Here are 100 books that Out Stealing Horses fans have personally recommended if you like
Out Stealing Horses.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Why I chose to write about cold climates: I spent nearly seven years living in the North of Norway in the Sámi reindeer herding village called Guovdageaidnu, or Kautokeino in Norwegian. I cherish my time in that part of the world.
Perhaps one of the most classic Arctic memoirs, this book is Ritter’s account of the year she spent in the remote Arctic wilderness of Spitsbergen in the 1930s.
The nature writing is exquisite, and you can’t help but be transported to the time in place in which she lived, replete with polar bears and long, cold, (and dark) Arctic nights.
"Conjures the rasp of the skin runner, the scent of burning blubber and the rippling iridescence of the Northern Lights..." Sara Wheeler, author of Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica
"Ritter manages to articulate all the terrible beauty and elemental power of a polar winter" Gavin Francis, author of Empire Antarctica
In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least,…
I think there’s a little voyeur in all of us, which is why we love reading memoirs. These stories typically are written by people who’ve wrestled with a life-changing event and emerged on the other side with wisdom to share. Whether they’ve grappled with a heartbreaking loss, a debilitating illness, or an unsettling change in circumstances that left them reeling, authors who temper their truth with humor are the ones who inspire me most. Finding hilarity in the midst of hardship is no easy feat, but it reminds us that humor is a great coping skill.
When my book club read this, we were universally blown away by Augusten Burroughs’ humor. Mining his tumultuous childhood, Burroughs paints a vivid and unforgettable picture of life with the ultimate dysfunctional family.
I went on to read the author’s other memoirs, and while I always enjoy his one-of-a-kind spin on the world, this remains my favorite of his works.
This is the true story of a boy who wanted to grow up with the Brady Bunch, but ended up living with the Addams Family. Augusten Burroughs's mother gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead ringer for Santa Claus and a certifiable lunatic into the bargain. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients and a sinister man living in the garden shed completed the tableau. The perfect squalor of their dilapidated Victorian house, there were no…
In life and writing I’m torn between a desire for solitude and for connection with people. As a young woman I lived in a cottage miles from friends, working from home while my husband was at work, bringing up our first child. No email, no texting, few visitors. It was idyllic, and I was desperately lonely; that’s when I began to write. We moved, I found friends. But still I dream of solitude. Could I handle it now? It’s surely why I found myself writing a novel about a young woman who finds herself suddenly alone in the wild, with no friends – doesn’t everyone write about the things they fear?
I’ve just reread the opening of Our Endless Numbered Days and whoosh – I’m back in the story, with so many questions, prime among them why the narrator’s father – the liar, the north London survivalist – is removed from all photographs but this last, hidden one that she cuts and conceals under her breast.
Fuller’s story is a page-turner in all the best ways, going back in time to follow nine-year-old Peggy and her father as they run from their family home to a remote cabin in a European forest and a life of barely surviving despite all his plans.
Why? Who is the strange man on the mountain? And how does she get back home? Maybe that isolated mountain hut wasn’t so idyllic after all?
'Fuller handles the tension masterfully in this grown-up thriller of a fairytale, full of clues, questions and intrigue.' - The Times
'Extraordinary...From the opening sentence it is gripping' - Sunday Times
1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother's grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change.
Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote…
In the bigoted milieu of 1945, six days after the official end of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, remarkably rises to become Miss America, the first —and to date only— Jewish woman to do so. At stake is a $5,000…
For me, writing fiction is a way of tackling issues of fate and identity through storytelling. I believe we’re each the result of an intersection between personality and history and I’m interested in the way our time and place impacts us and creates a backdrop for our lives. My first novel, The Wayward Moon, is historical fiction set in the 9th-century Middle East. My second novel follows a Jewish family back six generations to Belarus. But no matter what period I’m writing about, the most important thing is always to tell a good story.
Smith is a master at depicting multi-racial families (something she knows all about, as she grew up in one).
Her narratives take up the complex nature of the relationships between parents, children, and siblings, while delving into issues of race, class, politics, infidelity, and self-knowledge. Smith is expert with her use of voice, as she composes character through idiosyncratic styles of language and expression.
Life in this novel is colorful and messy, as it cleverly investigates the impossibility of really knowing those closest to you.
From the acclaimed author of Swing Time, White Teeth and Grand Union, discover a brilliantly funny and deeply moving story about love and family
Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful?
Set between New England and London, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps - and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high…
I sometimes joke that the greatest gift my parents gave me was a troubled childhood. Difficult circumstances taught me about patience and gave me the grit to persevere. My mother’s mood swings and my brother’s violent outbursts turned me into a shrewd observer of people and their unpredictable behavior. That led me to study psychology at Harvard, where so much research seemed to boil down to one goal: giving people context to understand why they act and behave in particular ways. As a journalist who has interviewed thousands of people across dozens of countries, the theme of family – and how we sometimes have to overcome them – remains as salient as ever.
I interviewed Doris Lessing about her memoir Alfred & Emily at her home in London in 2008. She was 88 years old, but was still trying to break free of the “monstrous legacy” of World War II, which had left her father, Alfred, broken and her mother, Emily, “demented.”
Growing up in colonial Rhodesia, she was more comfortable in the bush with wild snakes than she was at home with her troubled parents. Yet she acknowledges what they could have been had history not been so cruel. I’ve tried to apply that same grace to my parents, who met during the Vietnam War and later struggled to care for my severely disabled brother.
Acknowledging my parents’ war wounds, as Lessing did with hers, helped pave the way for forgiveness.
I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.
In this extraordinary book, the 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in…
I sometimes joke that the greatest gift my parents gave me was a troubled childhood. Difficult circumstances taught me about patience and gave me the grit to persevere. My mother’s mood swings and my brother’s violent outbursts turned me into a shrewd observer of people and their unpredictable behavior. That led me to study psychology at Harvard, where so much research seemed to boil down to one goal: giving people context to understand why they act and behave in particular ways. As a journalist who has interviewed thousands of people across dozens of countries, the theme of family – and how we sometimes have to overcome them – remains as salient as ever.
Nigel Slater was already one of the U.K.’s most celebrated chefs when he released his memoir Toast in 2003.
When I read it more than a decade later, it was like diving into a prequel to his many cookbooks, columns, and TV shows that I’d followed for years. The book is hilarious and heartbreaking. It beautifully illustrates how interests and passions can save people from unhappy childhoods and toxic people, like his coarse stepmother and distant father, both of whom are vividly drawn.
As a memoirist, I took inspiration from his narrative arch and how he persevered. The darkness and isolation of my own childhood is what prepared me to embrace the glitz and glamour of Eurovision.
TOAST is top food writer Nigel Slater's eat-and-tell autobiography. Detailing all the food, recipes and cooking that have marked his passage from greedy schoolboy to great food writer. In December 2010 the BBC will bring out a film of Toast starring Helena Bonham-Carter and directed by Lee Hall, who won an oscar nomination for Billy Elliot.
Britain's most popular cook describes his personal culinary odyssey, from dangerous encounters with his mother's weevil-seasoned cakes to being harangued by readers who think he deliberately styles Yorkshire puddings to look like a woman's private parts.
Hilarious, irreverent and mouthwatering, TOAST captures thirty years…
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in…
In life and writing I’m torn between a desire for solitude and for connection with people. As a young woman I lived in a cottage miles from friends, working from home while my husband was at work, bringing up our first child. No email, no texting, few visitors. It was idyllic, and I was desperately lonely; that’s when I began to write. We moved, I found friends. But still I dream of solitude. Could I handle it now? It’s surely why I found myself writing a novel about a young woman who finds herself suddenly alone in the wild, with no friends – doesn’t everyone write about the things they fear?
Neil Ansell is such an honest writer. I came to this book because I loved his other writing about nature and followed him back through time to the five years he spent living alone up a Welsh mountain, seeing no one for weeks on end, exploring and working in the woods and hills around him.
It’s a rich and deep description of place, but more than that, it’s a gradual unfurling of Ansell’s sense of self. In a later book, he writes of that time of prolonged solitude, ‘You slough off the skin of self, all self-awareness, and are left with pure sensation. Nothing has a name; it is only itself.’
Ansell is a slow-burning writer who I trust completely to take me, however slowly, to a new understanding.
Deep Country is Neil Ansell's account of five years spent alone in a hillside cottage in Wales.
'I lived alone in this cottage for five years, summer and winter, with no transport, no phone. This is the story of those five years, where I lived and how I lived. It is the story of what it means to live in a place so remote that you may not see another soul for weeks on end. And it is the story of the hidden places that I came to call my own, and the wild creatures that became my society.'
In life and writing I’m torn between a desire for solitude and for connection with people. As a young woman I lived in a cottage miles from friends, working from home while my husband was at work, bringing up our first child. No email, no texting, few visitors. It was idyllic, and I was desperately lonely; that’s when I began to write. We moved, I found friends. But still I dream of solitude. Could I handle it now? It’s surely why I found myself writing a novel about a young woman who finds herself suddenly alone in the wild, with no friends – doesn’t everyone write about the things they fear?
This is one of the most beautiful novels of solitude I’ve ever read.
Conti immerses us in the strange, shifting world of the Paraná Delta in Argentina where Boga lives on a sandbank until the old man he used to fish with dies. Boga finally has the solitude he has craved for so long and sets off in his small boat.
This wondrous book carries us with Boga floating with the currents and tides, following fish, drifting. Though Boga’s chosen life feels aimless, we’re swept with him in the world of the delta and its people, where every storm, every encounter builds towards an unforgettable climax.
I read it four years ago, and I’m still there in the boat with Boga: it’s a quiet masterpiece.
'Neither the old man nor Boga ever said more than was needed. And yet they understood each other perfectly.' Over the course of a season, Boga and the old man work side by side on the sandbanks of the Parana Delta, cutting reeds to sell to local basketweavers. But when the old man falls sick and dies, Boga abandons himself entirely to the river and the life of solitary drifting he has long yearned for. Echoes of John Berger sound throughout the evocative prose of this great Argentinian writer. A twentieth-century classic, Southeaster is a central work in Haroldo Conti's…
I'm a long-time role-player/gamemaster and reader of SFF, and I've read, created, and played (and written!) a lot of stories.Good stories come from good characters. We all know that. But part of what makes characters good is that they're believable, and to me their believability is inextricable from the worlds they come from. A world-build—setting, weather, technology, magic, science, cultures, and languages—should BE as much of a character as the protagonist(s). While I admit a fond nostalgia for ye olde semi-Euro-medieval setting, I lovea world-build that challenges or surprises me, and I love the characters and stories that come out of those worlds. I hope you do too.
Shapeshifting lizard people. Oh. You want me to say something else?
How about... a world like no other, peopled by all manner of beings (but no humans, which is honestly a delight). The setting is so fantastic, but also so meticulously designed—every settlement and civilization feels organic, fully realized, and unlike anything else. But what about the story—?
Moon doesn't know where he's from, but he knows he's the only shapeshifter he's ever met, and the only person with wings...and worse, he thinkshe's part of the terrible Fell, a species that seems to be invasive and hostile and looks a lot like him.
Then he meets another Raksura, and learns how wrong he's been about everything, including himself.
Nominated for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Series. "Wells...merrily ignores genre conventions as she spins an exciting adventure around an alien hero who anyone can identify with."-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Moon has spent his life hiding what he is - a shape-shifter able to transform himself into a winged creature of flight.
An orphan with only vague memories of his own kind, Moon tries to fit in among the tribes of his river valley, with mixed success. Just as Moon is once again cast out by his adopted tribe, he discovers a shape-shifter like himself . . . someone…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
I am both a writer and a teacher of writing at the university. I have always wanted to be a writer, even though one of my aunts lied to me when I was five that writers would be poor and would die of tuberculosis. I like listening to stories of ordinary people and can learn so much from them. I studied English literature and psychology in my undergraduate studies. I hold a PhD in applied linguistics. I enjoy reading about the subject of philosophy and am fascinated by the theories revolving around ethics. Naturally, I challenge my characters with moral dilemmas so I can write about their struggles.
I love All the Names so much that I read it twice in a gap of ten years. I love it for two main reasons: how ordinary people can be immortalized by powerful writing and what decisions good people make in a moral dilemma. In his Nobel Prize award ceremony speech in Stockholm in 1998, Saramago said that his writings were to transform ordinary people into literary figures in order that he would not forget them.
He did exactly that in this book. An unknown woman was immortalized by the main protagonist, who was portrayed as an unloved, lonely clerk working at the Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths in Lisbon. As I was reading his story, I wondered what turned this unassuming, timid worker into a forger. Given the opportunity, would a good person turn into a tyrant?
José Saramago's mesmerizing, classic narrative about the loneliness of individual lives and the universal need for human connection.
Senhor José is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death that are his daily routine. But one day, when he comes across the records of an anonymous young woman, something happens to him. Obsessed, Senhor José sets off to follow the thread that may lead…
