Here are 66 books that Shout at the Devil fans have personally recommended if you like
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I grew up devouring old Classics Illustrated comics. By the time I was 12, I’d read all the great adventure stories from H. Rider Haggard to Jules Verne. My childhood obsession became my career. My research has taken me down the Silk Road, into the jungles of Mexico and the mountains of the high Atlas, and following opium caravans through the Golden Triangle. I’ve now written more than twenty novels of historical adventure that have been translated into 25 languages.
This prequel to the Sharpe series covers the eponymous hero’s adventures in India at the siege of Seringapatam before the Peninsular War. For me, Cornwell’s books are a perfect mix of history and breathless action. This one even features a cameo from Wellington. If only they’d let me read this in history at school, I might have stayed awake more often. Cornwell pays great attention to historical detail, and if he messes with it, he does it deliberately. There are sumptuous palaces, epic battle scenes, rockets exploding, and people getting eaten by tigers. There’s also the deliciously nasty Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill. What’s not to love?
*The brand new novel, SHARPE'S ASSASSIN, is available to pre-order now*
Sharpe's Tiger is the brilliant beginning of Sharpe's adventures
India, 1799
The citadel of Seringapatam is under siege. Navigating this dangerous kingdom of bejewelled palaces and poverty, Private Richard Sharpe embarks on a rescue mission to save a senior officer from the clutches of the Tippoo of Mysore - and oust the Sultan from his throne.
The fortress of Mysore is considered impregnable, but one of the greatest threats comes from betrayal within the British ranks. And the man to outwit enemies from both sides is Sharpe . .…
They are in some sense books of self-discovery and/or discovery of new worlds. They made me want to travel and explore other cultures. And they also inspired me to write. They helped shape me as a person. I'm now a journalist and author of several books on Japan. I've lived in many different places around the world and find Tokyo Japan to be the best capital to live in. My work describes life in Tokyo and the Japanese culture in general, focusing on sports, crime, and politics. I've written best-sellers in both the US and Japan and been nominated for several prizes. Most recently I was selected winner of a 2023 Henry Chadwick Award.
Shōgun is a historical novel set in 17th-century feudal Japan that is based on the life of an English sailor named Will Adams who is shipwrecked there.
He became a samurai and a confidant of a warlord based on Ieyasu Tokugawa. It is a meticulously researched and richly detailed novel that combines historical events with fictional characters and storylines, dealing with themes of honor and loyalty in a world of samurai and daimyos.
It also explores relationships between Japanese and European traders, highlighting the clash of Western and Eastern values. At over 560,000 words long, it is a spellbinding narrative that offers an encyclopedic exploration of Japanese history, culture, customs, and traditions of Japan. It started a Japan craze in the United States when it was first published.
'Clavell never puts a foot wrong . . . Get it, read it, you'll enjoy it mightily' Daily Mirror
This is James Clavell's tour-de-force; an epic saga of one Pilot-Major John Blackthorne, and his integration into the struggles and strife of feudal Japan. Both entertaining and incisive, SHOGUN is a stunningly dramatic re-creation of a very different world.
Starting with his shipwreck on this most alien of shores, the novel charts Blackthorne's rise from the status of reviled foreigner up to the hights of trusted advisor and eventually, Samurai. All as civil war looms over the fragile country.
I'm a lot of things. I design games. I study literature and theater. I write novels that are messy fusions of literary and genre fiction. I'm endlessly curious. Each of my books starts with when I hear in my head, the voice of a character asking a question. It's always a silly question, and it's always the one that matters more to them than anything else in the world. "Why does being superintelligent make you evil?" became Soon I Will Be Invincible. "What are people who play video games obsessively really looking for?" became You. Answering the question isn't simple, but of course that's where the fun starts.
Flashman does a thing I love, which is to tell the story of another book's least notable character.
Harry Flashman comes from Thomas Hughes's 1850 novel Tom Brown's School Days (the entire basis for the Harry Potter novels), where he's a sub-Draco Malfo figure, a useless bully.
Flashman tells the story of his later years as the Victorian Empire's most cowardly soldier, rattling around British colonies, stumbling through their various atrocities and debacles. I wish the book were even harsher on the Brits, but it's a deeply fun counter-text and a lovely bit of escapism nonetheless.
For George MacDonald Fraser the bully Flashman was easily the most interesting character in Tom Brown's Schooldays, and imaginative speculation as to what might have happened to him after his expulsion from Rugby School for drunkenness ended in 12 volumes of memoirs in which Sir Harry Paget Flashman - self-confessed scoundrel, liar, cheat, thief, coward -'and, oh yes, a toady' - romps his way through decades of nineteenth-century history in a swashbuckling and often hilarious series of military and amorous adventures. In Flashman the youthful hero, armed with a commission in the 11th Dragoons, is shipped to India, woos and…
I grew up devouring old Classics Illustrated comics. By the time I was 12, I’d read all the great adventure stories from H. Rider Haggard to Jules Verne. My childhood obsession became my career. My research has taken me down the Silk Road, into the jungles of Mexico and the mountains of the high Atlas, and following opium caravans through the Golden Triangle. I’ve now written more than twenty novels of historical adventure that have been translated into 25 languages.
The story is set in Afghanistan, just after the end of World War 2, and takes the reader on a journey that would be virtually impossible for a westerner today. I love its authenticity—Michener travelled the country extensively in the sixties—and the combination of brutality and humour make this a unique adventure. There’s also a handful of characters who could have come straight out of Game of Thrones. It’s not one of Michener’s usual house brick size novels—this is less intimidating, more like a roofing tile. I’ve read it many times over the years. For me it remains his best work. A great story combined with a breathtaking insight into the culture, history, and geography of a forbidding and fascinating country.
First published in 1963, James A. Michener’s gripping chronicle of the social and political landscape of Afghanistan is more relevant now than ever.
Combining fact with riveting adventure and intrigue, Michener follows a military man tasked, in the years after World War II, with a dangerous assignment: finding and returning a young American woman living in Afghanistan to her distraught family after she suddenly and mysteriously disappears. A timeless tale of love and emotional drama set against the backdrop of one of the most important countries in the world today, Caravans captures the tension of the postwar period, the sweep…
I am a writer of psychological thrillers. I have a keen interest in psychology and how events and experiences in our childhood shape who we become. When I work on a new book, I always build a detailed profile of my characters’ childhoods – and as I write thrillers, these are often challenging ones with issues like narcissistic parents or siblings, coping with grief, mental illness, or bullying. My plot will always be at least partly driven by the secrets my characters form in their childhood or early life, and so I also really value this depth in the psychological thrillers I read.
This is a story about three brothers. It starts with the funeral of one of them (you don’t know which) and goes back over their lives to unravel the mystery. They are all very different and none of them are likeable, and yet I found myself invested in all of them, trying my hardest to like them despite what they did – to each other and more widely. The book explores some serious issues around mental health and addiction, and I felt Nugent did this incredibly well – with both sympathy and clearly lots of research. The story is also told very skillfully. It uses multiple characters and jumps between timelines but reads very smoothly.
I love great writing and great storytelling too. As a child I liked nothing more than when my father made up bedtime stories for me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate how writers work exceptionally hard not just at getting the plot of a story right but in the words they chose. Being Irish, I love to support the wealth of enviably good writers that seem to spill out from these shores. In each of these books you will find love and loss and laughter. It never fails to make me smile when abroad to see one of these guys on the shelves of the bookshops I visit.
Set over three generations of the one family, this is the story of their fight for survival. What I love here is not just the prose, because there is no one finer than O’Callaghan, but also because it touches on the depopulation of Ireland’s small islands during the famine and the small island to which he refers has a very significant family connection for me. Partly based on O’Callaghan’s own family, Life Sentences tells an epic story of working-class life in Ireland from famine right through to modern-day. It is an unforgettable tale of love, abandonment, and reconciliation.
An unforgettable tale of love, abandonment, hunger and redemption, from a rising star of Irish fiction
'O'Callaghan is one of our finest writers . . . and this is his best work yet' JOHN BANVILLE
*****
At just sixteen, Nancy leaves the small island of Cape Clear for the mainland, the only member of her family to survive the effects of the Great Famine. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she is irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love…
I love great writing and great storytelling too. As a child I liked nothing more than when my father made up bedtime stories for me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate how writers work exceptionally hard not just at getting the plot of a story right but in the words they chose. Being Irish, I love to support the wealth of enviably good writers that seem to spill out from these shores. In each of these books you will find love and loss and laughter. It never fails to make me smile when abroad to see one of these guys on the shelves of the bookshops I visit.
David has lost his wife far too early. A man in mourning, he relives their twenty years together and sees that the ground beneath them had shifted and he had simply not noticed, or was it more that he had chosen not to. The writing here is spectacular and the theme of love and loss so very moving. Set between Ireland and Spain, McMahon captures the sublime and mundane nature of long-term love with exceptional skill. Another reason I like this book is that in my debut novel, my main character Maurice Hannigan, while very different from David, was also a widower, and naturally, the issue of loss figured heavily so I feel a bond to this book that is very special.
'A poignant, gentle and astutely observed novel about marriage and the evolution of love' Sunday Times, NOVELS OF THE YEAR 2020 ________________
Is there such a thing as a perfect marriage?
David thought so. But when his wife Mary Rose dies suddenly he has to think again. In reliving their twenty years together David sees that the ground beneath them had shifted and he simply hadn't noticed. Or had chosen not to.
Figuring out who Mary Rose really was and the secrets that she kept - some of these hidden in plain sight - makes David wonder if he really…
As an experienced teacher I was fascinated by how writing personal stories helped to develop confidence as well as oral and written self-expression at different levels of complexity in children across the primary school age range. This encouraged me to embark on a MA in creative writing where I wrote an extended autobiographical piece that focused on how the relationship between my father and myself affected my childhood. I continued this research into my doctoral studies in Irish autobiography. I explored the history of Irish autobiography, memory, and identity formation. This research provided the context to write my own childhood memoir I Am Patrick.
In 1899, the Irish novelist, Hannah Lynch wrote her memoir Autobiography of a Child. She caused controversy in Ireland and abroad by attempting to represent her childhood up to the age of twelve narrated through the child’s voice, a strategy I adopted but from the ageing child’s point of view where the language and thought process become more complex as I grow older. Her use of adult reflection upon the child’s unstable memory demonstrates an original understanding of the child’s point of view and its representation. Hannah uncovered the inescapable cycle of harsh treatment by her parents within a large family and the physical abuse by nuns at school. Her book reinforces the unreliability of memory for autobiography and helped me to accept that total veracity is not possible.
It is a powerful first-person narrative follows the story of a young Irish girl from her earliest memory to around twelve years of age, tracing the shaping of "the Dublin Angela" into "the English Angela" and ultimately Angela of Lysterby, "the Irish rebel." This tale is told from the perspective of her older self, now "a hopeless wanderer" with youth and optimism behind her. The narrative opens with a startling sketch of Angela's mother, "a handsome, cold-eyed woman, who did not love me," before relating fragmented memories of an idyllic time spent in rural Kildare while "put out to nurse"…
I’m an Irish writer and historian. I always enjoyed history, even in school, and I went on to study it at Maynooth University, receiving a BA. I became a history teacher and eventually head of the history department in Méanscoil Iognáid Rís. I began writing local history articles for the Dunlavin arts festival and the parish magazine. I went back to university and got a first-class honours MA from Maynooth, before being awarded a PhD from DCU. I’ve won the Lord Walter Fitzgerald prize and the Irish Chiefs’ Prize, and my students were winners in the Decade of Centenaries competition. Now retired, I continue to write and lecture about history!
This is an unusual, ambitious, and relevant book, focusing on the Christian values contained within Irish political thought over a period of approximately three hundred years (from the late eighteenth century to approximately the year 2000). Many Irish politicians and patriots included a Christian element in their visions of and for an independent or a self-governed Ireland. Beginning with Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen of the 1790s, this Christian element is traced through Emmet, O’Connell, the Young Irelanders, the Fenians, the Home Rulers, and the leaders of the 1916 rising. The book goes on to trace the Christian vision through the periods of the Irish Revolution, independent Ireland, and the northern troubles of the late twentieth century. Engrossing and insightful, this excellent book provides much food for thought!
Marsden, John. Redemption in Irish History. Dublin, Dominican Publications, 2005. 14 x 21cm. 219 pages. Original softcover. Excellent condition, as new other than inscription to previous owner on half-title page. Redemption in Irish History comes at a critical historical juncture for Irish society and Irish Christianity. Through bringing theology, politics, history and economics into creative dialogue, Redemption in Irish History offers an integrative vision of how Irish society might be nourished from the best of its diverse traditions and thereby truly flourish in our increasingly inter-dependent world. Topics including Pearse and Connolly, history, theology, politics, economics come together in creative…
I am a Wolfhound parent and the author of books about this majestic breed. I have studied everything I could find about the Wolfhound since I first lost my heart to one many years ago, meeting breeders and owners alike to learn everything I could about their temperament and health. I have attended many dog shows and symposiums to further my knowledge of my breed. Having shared my life with this dog, unlike any other, I devour books written by other Wolfhound owners.
This is one of my special favorites. I know Amanda personally and knew and grew to love the real Millie and Bridie.
Arohuani is a magical kingdom ruled by Irish Wolfhound Queen Millie. When a dark force rises in the land, her daughter, Princess Bridie leads an army of wolfhounds to defeat the evil. This is one of my favorite books because it transports the reader to a world ruled by gently, loving hounds. I reread it yearly.
In the magical kingdom Arohanui, ruled by the wise and gentle Wolfhounds of the royal house of Kuri te Aroha, a dark force rises. The queen's daughter Bridie commands the guard of the only passage into the kingdom but as vigilant as she and her ladies are, evil finds its entry into their stronghold. They must forge unexpected alliances with others of their kind, along with the magical and unusual creatures of the kingdom, if they are to defeat this evil.
The Battle for Arohanui will be fierce, from the mountains, across the plains and to the shores of the…
