Here are 97 books that Small Things Like These fans have personally recommended if you like
Small Things Like These.
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In addition to writing novels, I’m also a playwright. Whatever form I work in, I’m drawn to character, drama, and emotion. I aspire to write literary page-turners that feel as rich and complicated as real life. Also, I want the endings of my books to slay readers and break their hearts. Of course, when I say that, I’m not necessarily speaking of sorrow; sometimes your heart breaks from expanding, from a surfeit of feeling. Your heart breaks only to grow larger.
This literary rendering of Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century comprises fifteen stories. Whenever I read them, I can feel Joyce’s adoration for this city—and the last story, "The Dead," is glorious.
The final line always slays me: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”
A definitive edition of perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language
James Joyce's Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of "dear dirty Dublin" at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as "Araby," "Grace," and "The Dead," delve into the heart of the city of Joyce's birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners' speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound, and this edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from…
The stories I’ve loved the most in my life have all been about the richness of human relationships, told by a memorable narrator who can find humor and hope in almost everything, no matter how screwed up. Whether it’s Charles Dickens poking fun at his contemporaries in Victorian England or Armistead Maupin sending up friendship and love in San Francisco in the 1980s, I’m a sucker for well-told, convoluted, and funny tales about people who find life with other human beings difficult, but still somehow manage to laugh about it and keep on going. As the author of six novels myself, these are the kinds of stories I always try to tell.
This is a peculiar and marvelous book about birth families, adopted families, and “found” families, and how each of these can be equally screwed up.
Starting in Ireland in the 1940s, the story is peppered with sharp, clever dialog and vivid, fully-human characters. I love how the narrator struggles with his own heart for decades, unable to decide what he wants, who he loves, what’s right, what’s wrong, etc.—in other words, all the stuff I haven’t figured out yet myself.
Coincidence also plays a huge role in this book, basically making an ass of everyone, which I find oddly comforting since it reminds me that part of being human is having very little control over my own life. Painfully funny and brilliant from cover to cover.
'Compelling and satisfying... At times, incredibly funny, at others, heartrending' Sarah Winman, author of When God Was a Rabbit
Forced to flee the scandal brewing in her hometown, Catherine Goggin finds herself pregnant and alone, in search of a new life at just sixteen. She knows she has no choice but to believe that the nun she entrusts her child to will find him a better life.
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery, or so his parents are constantly reminding him. Adopted as a baby, he's never quite felt at home with the family that treats him more as…
Aged eighteen and living in London, my mother fell in love with an older man and was soon pregnant. Fearful of repercussions, she kept the pregnancy secret from her Catholic parents and continued to keep this secret for many years. This was something I’d always known, but it was only recently that I decided to investigate what happened to so many girls who went to the wrong people for help. What I found was devastating, and it gave me a greater understanding of the choices my mother made. I'm a writer who often draws on autobiographic material for my novels, plays, and stories. I like to feel a subject is truly mine.
I came across this memoir while researching Irish mother and baby homes for my own novel. June Goulding was a young midwife in the 1950s when she was hired by the Sacred Heart Convent in Cork. Here she found girls, some as young as 13, punished for the sin of being pregnant, forced to work, tarring roads, scrubbing floors, and rearing their children until they were handed over for adoption – in exchange for a donation to the church – often without their consent. Thirty years later, haunted by what she was party to, Goulding tells the story of how she tried to relieve the suffering of these unfortunate women.
'I promised that I would one day write a book and tell the world about the home for unmarried mothers. I have at last kept my promise.'
In Ireland, 1951, the young June Goulding took up a position as midwife in a home for unmarried mothers run by the Sacred Heart nuns. What she witnessed there was to haunt her for the next fifty years. It was a place of secrets, lies and cruelty. A place where women picked grass by hand and tarred roads whilst heavily pregnant. Where they were denied any contact with the outside world; denied basic…
Secrets, misunderstandings, and a plethora of family conflicts abound in this historical novel set along the Brazos River in antebellum Washington County, East Texas.
It is a compelling story of two neighboring plantation families and a few of the enslaved people who serve them. These two plantations are a microcosm…
Aged eighteen and living in London, my mother fell in love with an older man and was soon pregnant. Fearful of repercussions, she kept the pregnancy secret from her Catholic parents and continued to keep this secret for many years. This was something I’d always known, but it was only recently that I decided to investigate what happened to so many girls who went to the wrong people for help. What I found was devastating, and it gave me a greater understanding of the choices my mother made. I'm a writer who often draws on autobiographic material for my novels, plays, and stories. I like to feel a subject is truly mine.
I was so struck by this candid memoir from Angela Patrick about what happened to her when she became pregnant in the early sixties at nineteen that it made me consider my mother’s lucky escape when the same thing happened to her. Both were Catholic and unmarried, but Patrick, unlike my mother, turned to her family for help and was exiled to a mother and baby home. It’s a tale of shame and sorrow, coldness and cruelty – and the scars that remain when a baby is given up.
In 1963, Angela Brown was 19, enjoying her first job working in the City of London, when her life turned upside down. A brief fling with a charismatic charmer left her pregnant, unmarried and facing a stark future. Not yet 21, she was still under the governance of her parents, strict Catholics who insisted she have the baby in secret and then put it up for adoption.
Forced to leave her job and her family, Angela was sent to a convent in Essex for her 'confinement'. Run like a Victorian workhouse, she was vilified by the nuns for her 'wickedness'.…
Like many women my age, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the possibly discordant relationship between the things I love doing—writing, reading, spending time in solitude with stories and ideas—and the expectation of motherhood. For many of us, the prospect of parenthood can feel less like a choice than a cultural imperative, and it can be difficult to reconcile brain and body, self and society. The novels on this list feature razor-sharp, highly educated female protagonists who experience, recall, or imagine pregnancy and motherhood in complicated ways. Their minds and bodies are sometimes in sync, sometimes painfully at odds, but always fascinating to behold.
This 1965 novel by English author Margaret Drabble follows protagonist and PhD student Rosamund as she becomes a single mother.
Educated, upper-middle-class Rosamund narrates with a quintessentially British and—for me—highly enjoyable blend of primness and humor. Fascinatingly and somewhat frustratingly, Rosamund keeps her pregnancy a secret from her daughter Octavia’s father, even after Octavia is born. She’s like a strange English Virgin Mary who studies Elizabethan sonnets and really doesn’t want to “put anyone out”.
Her story also offers an interesting glimpse into class issues in 1960s London and the way that experiences of pregnancy and motherhood can both transcend and accentuate class divisions.
A celebration of the drama and intensity of the mother-child relationship, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.
It is the Swinging Sixties, and Rosamund Stacey is young and inexperienced at a time when sexual liberation is well on its way. She conceals her ignorance beneath a show of independence, and becomes pregnant as a result of a one night stand. Although single parenthood is still not socially acceptable, she chooses to have the baby rather than to seek an illegal abortion, and finds her life transformed by motherhood.
'Rosamund is marvellous, a true Drabble heroine . .…
I’ve chosen to recommend fiction by Irish women, because I’m a female Irish writer myself. My own books are mostly for children, but, hey, I’m an adult. As well as a writer I am a retired publisher, a not-quite-retired editor, and an occasional translator, so I tend to engage very closely – OK, obsessively – with text. I have a pretty serious visual impairment, so most of my ‘reading’ is through the medium of audiobooks. I’m never sure if that influences my taste in reading. Anyway, these are the books I’ve liked recently, and hope you do too.
A few years ago, I spent a week in the hospital recovering from surgery. When my husband came to visit, I would fill his ears with tragic and/or hilarious tales of my ward-mates. He kept saying, “Write it down. This is novel material.” He was right. But I didn’t.
Looks like Elaine Feeney did. Her novel, mostly set in a hospital ward, is uproariously funny as well as deeply sad and very wise.
I grew up near Elaine’s home town in east Galway. So, though I don’t know her, I do know the society she is writing about. And she gets it spot on!
WINNER OF THE KATE O'BRIEN AWARD 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2020 AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT 2020
'Riveting... I was exhilarated reading this' Roddy Doyle
Sinead Hynes is a tough, driven, funny young property developer with a terrifying secret.
No-one knows it: not her fellow patients in a failing hospital, and certainly not her family. She has confided only in Google and a shiny magpie.
But she can't go on like this, tirelessly trying to outstrip her past and in mortal fear of her future. Across the…
My book is fantastical historical fiction about two characters who're wrestling with the monstrosity of their grief.
It takes you into London high society, where Ambrose tries to forget about how much he misses Bennett and how much he dreads becoming as cold as their Grandfather. It takes you to…
I’ve chosen to recommend fiction by Irish women, because I’m a female Irish writer myself. My own books are mostly for children, but, hey, I’m an adult. As well as a writer I am a retired publisher, a not-quite-retired editor, and an occasional translator, so I tend to engage very closely – OK, obsessively – with text. I have a pretty serious visual impairment, so most of my ‘reading’ is through the medium of audiobooks. I’m never sure if that influences my taste in reading. Anyway, these are the books I’ve liked recently, and hope you do too.
My husband (who is a woodturner) convenes a writing group for people who write about craft. I think that group should read this novel, set in a seventh-century monastic community, pretty well on a very large rock (Skellig Michael), for its detailed accounts of living on next to nothing and yet engaging, almost unaware, in meticulous daily craftsmanship.
That isn’t what the book is about, exactly: it’s mostly about an extreme and obsessively self-denying way of life; it’s about how even a tiny handful of men fall into master and underling roles; it’s about how fear of the unknown leads to the creation of monsters in people’s minds, which in turn leads to tragedy. A hard book, in many senses. But amazing.
In this beautiful story of adventure and survival from the New York Times bestselling author of Room, three men vow to leave the world behind them as they set out in a small boat for an island their leader has seen in a dream, with only faith to guide them.
In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks—young Trian and old Cormac—he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the…
I’ve chosen to recommend fiction by Irish women, because I’m a female Irish writer myself. My own books are mostly for children, but, hey, I’m an adult. As well as a writer I am a retired publisher, a not-quite-retired editor, and an occasional translator, so I tend to engage very closely – OK, obsessively – with text. I have a pretty serious visual impairment, so most of my ‘reading’ is through the medium of audiobooks. I’m never sure if that influences my taste in reading. Anyway, these are the books I’ve liked recently, and hope you do too.
Let’s be clear: the title is ironic. This is a love story, told mostly in retrospect. Well, it’s not love exactly. It’s sex. Or a kind of twisted idea of romance. It’s attraction anyway, not quite obsessive, but close. And it’s mysterious. Who are these people? How do they connect to each other? How do they know each other? Do they even like each other? Why/why not?
The answers, if readers can identify them, are not reassuring. And yet... I loved this book, read it twice, straight off. It’s partly the descriptions of the physical world – natural and constructed – always partial, never conclusive, that are so attractive to read.
'A beautiful, wry love story' David Nicholls, author of ONE DAY
'I love this woman's writing. Golden sentences' Diana Evans, author of ORDINARY PEOPLE
'One of the year's most beautifully written books, THIS HAPPY traces the path to womanhood of Alannah from disastrous affair to no-less-comfortable marriage and beyond' The i, Best Books of 2020 So Far
'If you loved Sally Rooney's NORMAL PEOPLE, read this novel ... Darkly romantic ... Reminiscent of Eimear McBride's lyrical Joycean sentences' Vogue
'The best novel I have read all year' Sunday Business Post
I’ve chosen to recommend fiction by Irish women, because I’m a female Irish writer myself. My own books are mostly for children, but, hey, I’m an adult. As well as a writer I am a retired publisher, a not-quite-retired editor, and an occasional translator, so I tend to engage very closely – OK, obsessively – with text. I have a pretty serious visual impairment, so most of my ‘reading’ is through the medium of audiobooks. I’m never sure if that influences my taste in reading. Anyway, these are the books I’ve liked recently, and hope you do too.
Theoretically for Young Adults (meaning older teenagers), this one is also for adults of any age. It’s about exclusion, anxiety, depression, suicide, all matters that have touched my own family with tragedy,
Helena Close knows about mental illness and what it feels like, and she describes it in visceral detail. But she is a sharp and funny writer, and she takes no prisoners when it comes to the false assurances of a certain kind of charlatan ‘counsellor’.
The heroine of this book seems set to drown in sorrow, but she learns, slowly and with help, how to swim up out of pain and fear towards the light. So uplifting!
Saoirse (18) can't wait to leave school - but just before the Leaving Cert her ex-boyfriend dies by suicide. Everyone blames Saoirse - even Saoirse herself, who cheated on him with his best friend. She is shunned by her schoolmates and suffers unbearable levels of anxiety.
Everything becomes too much, and on the night of the school Debs, Saoirse throws herself into the river - and wakes up in a psychiatric hospital. Slowly, painfully, with the support of a friendly hospital cleaner, her old best friend, her kind and hilarious grandmother, and even her irritating sister, Saoirse regains her sense…
Emmitt’s plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of purchasing their dream home. Disappointed, he’s surprised to discover her subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo.
In his search for a meaningful life in Japan, and after quitting his job, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law…
I was drawn to writing family drama because complex family dynamics are endlessly fascinating to me. I’m an adopted person whose parents went on to divorce and remarry. I have two teenagers of my own and I’ve found that there are a multitude of choices we have to make as parents, and sometimes dilemmas don’t have a clear answer. If we get it wrong, the effects on the people we love can be devastating. Love within families can be tricky. The gap between what we want and what we need can be vast. There’s so much to explore in family dramas!
Secrets and lies always keep me turning the pages and this book has those in spades.
I love that Fisher writes about the kind of women we all know. Her characters are truly relatable and the dilemma of whether Maggie should expose her husband’s lies or protect the people she loves is an agonising one.
There’s so much humour in Fisher’s writing. I love a book that brings out laughter and tears.
In this heart-wrenching, emotionally gripping USA Today bestseller, a woman with a seemingly perfect life finds a mysterious letter that reveals dark secrets from the past that threaten to destroy her family.
Lara's life looks perfect on the surface -- gorgeous doting husband, Massimo; sweet little son, Sandro; and the perfect home. But Lara knows something about Massimo. Something she can't tell anyone else, or everything he has worked so hard for will be destroyed: his job, their reputation, their son. This secret is keeping Lara a prisoner in her marriage.
Maggie is married to Massimo's brother, Nico, and lives…
