100 books like The Do-Over

Setting up and maintaining a backyard homestead is honest, fulfilling work. For those who prefer productive labor as exercise (rather than heading to a gym), this book is an inspiring look backward at satisfying, useful skills. Take Seymour’s wattle hurdle. Used as a herding panel, the hurdle is woven entirely from hazel sticks. Any supple wood will do. The result is a portable fence panel that cost nothing but a bit of labor.

Many of the projects featured are out of reach (like millstone dressing or coopering or charcoal burning) but all are fascinating and most still relevant today. For example, Seymour demonstrates that engineering a wooden gate that wouldn’t sag was worked out a long time ago—in several variations. Like all of Seymour’s books, this one is exquisitely illustrated.

This book is responsible for me missing my tube stop on my way to work so as you can imagine I found it a riveting read.

Michelle Styles is a well-known romance writer who has written a number of Viking-era romances. I enjoyed this one in particular, because I loved the main character, Dagmar Kolbeindottar. She is a warrior, not a lover, or so she thinks – until she is captured by the Celtic warlord, Aedan Mac Connal, who has been commanded by her father, under duress himself, to bring her back.

Her father then forces her to make a choice and marry – and she choses Aedan, hoping he will refuse her. Cue misunderstandings, passionate trysts, and an ending that is truly satisfying, as well as brilliant atmosphere and creation of characters including doughty Dagmar.

When our heroine discovers her fiancé cheating on her at a Yuletide country house party, she flees in distress, saddling up to return to London on horseback. Cue the intervention of a devilishly handsome rakehell offering his carriage. With all good sense thrown to the wind, lovely Lily is soon climbing aboard—in more ways than one. 

When the pair encounter [gasp] a snowstorm and must take refuge on his estate, the passion-o-meter reaches new heights. This book comes with a fabulous (and well-earned) “sizzle alert”. Hoorah!

Madievsky’s brilliant, weird, evocative debut begins with the kind of first line that lets you know you’re in good hands: “Spending time with my sister, Debbie, was like buying acid off a guy you met on the bus.”

Debbie’s disappearance early in the novel forces the narrator to reckon with who she is outside of the sisters’ codependent relationship, and it raises questions about what we owe our more complicated family members.

Tara was the best friend I needed when I picked up this book.

I felt like I was sitting on the couch across from her while she gave me all sort of kind, direct, no-nonsense advice. She reminded me to be good to myself, and taught me that I’m worthy of my own care and attention. Just seeing the spine of this book on my shelf makes me feel less alone. I can hear her encouraging voice. (See? I am a little crazy!)

Anyone who has spent any time in the world of journalism can recognise the flawed but ultimately lovable character of Thorn Marsh, Marika Cobold’s main character, who like far too many reporters, myself included, is far too often concentrated on her work rather than on living in the real world of human relationships.

Journalistic ethics should define us and our work, but Thorn falls from grace (or rather crosses a line). When her paper is taken over, she is placed on a mid-week supplement and is pushed for heart-warming clickbait. She actually makes up a story about an angel appearing on the Heath, crossing many a journalistic line in doing so.

Cue a tale about love, honour, loyalty, and how to pick yourself up when you’ve done wrong – and had wrong done to you. I loved Thorn. Hopefully she will reappear in another novel by Marika Cobbold one day… show more.

This book came out on my birthday a few years ago and felt like a present specifically for me, and other superhero fans will feel the same.

This YA sci-fi trilogy features a world divided between those who either love or hate the Renegades, a group of superpowered humans.

If you enjoy the themes of “heroes aren’t always what they seem” present in superhero works like The Boys, then Renegades is a milder version of that, making it a great entry point for superhero fans and an action-packed, thought-provoking read about what is right or wrong.

This book will have you up all night. It is a humorous, steamy contemporary romance between a boss and his apprentice. Both are architects in a family business. You will fall in love with the witty dialogue and the irresistible chemistry between the hero and heroine in this multicultural romance. 

Having not one but three books as my second choice may look like cheating, but the novels which comprise Manning’s unforgettable Balkan Trilogy – The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City, set in Bucharest, Romania; and Friends and Heroes, set in Athens – are now usually published under one cover.

The first two volumes paint the story of Guy and Harriet Pringle, newly married English expats in the Romanian capital on the eve of the Second World War, who then escape to Athens as the Germans advance across the Balkans.

I use the verb “paint” deliberately. Manning was a painter in her youth, and few writers can paint the word-picture of a foreigner in a strange city as well as she does.

I fell in love with Bucharest after reading it, and I travelled there for the first time in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution in 1989, while there… show more.

Surely the rise of Hitler and the impact of global depression gave an air of inevitability about the holocaust to follow? In this successor volume, Steiner makes clear many other factors were in play that might have altered Europe’s fate. She details the West’s overriding fear of Soviet communism, the crucial role Mussolini played as termite to the tentative international order built in the 1920s, and the deep internal divisions that French leaders ultimately were unable to overcome, divisions that played their own role in strengthening British Prime Minister Chamberlain’s decision to deal with Hitler at the Munich conference.