Here are 100 books that Ordinary People fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have always been a romantic at heart, although it took time for me to realize and act on this as I was conditioned from an early age to be scholarly and rational (life-allowing). One of my favorite silent films as a teenager was a love story that focuses on a forbidden relationship between a British girl and a Chinese man at the turn of the twentieth century, called Broken Blossoms; it left an indelible impression. Eventually, I myself became involved in a life-changing romantic relationship with a Chinese man. I now love exploring the vicissitudes of the human heart at the crossroads of cultural differences in my writing.
This book is indeed a “creation of comic genius,” as Nick Hornby blurbed. The movie didn’t do anything for me; I found Renée Zellweger quite blah, and Hugh Grant was playing the British cad as usual. However, the book was so funny I had a hard time putting it down.
Basically, it is about Bridget, a British “Everywoman” who falls into the clutches of her slimy boss, Daniel, while on a quest for the traditional Holy Grail of womanhood—true love. One of the things I most enjoyed about this chick-lit classic was the rather graphic booze-and-smoking sessions, as well as the eccentric minor characters, especially Bridget’s mother. My mother is also a maverick and very much a free spirit, so this really resonated with me.
A dazzlingly urban satire on modern relationships? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something?
As Bridget documents her struggles through the social minefield of her thirties and tries to weigh up the eternal question (Daniel Cleaver or Mark Darcy?), she turns for support to four indispensable friends: Shazzer, Jude, Tom and a bottle of chardonnay.
Welcome to Bridget's first diary: mercilessly funny, endlessly touching and utterly addictive.
Helen Fielding's first Bridget Jones novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, sparked a phenomenon that has seen…
A lover of fiction since my teens, I only really took an interest in history in my 20s. I’m fascinated with WWII and the 1950s due to family histories and having visited key sites, like Bletchley Park and the Command Bunker in Uxbridge, near where I grew up. I’m not especially patriotic, but I am proud of what Britain had to do in 1940, as well as the toll the war took and the years of recovery. But it’s also the time, albeit decreasingly so, when people still alive today can look back at their youth, and we can all have a nostalgia for that time in our lives.
I remember reading this in my student bedsit and being transfixed. I was studying art but had just decided that I wanted to be a novelist. As such, I loved the opening lines: “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
It is a simple yet beautiful book about love, belief, and betrayal. I’m not religious, but the testing of someone’s faith and how it may make them act stuck with me. Also, the facade of the ‘stiff upper lip,’ but underneath, the vulnerability.
The love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. After a chance meeting rekindles his love and jealousy two years later, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, and slowly his love for her turns into an obsession.
I’m an author and a romantic. Put the two together and it makes sense for me to write love stories. I’ve always been interested in relationships and fascinated by how complex our feelings make us when we fall in love. There’s a love story in all my books, but for the last three novels, a love story has been thestory. I’m a Londoner too, and I like it when a city becomes another character in a book, as I hope London has in The Central Line.
It's 1969, Phyllis is married to a kind man, with two children and a large house in suburban London. Her domestic world is not far removed from a dutiful 50s housewife’s. Then a much younger man, dashing, selfish, and a family friend, kisses her in a dark garden, and her life explodes. She abandons her family and moves to a shabby flat in Ladbroke Grove. A new world opens to her – she meets people of colour, artists, activists, drinkers, and idealists. She experiences sexual freedom and romantic love. Phyllis’s teenage daughter joins her in her new life, and mother and daughter must work out a different kind of relationship. I found myself feeling furious with Phyllis at the same time as emphasising with her.
“Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book. She writes with authority, and with delicacy: she explores nuance, but speaks plainly; she is one of those writers a reader trusts.”—Hilary Mantel
From the bestselling author of Late in the Day and The Past comes a compulsive new novel about one woman’s sexual and intellectual awakening in 1960s London.
1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their…
I’m an author and a romantic. Put the two together and it makes sense for me to write love stories. I’ve always been interested in relationships and fascinated by how complex our feelings make us when we fall in love. There’s a love story in all my books, but for the last three novels, a love story has been thestory. I’m a Londoner too, and I like it when a city becomes another character in a book, as I hope London has in The Central Line.
I fell in love with this beautifully written book about female friendship, set-in modern-day London. The opening shows us three young women lounging in London Fields one summer, all of them filled with an indisputable sense that they are on the brink of life, their horizons lit up with promise. Ten years later, those promises have failed to materialize. The characters are confused, struggling, and envious of what each of the others has. All three are strong, flawed characters, and their lives, choices, and mistakes feel very real and poignant.
THE MUST-READ SUMMER 2020 RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK
'If you wished Normal People had tackled female friendship, try Expectation' GRAZIA 'Profoundly intelligent and humane. Deserves to feature on many a prize shortlist' GUARDIAN 'A brilliant exploration of friendship, feminism and thwarted ambition' PANDORA SYKES ______________________
What happened to the women we were supposed to become?
Hannah, Cate and Lissa are young, vibrant and inseparable. Living on the edge of a common in East London, their shared world is ablaze with art and activism, romance and revelry - and the promise of everything to come. They are electric. They…
I’m an English professor, a poet, a lover of reading, and a happy husband and father. How did all this happen; what historical processes made my good fortunes possible? I get answers to these questions from great fiction and great nonfiction. It’s hard to find two more sensitive and beautifully written novels about marriage’s personal and social dimensions than Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Their psychological insights are complemented by two marriage historians and one sociologist with broad knowledge about love’s evolution over the centuries. I’ve read these books multiple times and shared them with many students (and friends)! They never get old.
This book got me thinking about the future with its bold claim that today's best marriages are the best ones the world has ever known—because (some) spouses are freer and more compatible than those of earlier eras. But it also got me thinking with its claim that for the less fortunate members of today’s societies, including people struggling with poverty, marriage can be very hard.
The book also ranges back in time to show what marriages were like—and what people expected from them—in past eras. These history lessons are super-valuable. Also, even though this isn’t primarily a self-help book, it gave me lots of food to think about my marriage and why it’s so valuable to me.
“After years of debate and inquiry, the key to a great marriage remained shrouded in mystery. Until now...”—Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Eli J. Finkel's insightful and ground-breaking investigation of marriage clearly shows that the best marriages today are better than the best marriages of earlier eras. Indeed, they are the best marriages the world has ever known. He presents his findings here for the first time in this lucid, inspiring guide to modern marital bliss.
The All-or-Nothing Marriage reverse engineers fulfilling marriages—from the “traditional” to the utterly nontraditional—and shows how any marriage can be…
I went to four different boarding schools when I was younger, which at the time didn’t seem weird but it definitely is. I think boarding schools are peculiar places, full of teenagers with raging hormones, secret homesickness, and a certain sort of reckless swagger that is a recipe for all sorts of drama i.e. the perfect setting for a novel.I was on quite hefty scholarships and know how lucky I was to be there, but whether you have or haven’t been to boarding school, there is an endless fascination with them. I had a lot of fun writing The Islanders, wallowing happily in my nostalgia and reminiscing with old friends about what we got up to.
Another book about a misfit at a US boarding school. Frankie, our heroine, is sharp, possibly a criminal mastermind, and an ugly duckling turned pretty. At her school–Alabaster Prep–she gets in with a group of older boys and starts to undermine their secret prank society by outdoing them all, with (un)predictably disastrous consequences. This book is so much fun; adults and adolescents alike will love it.
The hilarious and razor-sharp story of how one girl went from geek to patriarchy-smashing criminal mastermind in two short years, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of We Were Liars and Genuine Fraud.
* National Book Award finalist * * Printz Honor *
Frankie Landau-Banks at age 14:
Debate Club. Her father's "bunny rabbit." A mildly geeky girl attending a highly competitive boarding school.
Frankie Landau-Banks at age 15: A knockout figure. A sharp tongue. A chip on her shoulder. And a gorgeous new senior boyfriend: the supremely goofy, word-obsessed Matthew Livingston.
I’ve always loved books, movies, and shows that feature swoony, satisfying romances. As a middle school teacher and upper middle-grade author, I know it can be tricky to find novels with romance for the middle-grade set. But I also know firsthand that there are many kids who crave these kinds of stories–and that there are major benefits to giving kids a chance to read and hopefully talk about crushes and relationships in all their complexity. I’m always on the lookout for realistic stories with just the right amount of romance to delight middle-grade readers, and these five are some of my favorites.
This is an immersive and insightful slice-of-life story that drew me right in. I read it on vacation, and it was a perfect tween beach read to get swept up in!
The chapters alternate between the perspectives of two main characters, Lily and Will, who feel equally real and equally endearing. I loved getting inside both their heads and seeing their lives intersect and their feelings for each other grow.
The writing is lovely and smooth, and there’s just a light sprinkling of romance to liven up a relatable and authentic friendship story.
Secrets, rumors, shifting friendships, overbearing parents, and, on top of all that, a first dance—how does anyone survive seventh grade? Told from dual points of view, this novel about two tweens finding their voices and standing up for themselves is for fans of Lisa Yee, Leslie Connor, and Janae Marks.
Lily, Maddie, and Sasha have always been the perfect friendship trio. But this year, everything is changing. Maddie and Sasha made the elite soccer team, and Lily feels that they’re always leaving her behind. And everyone seems to have secrets now: Maddie, and Sasha, and Lily’s sister, and even Lily…
I have known that I was gay since I was in second grade and kissed a boy on the playground. But that wasn’t the only way that I knew. Coaches, bullies, religion, and family warned me by namecalling, violence, and intimidation. It wasn’t until I was in college that I heard homosexuality portrayed in a positive light. Thank you, Walt Whitman. Then I saw The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Dessert, and knew that I had to go on my own adventure in search of my gay tribe. Novels can be a tribe. I hope the books on my list give you a place to find acceptance and love.
Tin Man weaves the beauty and meaning of Van Gogh’s oeuvre into a background for a story that is written like poetry. Time is a main character who is sometimes kind, but mostly cruel. Separation, loss, and longing are themes that all people can relate to but when seen through the perspective of a character who identifies as LGBTQ+ it heightens and clarifies those human experiences in a way that draws a reader from any background deeper into an exploration of what the passing of time means and the consequences of ignoring the herald of each minute that ticks by.
The beautiful and heartbreaking new novel from Sarah Winman, author of the international bestseller WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT.
'Her best novel to date' Observer 'An exquisitely crafted tale of love and loss' Guardian 'A marvel' Sunday Express 'Astoundingly beautiful' Matt Haig
It begins with a painting won in a raffle: fifteen sunflowers, hung on the wall by a woman who believes that men and boys are capable of beautiful things.
And then there are two boys, Ellis and Michael, who are inseparable. And the boys become men, and then Annie walks into…
As a 34-year-old memoirist, one of the most frequent questions I get about my genre, delivered with both curiosity and disdain, is: “Why?” After all, why? What could I, the life experience and literary equivalent of a pollywog, have to share about my journey—or, gasp, what I’ve LEARNED? The fun thing is, as someone who once broke my parents’ computer by using dial-up internet to download Napster, I’m used to disappointing people. Even more fun: as a millennial memoirist, I don’t believe in writing books that will tell people what I’ve learned. I hope my writing shows, through both merit and content, that I have indeed learned something.
All hail the queen. Sally Rooney makes it look easy, with just the right amount of Irish, nothing-is-easy-you-insufferable-wanker on the side. This book has it all: awkward yet undeniably hot sexual tension! Arguments! Cool names! A house that is bigger than yours!
And within Rooney’s stupidly gorgeous prose, we find ourselves not only yelling “EXACTLY!” out loud, many times, to an empty room but answering the book’s central question: right here. As long as we have a good book, that beautiful world is right here.
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.
Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get…
I’ve been fascinated by different cultures since I was 14 years old growing up in inner-city Chicago. My passion has given me a curious quest to travel the world and learn about different cultures. My friends have a tagline for me which is ‘From the Hood to Hanoi and All the Stops In Between’ because of my international teaching in Vietnam. As an adult who is now an international professor, sought-out global trainer, and cultural subject matter expert, my passion has increased for bringing an awareness to a broader audience about the beauty of diverse friendships.
This book ties in so closely with what I believe about the beauty of diverse friendships if we allow ourselves to come out of our comfort zones to truly connect with people heart-to-heart.
When I read this book it really affirms what I believe, that it is really possible to heal racial divides through humility, listening, and a willingness to connect with a person from a diverse background that we would have never thought possible.
We can heal our communities--one friendship at a time.
Everyone wants to do something to improve race relations, but many of us don't know where to start. In Life-Changing Cross-Cultural Friendships, lifelong friends Gary Chapman and Clarence Shuler will show you how. Through important lessons they have learned, you will learn how to begin and grow authentic friendships across racial and ethnic barriers.
Each chapter will guide you toward deeper understanding of what it takes to foster cross-cultural friendships. These powerful lessons include:
How to overcome the fear of developing cross-cultural friendships
How to differentiate true friends from mere acquaintances…
