Here are 88 books that Penance fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m from North East England, an area of the UK under-represented in contemporary fiction. I love reading books from authors who grew up in the same area as me, and I enjoy stories that deal with issues relevant to our communities and capture the unique spirit of the people here. My writing is infused with social and political issues. I’m passionate about stories that explore the world around us and how it impacts people, and all these books do that in very different ways.
This brutal, beautiful book with a powerful, authentic northern voice captured my attention. Set in County Durham, the story follows young Traveller John-John after he is released from a young offender’s institution for a violent crime and tries to turn his life around. Despite his good intentions, he is soon caught up in a fight with local drug dealers.
I loved this book because it took an unflinching look at a community not often depicted in contemporary fiction and featured a complex, conflicted character (who loves dogs) who struggles to escape his past.
The book is by an author I admire. He writes gritty, dark northern fiction that focuses on the fringes of society. Originally published by independent presses, he has gone on to be very successful, and as an independent northern author, I would love to emulate that career trajectory.
WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE
An unflinching portrait of contemporary Traveller culture by the award-winning author of The Gallows Pole
John-John wants to escape his past. But the legacy of brutality left by his boxer father, King of the Gypsies, Mac Wisdom, overshadows his life. His new job as an ice cream man should offer freedom, but instead pulls him into the dark recesses of a northern town where his family name is mud. When he attempts to trade prejudice and parole officers for the solace of the rural landscape, Mac's bloody downfall threatens John-John's very survival.
I’m from North East England, an area of the UK under-represented in contemporary fiction. I love reading books from authors who grew up in the same area as me, and I enjoy stories that deal with issues relevant to our communities and capture the unique spirit of the people here. My writing is infused with social and political issues. I’m passionate about stories that explore the world around us and how it impacts people, and all these books do that in very different ways.
Written by a disabled, northern author, this magical middle-grade novel has such a warm, compassionate voice, and I loved how it reflected the story’s locations, which are inspired by real places in North East England.
The story is full of magic and features a cast of disabled children who live in a lighthouse by the sea and get caught up in an adventure. I think it’s important for all kids to see themselves in fiction, and this book does a wonderful job of improving disability representation.
Although it’s aimed at children, there’s plenty for adults to enjoy, and I thought this was a beautiful book full of illustrations by a local artist, which helped me to picture the characters and setting.
"A charming tale of found families and mermaids, with my favourite kind of hero at its heart" - Elle McNicoll, award-winning author of A Kind of Spark
A stunning literary adventure from an incredible debut talent, perfect for fans of Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Cerrie Burnell and Katherine Rundell.
I was Haven Point's first Wreckling, but I certainly wasn't the last. There are forty-two of us now, not including the mermaids. When you're a Wreckling, you mainly spend your days squabbling, eating and planning adventures. Oh, and Wrecklings also carry out wreckings, which is how we got our name . .…
I’m from North East England, an area of the UK under-represented in contemporary fiction. I love reading books from authors who grew up in the same area as me, and I enjoy stories that deal with issues relevant to our communities and capture the unique spirit of the people here. My writing is infused with social and political issues. I’m passionate about stories that explore the world around us and how it impacts people, and all these books do that in very different ways.
I love literary fiction and stunning prose, and this book is full of gorgeous sentences that shine off the page. It deals with class issues and finding your own place in the world.
I’m from a working-class, deprived town close to the one featured in this novel. I related to some of the character’s concerns and struggles, particularly regarding the lack of opportunity in North East England.
"Andrews’s writing is transportingly voluptuous, conjuring tastes and smells and sounds like her literary godmother, Edna O’Brien . . . What makes her novel sing is its universal themes: how a young woman tries to make sense of her world, and how she grows up." –Penelope Green, The New York Times Book Review
This “luminous” (The Observer) feminist coming-of-age novel captures in sensuous, blistering prose the richness and imperfection of the bond between a daughter and her mother
It begins with our bodies . . . Safe together in the violet dark…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I’m from North East England, an area of the UK under-represented in contemporary fiction. I love reading books from authors who grew up in the same area as me, and I enjoy stories that deal with issues relevant to our communities and capture the unique spirit of the people here. My writing is infused with social and political issues. I’m passionate about stories that explore the world around us and how it impacts people, and all these books do that in very different ways.
I read this book because it’s set in my hometown, which doesn’t appear often in fiction. It’s full of places I know, and I enjoyed the quirky style and the way the story is told from some unusual perspectives.
Apples is about Adam and Eve, two different teens growing up on a council estate in Middlesbrough, dealing with family troubles and relationships. It’s fast-paced, dark, and full of energy, and it has a fantastic opening line. It’s a book I come back to regularly.
'We got a McDonald's the night my mam got lung cancer.'
As a distraction from sleazy male admirers, spiteful classmates and her mother's cancer, Eve's eyes are opened to a multicolour life of one night stands, drug fuelled discos and endless varieties of cheap plonk. She barely has time to notice Adam. Adam, however, notices Eve. Whilst contending with sexual frustration, a violent father and increasingly compulsive behaviour, is he too busy reading Razzle in his bedroom to make his move?
Narrated alternately by Adam and Eve, alongside a cast of teenage delinquents, perverts and butterflies, Apples is an exploration…
Ever since I was a little kid, I've loved scary stories. But more than the thrill of being afraid, I was drawn to the notion of befriending the ghosts, of making the frightening familiar, of finding meaning and comfort in the horrific. Maybe that's why I'm now a queer old goth, and maybe it's why my favourite themes to both read and write are those of identity, belonging as an outsider, and the 'monstrous' elevated to the beautiful.
I read this tiny collection of stories after chatting to the author on social media, and it's what got me reading again after two years of barely reading a thing.
Nostalgic, atmospheric, and vivid, these stories are sometimes stomach-churningly brutal. Even though a lot of them deal with the supernatural, it's the most mundane of situations that are the most anxiety-inducing. They took me right back to my own Northern childhood, with all the mystery, boredom, wonder, and terror it entailed. A very emotional collection with as much heart as heartbreak, wrapped up in chiming prose.
Welcome to The Repository of Lost Souls. A place for tales – and the people who walk within them – to step inside and rest their weary heads. Meet the vengeful mermaid, the weary ghost. The sibling vampire and the curious child. The family damaged by war. Join the final journey of the Bone Queen.Follow the hare.The Repository of Lost Souls is the debut short story collection of Jane Roberts-Morpeth. Twelve short stories of birth, life, death and beyond, that draw on personal experience and the North East of England, where she lives. Some have a ghostly or paranormal element…
As a practicing Hedge Witch, I’m fascinated by the marriage of science and the mystical. Now, I’m alchemizing confidence, coherence, and clarity for soulful writers to pursue the books of their dreams. I am the author, illustrator, and designer of Mama Bear Says™ and the Book Witch of planners and journals for your sacred words. I live at the edge of the wild woods and love to graze on wild berries, sit by a cozy hearth, and watch the magic of the animals who meander through these lands. The magic of the natural world and the healing power of Mother Earth sits as a priority in my life. These are the books on my magickal bookshelf.
If you are witch-curious or trying to reclaim the word from the long-nosed, wart-faced, evil images that have been forced upon us by a misunderstanding society, Witch is a fun read, filled with wit and wisdom for beginning witches. “Witch” is a powerful woman, a wise healer, who lives with the cycles of Mother Earth. This book helps women remember, reconnect, and reclaim the word “witch” and the power that comes with it.
Reclaim your inner witch with the magical rituals, divination tools, spells and ancient wisdom in this revolutionary book.
A witch is a woman in her power. She's wise, a healer, someone who is aligned with the cycles of Mother Nature and the phases of the Moon. Yet for so long, the word 'witch' has had negative connotations - being used as an insult, a slur and to perpetuate fear. In this book, third generation hereditary witch Lisa Lister explains the history behind witchcraft, why in past centuries the word 'witch' has led women to be tortured, drowned and burned at…
Riley Masterson has moved to Greenbrier, SC, anxious to escape the chaos that has overwhelmed her life.
Questioned in a murder in Alabama, she has spent eighteen months under suspicion by a sheriff’s office, unable to make an arrest. But things in gentrifying Greenbrier are not as they seem. As…
I am an Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I taught history for many years at several UK universities, and I was the Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge. I am the author of six books, including Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches and Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction. His latest book, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World, will be published in November by Penguin. I live in Cambridge, England, and I am married with three children.
Originally published in 1970, this was another foundational text for me and other witchcraft scholars of my generation.
It grew out of Macfarlane’s doctoral thesis focusing on Essex, which had been supervised by Keith Thomas, whose own great book, Religion and the Decline of Magic (much of which dealt with witches), came out the following year. Even then, the historian Macfarlane was on his way to becoming an anthropologist – a transition visible on every page of this fascinating book.
But its overriding character is that of a work of sociology. Social science models helped to impose interpretative order on the kind of archival information dug up by C. L’Estange Ewen, and connected a rise in witchcraft accusations to a number of strains in late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English life, especially economic strains.
Although their interpretations differ in substance and emphasis, Macfarlane and Thomas are still associated with a paradigm…
This is a classic regional and comparative study of early modern witchcraft. The history of witchcraft continues to attract attention with its emotive and contentious debates. The methodology and conclusions of this book have impacted not only on witchcraft studies but the entire approach to social and cultural history with its quantitative and anthropological approach. The book provides an important case study on Essex as well as drawing comparisons with other regions of early modern England. The second edition of this classic work adds a new historiographical introduction, placing the book in context today.
I prefer to write historical fiction because so many fascinating stories have already happened in the past, and these tales are filled with real-life characters with rich backstories and personalities. I try to find the best historical figures and scenarios I can through exhaustive research and then stitch them together into thrillers that mesh seamlessly with the history I researched. My books are written to educate and entertain, and nothing makes me prouder than when readers follow the breadcrumb trails I leave behind for further research. I hope you enjoy the hunt!
Of all the books I consulted while writing my own, this is the one that surprised me the most and that I most frequently revisit. It is a collection of historical documents on witchcraft in the Western world from the Roman Empire to the eighteenth century, and I cannot recommend a better book on the subject. It's fascinating, painstakingly researched, instantly accessible to any reader, and either hilarious or horrifying, depending on how you pick your poison! There is a particularly interesting document that details how one sells their soul to the Devil which I was delighted to see referenced in Robert Egger's 2015 film The VVitch. He must have either read this book or consulted that same document during his research, which was clearly to his benefit.
The Witchcraft Sourcebook, now in its second edition, is a fascinating collection of documents that illustrates the development of ideas about witchcraft from ancient times to the eighteenth century. Many of the sources come from the period between 1400 and 1750, when more than 100,000 people - most of them women - were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe and colonial America. During these years the prominent stereotype of the witch as an evil magician and servant of Satan emerged. Catholics and Protestants alike feared that the Devil and his human confederates were destroying Christian society.
I’ve always loved the darker side of fantasy. While heroes, knights, and handsome kings can occasionally be enjoyable, I want to know the other characters who have suffered, hurt, lost, grieved, and been hardened by grim circumstances and cruel fate. Those characters demonstrate the resilience of human nature and how goodness truly can exist even in the harshest environment. I love using this darkness in my own novels to show that even the tiniest spark can shine immensely bright—a true testament to the indefatigability of our spirits.
I love the cunning, wit, and charm of the one-and-only Vlad Taltos. Though he’s an assassin, he’s never cruel or wicked; he merely does what he needs to appease the “mafia-feeling” organization he works for. He’s almost more a swashbuckling rogue than a killer.
In his interactions with his familiar, Loiosh, you see his more nuanced side, the morality beneath the magic and swordplay. And few fantasy worlds I’ve ever visited have been as rich and colorful as those created in the Vlad Taltos series.
The first three fantastical adventures of assassin Vlad Taltos—now in one volume.
A welcome addition to any fantasy fan's library, The Book of Jhereg follows the antics of the wise-cracking Vlad Taltos and his dragon-like companion through their first three adventures—Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla.
There are many ways for a young man with quick wits and a quick sword to advance in the world. Vlad Taltos chose the route of assassin. From his rookie days to his selfless feats of heroism, the dauntless Vlad will hold readers spellbound—and The Book of Jhereg will take its place among the classic compilations…
After solving her first case, private eye Siobhan O’Brien is hired by Phillip Ahn, an octogenarian billionaire with his own personal island in the Pacific Northwest. Ahn, a genius in artificial intelligence, swears that Duke, his youngest child and only son, is an impostor. Is Ahn crazy, or is Duke…
As you may notice, in my own stories, I like to find the magic in everyday things and, to a greater or lesser extent, each of the books I have chosen to write about here, do that. Having worked with children as a Rainbow Guide Leader, taught children, for a brief spell, abroad, I know children and their intelligence, understanding, and kindness, amongst other things, can often be underestimated. The books I chose, show how children (girls in particular) win the day by using their intelligence, skills, and talents. Celebrating girls and their achievements is increasingly important in improving their rights and access to opportunities in life.
How do you survive your school days, but with your own set of ‘magic spells’ and a good friend or two to help you along the way?
The humour in Jill Murphy’s stories is second to none and many children may recognise characters within the story, in people they know.
This book also shows that it is the girl who is honest and has integrity who ‘wins the day’ and ‘saves the day’: While perhaps an unlikely heroine, since she always appears to be getting into trouble (not always through any fault of her own) thinking on your feet, honesty and integrity, would probably be just a few of the heroine’s key character traits/teaching points and never giving up, even if you are considered to be ‘The Worst Witch’ in the school...
'Millions of young readers have fallen under the spell of Jill Murphy's Worst Witch' - Sunday Express
Hold on to your broomstick for magical mayhem with Jill Murphy's much-loved classic The Worst Witch- the original story of life at a magical boarding school.
Mildred Hubble is a trainee at Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches, but she's making an awful mess of it.
She keeps getting her spells wrong and crashing her broomstick. And when she turns Ethel, the teacher's pet into her worst enemy, chaos ensues...
Read the rest of Mildred's (mis)adventures: The Worst Witch, A Bad Spell for the…
