Here are 89 books that The Foundling fans have personally recommended if you like
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My interest in medieval history comes from a love of language. My favourite Old English word is wordhord, which refers to a poet’s mental stockpile of words and phrases. My word hoarding (and sharing) started with tweeting the Old English word of the day in 2013. This spread to other social media platforms, a blog, an app, and now two books. I have a PhD in English from King’s College London (my thesis was on blood in Old English, even though blood actually makes me squeamish). I enjoy histories that make me think about the past from a different perspective.
This book is filled with fascinating facts about medieval medicine, surgery, humoural theory, disease, and diagnosis. But what is surprising is how many other aspects of the Middle Ages are covered through the theme of bodies.
We learn about strange creatures like blemmyae (who have no heads and faces in their chests) and cynocephali (dog-headed people), saints and relics, race relations and politics, manuscript manufacture, religion, literature, travel, eating habits, love, sexuality, and gender identity.
I love how the chapters are organized by body part, from head to feet, a clever approach I have never seen in a history book before. Hartnell demonstrates how the medieval past is "an uncanny place at once startlingly different from and strangely familiar to our own."
Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different from our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or where the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule.
In this richly illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored, and experienced their physical selves in the…
In the Spring of 2006, I went to the south of France searching for troubadours. It was my MA year and my thesis was looking at the influence of the courtly love tradition on Chaucer’s writing. Troubadours (and the female, trobairitz) were nowhere to be found. The closest I came was a café named Le Troubadour. However, evidence of their lyrics was there in the beauty and lushness of Languedoc in spring. I'm always drawn to the poetry, landscapes, and love stories of the past and have experienced how these connections enrich my life. I've completed a PhD in seventeenth-century literature and become an historical fiction novelist and a devotee of history and historical fiction.
A mammoth of an historical novel set in the time of the Ottoman Empire.
A unique love story between the elephant keeper (and royal architect) Jahan, his special white elephant, Chota, and the interesting princess Mihrimah. As funny as it is heartbreaking, with characters so compelling they felt like cherished friends mourned and missed at parting, but whom I’ll always remember with deep fondness.
A dazzling and intricate tale from Elif Shafak, Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World - chosen for the Duchess of Cornwall's online book club The Reading Room
'There were six of us: the master, the apprentices and the white elephant. We built everything together...'
Sixteenth century Istanbul: a stowaway arrives in the city bearing an extraordinary gift for the Sultan. The boy is utterly alone in a foreign land, with no worldly possessions to his name except Chota, a rare white elephant destined for the palace menagerie.
I’m the girl who loved school excursions to historical parks and the middle-aged author who cannot keep away from a house museum. Like most Australians, I love to travel (you’ll meet us everywhere), gravitating towards historical sites and weighing down my luggage with museum-shop trophies from Beijing to Bath and Cusco to Athens. All novels are mysteries the reader wants to solve, but stories with multiple timelines add an extra layer of puzzle to the mystery. As a writer I get to craft those puzzle pieces. And as a reader, I love solving them!
Of course, the title leapt out at me from the bookshop shelf! And on reading the first page I fell in love with Shafak’s lyrical writing.
As I read further, I was drawn into the stories of love in many guises within its pages. I was intrigued by the way the author wove a modern narrative of a deeply unhappy American housewife with a story about the historical character, thirteenth-century Sufi poet, Rumi, and his friendship with wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz.
The story took me to a place and time far from mine and I learned about a very different culture—yet in its philosophical concerns and themes, not so different after all. And I really loved that both Shams and Rumi were storytellers so that the novel had layers of nested stories.
The international bestseller from the author of the Booker-shortlisted novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, The Forty Rules of Love is part of our Penguin Essentials series which spotlights the very best of our modern classics
*One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped the World'*
"Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough..."
Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet there is…
I am a long-time journalist and have been passionate about understanding history ever since taking a wonderful AP course in European history in high school. I have read many historical books, both fiction and nonfiction, so it makes sense that my first novel, Rebecca of Ivanhoe, is historical fiction. To be a good journalist and citizen, you have to know and understand history to inform your reporting and try to prevent the bad moments of history from repeating themselves.
The Marriage Portrait is a revisionist story of Lucrezia de Medici, the daughter of a 16th century Florentine duke who marries her off to the ruthless ruler of another region in northern Italy. Lucrezia’s husband is infertile but of course she is blamed for not being able to conceive. She overhears a plot to do away with her, so her husband can try to beget an heir on someone else. Lucrezia, who can get no help from her parents, has to figure out how to outwit her husband and escape. I’ll let you read this suspenseful and richly layered novel to find out if she manages to survive.
WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION FINALIST • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The author of award-winning Hamnet brings the world of Renaissance Italy to jewel-bright life in this unforgettable fictional portrait of the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de' Medici as she makes her way in a troubled court.
“I could not stop reading this incredible true story.” —Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club Pick)
"O’Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave this story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station...You may know the history, and you may think you…
I have always been fascinated by stories that use darkness in plot and character growth. As a former funeral director, I find stories with death—whether it’s the power of death, the death of a loved one, or something similar—to be really poignant. I always write books that embrace the darkness, and I love to see how characters come out on the other side. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I do!
When I tell you I gasped at the end of this book, I am not exaggerating. I am not one to be surprised by books, but this one kept me guessing the entire time.
I was surprised multiple times throughout the book, and the complicated relationship between Anna and her aunt is fascinating from the very first page. I also really loved the worldbuilding and magic system as it is expertly woven into the story.
I find that many fantasy books have a magic system that is just there, but this one drives the plot.
The International Bestseller
Within the boroughs of London, nestled among its streets, hides another city, filled with magic.
'Magic and love. Love and magic. They destroy everything in the end ...'
Anna's Aunt has always warned her of the dangers of magic. Its twists. Its knots. Its deadly consequences.
Now Anna counts down the days to the ceremony that will bind her magic forever.
Until she meets Effie and Attis.
They open her eyes to a London she never knew existed. A shop that sells memories. A secret library where the librarian feeds off words. A club where revellers lose…
Like any writer, I’m fascinated with what makes people tick and why they act the way they do. Naturally, this means I read a lot of history. I love reference reading; I love researching arcane questions for a tiny detail that will bring a character or their world to life. Creating epic fantasy is an extension of both my drives as a reader and a writer. Pouring myself into characters who inhabit different settings is a deeply satisfying exercise in both craft and empathy, and each history book has some small bit I can use to make my settings more compelling, more enjoyable for readers, and more real.
I hadn’t thought seriously about the problem of rubbish, sewage, and waste disposal before reading Jackson’s work.
I think it’s important, even crucial, for a fantasy writer to know where the poop and detritus go in the societies they’ve built; it’s part of the worldbuilding that gives an imaginary culture enough weight and heft to convince a reader.
Plus, Jackson’s prose is always marvelously clean, concise, and dryly funny.
In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with "night soil," graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them.
Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph and disaster. Full of individual stories and overlooked details-from the dustmen who grew rich…
There was a time when women had to use pseudonyms or otherwise pretend to be men to get published. These days, especially in the urban fantasy genre, it seems like there are more female authors and female main characters than male ones! I love dynamic main characters, male or female, and every one of these books has stellar characters with a great story. I wanted to mention so many other authors, but I have narrowed it down to these five. I hope you enjoy my list.
The Alex Versus series's world-building, magic, and plots are very complex and layered. This is some seriously well thought out urban fantasy.
The main character, Alex, is basically an instant seer, able to see multiple consequences of diving left versus right, shooting someone, running, etc. He doesn’t always have time to evaluate his choices before having to make a decision. And often, there’s no out without loss or a high price to be paid.
The back story is cleverly woven into the plot and is never boring. This series has one of my favorite side characters ever written—an arachnid with startling insight and wisdom.
The start of a compelling new urban fantasy series based in Camden, featuring Alex Verus - a mage with a dark past who can see the future . . .
***The million-copy-selling series***
'Harry Dresden would like Alex Verus tremendously - and be a little nervous around him. I just added Benedict Jacka to my must-read list. Fated is an excellent novel, a gorgeously realized world with a uniquely powerful, vulnerable protagonist. Books this good remind me why I got into the storytelling business in the first place' Jim Butcher, author of the Dresden Files
It would be fair to say that the deconstruction has firmly taken hold of the Western genre in movies. But while an appreciation of Sergio Leone is omnipresent to the point of cliché for cinema buffs, in literature, Louis L’Amor, Zane Grey, and William W. Johnstone reign supreme. Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic Western horrors being the exception that makes the rule.
But Western books have their own subversion, and I wanted to spotlight those. The men’s adventure, the pulp fiction, the outright smut. These are the books that inspired my own novel, A Man Called Bone, and I hope it does right by its muses.
Leaving Piccadilly for the moment, we have the adult western. As if the name of the genre and the name that starts every book title isn’t enough, it’s published by Playboy. And as you might have guessed from there being four hundred of these books, put out damn near monthly since the seventies, it’s a bit of a fool’s errand to single out any one book. They’re somewhere between the formulaic nature of needing to be a Western with literally obligatory sex and violence, and the author being a house name that’ll change with any given volume, who by necessity will have his own idiosyncratic take on the material.
One book, you might get a writer that’s really into delivering the sex appeal promised by the cover. Another time, you’ll get someone who just wants to write a Western (if that: people weren’t writing these things for their health,…
While pursuing the cold-blooded killer Rafe Masterson, Slocum narrowly escapes the outlaw’s quick draw with his life. Unfortunately, his trusty horse wasn’t so lucky. Slocum’s steed was just the latest victim to fall afoul of Masterson, who has two notches in his belt representing the two deputies he’s already gunned down. Wanted in several states, Masterson is increasing both his death toll and reward value—and he’s not about to let Slocum bring him in…dead or alive.
I write crime fiction set in the north of England. It’s where I was born and grew up, although for the last 20 years I’ve lived in Spain. I really love novels with a local or regional flavour. The kind of writing that takes you to a specific place, and draws on that place in the action itself. The writers that I chose for this list all do this extremely well. And although their books are set in different locations, they share the sense of the setting almost becoming a character in the story.
Dominic wrote two very good crime books in a short series before publishing Vine Street.
I am including Vine Street on my list because, although it’s set in London and is therefore not ‘regional’, it was one of the great crime novels of 2021-22 and deserves to become a classic. I read this book before it was published, and I knew, like everyone else, that it was something special.
The story spans almost a century, from the seedy streets of London’s Soho in the 1930s, until the present day. There are some really well-researched and vividly depicted descriptions of police investigations in the 30s, and just for that it’s worth a read. But there’s also a twisting, mesmerizing plot that takes us all the way to the present.
What really distinguishes Vine Street, though, is the writing itself, which seems to echo the rhythms of the 1930s jazz clubs, and…
***BEST CRIME BOOKS OF 2021 - THE TIMES/SUNDAY TIMES*** ***CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH - THE TIMES***
'Brings the obsessional dread of James Ellroy to 1940s London.' IAN RANKIN
'Extraordinary...a career-defining performance.' THE SUNDAY TIMES
'This is crime writing of the highest quality' DAILY MAIL
SOHO, 1935. SERGEANT LEON GEATS' PATCH.
A snarling, skull-cracking misanthrope, Geats marshals the grimy rabble according to his own elastic moral code.
The narrow alleys are brimming with jazz bars, bookies, blackshirts, ponces and tarts so when a body is found above the Windmill Club, detectives are content to dismiss the case as just another…
Much of the Britain that's exported to the world is fed by the monochromatic myth of nobility and royalty, but the heart of Britain is multifaceted and multicultural. I didn’t grow up in London, but grew up visiting family here and ‘The Big Smoke’ had an allure for me. The people were all different colours and ethnicities and it truly felt like the most exciting place in the world. I moved here the week I turned 18, and I haven’t left. It's a harsh, expensive city, and it's much too busy to provide anyone with any lasting sanity, but here I found a version of Black Britain that I was missing in my hometown.
It is suffused with music throughout (and the nerd within me loves the reoccurring literary motifs and phrases that definitely lend a musical quality to the book) and took me back to lazy summer days as a teenager when I first moved to London and the city felt wide open with excitement and possibility.
This is another love story, but one about community, family and the first loves that we learn from our parents.
An exhilarating and expansive new novel about fathers and sons, faith and friendship from National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and Costa First Novel Award winning author Caleb Azumah Nelson
One of the most acclaimed and internationally bestselling “unforgettable” (New York Times) debuts of the 2021, Caleb Azumah Nelson’s London-set love story Open Water took the US by storm and introduced the world to a salient and insightful new voice in fiction. Now, with his second novel Small Worlds, the prodigious Azumah Nelson brings another set of enduring characters to brilliant life in his signature rhythmic, melodic prose.
