came to terms with his death by writing Corridor Nine.
Gayle Brandeis’s intimate memoir of wrestling with her mother’s suicide following a long mental illness kept me company in the ways it mirrored my own experience. It is sometimes easier to mourn a stranger’s pain, as you edge towards your own grief. Brandeis’s reading through her mother’s letters, with their paranoid delusions and grandiose aspirations, “passionate and creatively punctuated,” rang true to my father’s crazy literary outpourings. Her experiences of entering her mother’s home to witness the evidence of her last activities, to the almost physical trauma of learning the stark details of her mother’s suicide method, comforted me in their familiarity. The suicide of a mentally ill parent leaves a lot of guilt and confusion in its wake. Anger and resentment aren’t what one “should” feel after a death of a parent, but Brandeis doesn’t sugarcoat the complex mess of emotions that needs to be untangled.
Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeis’s wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mother’s suicide
Gayle Brandeis’s mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant at her chest, and a grieving daughter trying to piece together what happened, who her mother was, and all she had and hadn’t understood about her.
