Here are 100 books that The Beach fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have been a keen walker/hiker/backpacker since I was five when my parents named a local footpath James’s Path. Almost fifty years later, I have walked all over the UK and further afield in the Pyrenees and the Alps, Nepal, and the Antipodes. Walking for me is both a means to an end—to reach mountaineering routes and as exercise—and as an end in itself. Days spent walking can be reflective, social, demanding, and memorable. I always take a book, even if it's a day walk, and two or three if it’s a multiday trip. I hope you’re as energized and stimulated by my suggestions as I’ve been.
A multi-day walking trip requires a page-turning thriller. It is one of the most intriguing mysteries I’ve ever read. It dragged me into another world and then deeper into a story within a story. Lying in uncomfortable beds in noisy hostels while backpacking in Australia, I was beguiled and forgot my own reality.
Years later, this book stayed with me and influenced my debut novel despite, I think, never really understanding it. However, writing this review has made me start reading it again. I’m already baffled, but I'm hooked!
The Magus is the story of Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching assignment on a remote Greek island. There his friendship with a local millionaire evolves into a deadly game, one in which reality and fantasy are deliberately manipulated, and Nicholas must fight for his sanity and his very survival.
I have always believed that everyone has a story to tell. I have connected to people throughout my life because I chose to sit, listen, and share stories. I do this in my own neighborhood and on my travels worldwide. I do it with people I don’t have anything in common with and people I think I might not like. Every time, without exception, I learn something. Often, I am inspired. These experiences have tested and grown my compassion, empathy, kindness, and understanding capacity. I suppose this is why I love reading. It’s like meeting strangers and sharing stories.
I loved Jeanette Walls honest and raw telling of her father’s mental illness and her mother’s unorthodox mothering and the impact they both had on her childhood and adulthood. People with mental illness are often portrayed as villains with no redeeming qualities.
Still, Walls finds the bits and pieces of her father that are beautiful, made her childhood sometimes magical, and led to her own successful career and life.
Now a major motion picture starring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson.
This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist's journey from the deserted and dusty mining towns of the American Southwest, to an antique filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, 'brilliant' but alcoholic parents.
At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilisation her parents sought to escape, Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the 'mundane,…
I've penned 11 novels and numerous essays, and if there's one thread that ties them all together, it's rawness. I gravitate towards reading books and watching films where writers peel back the layers of their lives, exposing past wounds and delving into what they've learned from them. As an entrepreneur with a master's degree in marketing, I’ve found that this kind of vulnerability is not only compelling but essential in any form of storytelling. Whether I’m crafting a narrative for a new startup or reflecting on my own experiences for a novel, it’s this unfiltered honesty that resonates deeply with audiences.
Westover’s memoir is a fascinating exploration of the clash between ignorance and enlightenment, with a plot twist that involves her eventually realizing she was raised in a real-life survivalist cult. Her journey from a sheltered, isolated upbringing to earning a PhD is nothing short of extraordinary.
But what really hooked me was her biting wit and the way she grapples with the contradictions of loving a family that’s as endearing as they are exasperating. It’s like watching someone untangle a lifetime’s worth of emotional knots, one revelation at a time, and somehow finding humor in the most unexpected places.
Selected as a book of the year by AMAZON, THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, NEW YORK TIMES, ECONOMIST, NEW STATESMAN, VOGUE, IRISH TIMES, IRISH EXAMINER and RED MAGAZINE
'One of the best books I have ever read . . . unbelievably moving' Elizabeth Day 'An extraordinary story, beautifully told' Louise O'Neill 'A memoir to stand alongside the classics . . . compelling and joyous' Sunday Times
Tara Westover grew up preparing for the end of the world. She was never put in school, never taken to the doctor. She did not even have a birth certificate…
When I was twelve years old, my picture appeared in my hometown newspaper. I was holding a huge stack of books from the library, a week’s reading. All science fiction. I’ve read voraciously for the past seventy years—though much more widely as an adult. I’ve also had a life founding several small companies and writing twenty books. But I’ve continued to read science fiction, and, increasingly, dystopian novels. Why? Because, as a history buff, I think about the big trends that shape our lives. I see clearly that climate change, breakthroughs in technology, and unstable politics threaten our children’s future. I want to understand how these trends might play out—for better or for worse.
Climate change aside, what scares me the most about technology today is the capacity for bioengineering to run amok.
What happens when scientists monkey around with deadly viruses—and one escapes from the lab? What if some rogue researcher creates an entirely new lifeform that proves toxic to humans? Or some experimental microbe—an effort to save the world’s butterflies, for instance—proves to kill off bees instead?
This novel, which won major awards, depicts a frightening future world wrought by bioengineering. And you wouldn’t want to live there anymore than I do.
WINNER OF THE HUGO, NEBULA, LOCUS, JOHN W. CAMPBELL AND COMPTON CROOK AWARDS
The Windup Girl is the ground-breaking and visionary modern classic that swept the board for every major science fiction award it its year of publication.
Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's calorie representative in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, he combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs long thought to be extinct. There he meets the windup girl - the beautiful and enigmatic Emiko - now abandoned to the slums. She is one of the New People, bred to suit the whims of…
Since I was a little boy, long before I dreamed of becoming a Daoist monk, I sensed that there was far more beneath the pond of life than on the surface. I remember feeling jealous of a little turtle I saw in the Connecticut River. Why couldn’t I pop out of my world and see what was happening above, but he could? My spiritual questing led me to Asia and also deep into myself. Writing magical realism does not feel like engaging a fantasy; it feels like I can finally share how the world really is.
I cannot forget this book, even though, at times, I am desperate to do so. Ishiguro, one of my chosen authors and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is beyond masterful in the unique way he portrays quotidian events before a horror that is almost theatrical in its grotesquerie.
I was deeply disturbed while reading it, yet I could not put it down. Years later, I continue to find it a source of disquiet regarding where our culture/society is going and how we must stop a very particular trend. The trend is increasingly toward science and technology that utterly and completely disregards human feelings, individual rights, and the spiritual qualities of all sentient beings.
It’s simply an unforgettable story about something unfolding in an all-too-real fashion out here in the world outside the author’s mind.
One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense…
Having been born in Fiji and lived in Cyprus, Austria, and Nigeria, I have always had a strong sense of wanderlust and a keen eye for my surroundings – both natural and man-made. I’ve always been open to "what might happen next," which makes sense as to why I became a professional storyteller – an actor, writer, and director. I am thrilled by not knowing what lies ahead, and I’ve always felt there is possible adventure at every turn in life, which is why I am so fond of the evocative and thrilling books I have listed.
Set in the fictitious West African country of Kinjanja, the hapless exploits of an ill-fated British High Commission delegate in the wrong place at the wrong time left me exhausted from laughing out loud so hard.
It’s a sliding-door adventure thriller about the comic yet tragic downfall of a good man trying to do his best in the face of unrelenting adversity. I read it while living in Nigeria (Kinjanja is a cross between Ghana and Nigeria) and found it to be the perfect fusion of exotic location and sense of place, combined with a headlong descent into mayhem and madness.
A funny first novel about the misadventures surrounding Morgan Leafy, a young, overweight, oversexed British diplomat in West Africa. The book won the 1981 Whitbread Literary Award and the 1982 Somerset Maugham Award.
After retiring from a career in climate science, I reinvented myself as an English teacher, a yoga instructor, and a writer. I write personal essays about my life experiences, in particular my time teaching in Thailand. Before I traveled to Thailand, while I was there, and when I returned home to the US, I devoured every book I could find that could help me make sense of Thai culture and manage as a farang (foreigner, Westerner) in the Land of Smiles. Here are my five picks for helping other farangs understand Thailand.
Sightseeing is a contemporary short story collection that would appeal to any reader who appreciates great writing, beautiful imagery, finely sketched characters, and sensitive exploration of human relations.
I loved it because Rattawut Lapcharoensap is a Thai-American author whose depictions of both cultures ring true and whose Thai characters are not shy about sharing their opinions about farangs.
Though the focus is always on the personal and interpersonal, these stories have an underlying current of social commentary that touches on issues as wide-ranging as traffic safety, public health, prostitution, tourism, and animal welfare.
A collection of stories set in modern-day Thailand depicts this Asian country on the crossroads between the ancient and the modern, focusing on issues of family relations, romance, generational conflicts, and cultural changes.
I’m a writer and journalist with an eye on South and Southeast Asia. I first worked in Thailand in 1999, researching the Thailand chapter for the first edition of the Rough Guides Southeast Asia Guide. Since 2001, I’ve been a Thailand correspondent for German publisher Reise Know How. For the past decade, I have worked as Thailand Destination Expert for The Daily Telegraph. I co-wrote the bestselling Sacred Skin – Thailand’s Spirit Tattoos with photographer Aroon Thaewchatturat, and have written countless articles about Thai culture, politics and tourism. It took 20 years to write a novel set in Thailand – The Monsoon Ghost Image – a testament to the complexities of Thai society.
I felt I needed to include one title about Thailand’s endlessly discussed, sordid sex industry. Houellebecq’s acidic 2004 novel takes the country’s massive sleaze trade head-on, crammed with self-loathing observations of its male protagonist, his world eventually smashed to pieces by a terrorist attack and a heart-breaking ending in the country’s Gomorra-by-the-sea beach resort Pattaya. Audacious, cynical, yet nonetheless filled with humanity, and there’s plenty of sex, Viagra, fun, and despair as well. Platform puts all other fiction covering the country’s exploitative underbelly to shame.
Houellebecq's new novel tells the story of an attempt to create a package-holiday company for sex-tourists. Less philosophical and grandly ambitious than Atomised, it is, if anything, even more outrageously funny and bitingly satirical of the ways we live now than the earlier novel. Added to which, there is a genuinely moving love affair, real characters and a real plot!
I’m a writer and journalist with an eye on South and Southeast Asia. I first worked in Thailand in 1999, researching the Thailand chapter for the first edition of the Rough Guides Southeast Asia Guide. Since 2001, I’ve been a Thailand correspondent for German publisher Reise Know How. For the past decade, I have worked as Thailand Destination Expert for The Daily Telegraph. I co-wrote the bestselling Sacred Skin – Thailand’s Spirit Tattoos with photographer Aroon Thaewchatturat, and have written countless articles about Thai culture, politics and tourism. It took 20 years to write a novel set in Thailand – The Monsoon Ghost Image – a testament to the complexities of Thai society.
A brilliant reference book on all aspects (and yes, this book is very thorough) of Thai popular culture. Concise chapters on anything from spirit tattoos to meat on a stick illuminate the far corners of contemporary Thai society, illustrated by hundreds of great photographs. This is a standard work for anyone interested in how Thai society ticks. Cornwel-Smith has served up a second title recently – Very Bangkok – which offers a similarly thorough picture of the Thai capital.
This pioneering insight into contemporary Thai folk culture delves beyond the traditional Thai icons to reveal the casual, everyday expressions of Thainess that so delight and puzzle. From floral truck bolts and taxi altars to buffalo cart furniture and drinks in a bag, the same exquisite care, craft and improvisation resounds through home and street, bar and wardrobe. Never colonised, Thai culture retains nuanced ancient meaning in the most mundane things. The days are colour coded, lucky numbers dictate prices, window grilles become guardian angels, tattoos entrance the wearer. Philip Cornwel-Smith scoured each region to show how indigenous wisdom both…
I’ve been fascinated by wild and lonely places since early childhood. Growing up in a small village, there were plenty to choose from. Foraging and an interest in the medicinal properties of plants grew out of that fascination, and later brought me to survival guides and the concept of survival itself. Hostile places, historical skills, and wilderness experiences all have a hold over my imagination. The notion of being prepared for humanity’s decline is something I find endlessly intriguing. Can such a thing be prepared for? What form will our destruction take and how does this affect the methods we need to survive it? I’ll probably keep reading and writing about it until we have an answer.
A non-fiction account of one office worker’s yearlong attempt to survive in Alaska. As someone who finds non-fiction quite dry and hard to read, this book is the best of both worlds. It has the detail of a true account with the wit and humor of fictional story. This book gives me something that former SAS professionals and hardened explorers cannot; the experiences of an everyday man, trading his desk job for a log cabin in one of the most dangerous parts of the world.
Guy Grieve's life was going nowhere - trapped in a job he hated, commuting 2,000 miles a month and up to his neck in debt. But he dreamed of escaping it all to live alone in one of the wildest, most remote places on earth - Alaska.
And just when he'd given up hope, the dream came true. Suddenly Guy was thrown into one of the harshest environments in the world, miles from the nearest human being and armed with only the most basic equipment. And he soon found - whether building a log cabin from scratch, hunting, ice fishing…
