61 books like The Cold Millions

I live in the same world where too many modern novels (including mine!) take place—a world of professionals and students, people whose hands get dirty only if we’re repotting our tomato plants. So it’s wonderfully eye-opening to enter the setting of this book, along with farmers, prison guards, nurses, and other rural folks who are actually living out the current debate over natural-gas fracking. While the gas-company officials are clear villains, the townspeople on both sides are portrayed with compassion and complexity. Who are the “good guys” and “bad guys” when a prison guard sells his mineral rights to the frackers for the cash to start a dairy farm? Or when a gas driller has an affair with a woman whose husband died of environmental cancer? 

Alice Mattison, the author, must have been reading my mind! This piercing novel echoes some of my conflicted feelings about the Sixties and social activism in general, even as it also probes the strains of long-term marriage and friendship. As college students, Olive, Helen, and Val took different routes during the Sixties antiwar protests. Now, when a magazine commissions Olive to write an essay about Val’s long-ago novel, she must confront the repercussions of those friendships and the decisions the three women made. Helen chose violent protest; Olive chose a PhD; Val chose to appropriate Helen’s life in her fiction. Olive’s rethinking raises a question that’s important for us today: How far should an ethical person go for a just cause?  

This novel took me into a community that I rarely read about in fiction, to show the human impact of a controversial industry—in this case, GMO agriculture and Idaho potato farmers. From my research for two of my nonfiction books, I started with some understanding of the complex debate, and I appreciate that All Over Creation branches into more subplots beyond simply Big Agriculture versus family farms. In fact, I liked Will, the well-meaning local farmer who sincerely believes that GMO potatoes will save his ailing farm, far more than Yumi, the main character, a single mom who long ago fled potato country. She seems too caught up in her resentments against her father and hometown, to care about anyone but herself. 

At 640 pages, this exuberant saga takes an original approach toward the Sixties. The protagonist’s mother, Faye, got swept into the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago almost by accident, because it was part of the student scene. That’s only one of about six plotlines in this book, which focuses on Faye’s abandonment of her son, Samuel, when he was a boy; her arrest for throwing gravel at a right-wing presidential candidate decades later; and the paths propelling the potential mother-son reunion. I was captivated by the energy, richness, and plot twists of this novel, which somehow manages to keep all its balls spinning. (PS: The political protests aren’t what they seem.)  

Set in Moscow on the eve of the Russian Revolution, this novel’s plot does not scream “funny,” but it’s one of the most deeply funny books I’ve ever read.

An English printer living in Russia wakes up one day to find that his wife has left him and taken their children away, and revolutionaries have broken into his shop to print manifestoes.

From this unlikely setup, Fitzgerald spins a hilarious tale of loss, love, and redemption.

Actually a collection of nine novellas set in the fictional town of Babbington, in an alternative-reality version of 1950s New York, this collection is historical fiction at its funniest and strangest, satirizing not only 1950s American culture but also our literary traditions.

Each novella chronicles a coming-of-age adventure of Peter Leroy (the author’s alter ego) in the style of a different classic-fiction genre, from a Huck Finn-style river journey to a Proustian moment at a family outing to a send-up of Aesop’s fables.

Wonderfully warm and filled with sly asides.

Stella Bradshaw, an aspiring teenage actor in 1950s Liverpool, joins a local theater company for its Christmas production of Peter Pan, and everyone gets more than they bargained for. Stella is a willful working-class ingenue desperate to escape her broken home life, and her enthusiasm and fearlessness force a collection of dissolute, jaded theater actors and directors to confront their own career and life choices.

The revelation on the last page makes you reconsider everything that went before in a surprise ending that’s far from a gimmick.

Muriel Spark is one of the wittiest novelists of the twentieth century, and this is one of her rare forays into historical fiction.

This novel harkens back to the publishing world of 1950s London, where a war widow working as an editor at a struggling publishing house becomes involved in the personal and professional politics of the literary world.

The characters are thinly veiled portrayals of real-life figures in the London publishing scene of the time, and Spark sends up their foibles, petty schemes, and peccadillos to devastating effect.

Although the books in this series are not released in chronological order, I found it helpful to begin at the beginning, with George Washington. Each of these books is well-written and provides a concise way to learn about the significant events that occurred. Several times I’ve finished a book in this series and then selected an in-depth biography to further my knowledge about the ones I found most interesting. Though occasionally laborious reading, the insight gained from a brief look at each president’s life is worth every word.

When I heard Ginny Dent Brant interviewed about her books, I couldn’t wait to purchase them for myself. Finding True Freedom recounts Ginny’s uncertain days of watching her father’s passion for politics. (Lots of well-documented info about his and others’ involvement in Watergate.) But Harry Dent experienced a conversion and left politics for the mission field of Romania. I wouldn’t normally read a book about politics; however, I highly recommend Finding True Freedom as it was a page-turner for me and taught me that true freedom is not the easiest to find, especially in highly charged Washington politics.