Here are 100 books that The Gathering fans have personally recommended if you like
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From an early age, I was steeped in stories. My mother is a great storyteller and would tell vivid and exciting stories of her childhood, giving me a great sense of my own life as a part of the story of generations. We moved around a lot for my father’s job, which was sometimes disorientating and could lead to loneliness, and I took refuge in libraries and in writing stories of my own. By the time I left school, literature was my big love and mainstay, and I took a degree in English and later taught it in schools. Reading and writing stories has since become my life.
I honestly felt my life had more meaning after I first read this book, as it touched on so much that was close to my heart.
I totally identified with the protagonist’s emotional journey: a childhood imbued with a sense of things lost and hidden, which, in adulthood, he tries to quell with erudition before the past erupts and he learns the truth of his tortured origins.
I found it really haunting and more in touch with the truth about the human condition than most books I’ve read. I’ve read it three times, once with my reading group, and I’m sure I’ll read it again.
This tenth anniversary edition of W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece includes a new Introduction by acclaimed critic James Wood. Austerlitz is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he…
From early adolescence through my career as an English professor, I was deeply drawn to romance and romantic fiction as a form of pleasure, comfort, and hope. My new book is personal and intimate, not scholarly. Weaving together my expertise in the subject of romance fiction with the story of passionate love in my own life, my book Loveland: A Memoir of Romance and Fiction is about the experiences I've had, inside the culture of romance in which women are immersed. I have a view of passion that is not a conventional one as I trace a way forward for myself, and perhaps others as well.
Emily Bronte wrote one novel in her short life, but what an amazing novel it is. The anti-heroes Heathcliff (rough, bitter, and rude from early mistreatment) and his childhood beloved, Catherine (spoiled and willful), are unique in fiction, and when they go head-to-head, there’s no stopping them. But Bronte doesn’t make it easy to understand them.
Heathcliff obsessively pursues Catherine after she’s married, but what she feels for him has been debated by many scholars, such as myself–some say it’s not sexual, but I disagree. The scene where they finally kiss and cling to each other while she is eight months pregnant with her husband’s child, right before her death, was extremely shocking to the Victorian public. It was so powerful that it scared me when I first read it at age 14.
One of the great novels of the nineteenth century, Emily Bronte's haunting tale of passion and greed remains unsurpassed in its depiction of destructive love. Her tragically short life is brilliantly imagined in the major new movie, Emily, starring Emma Mackey in the title role.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition of Wuthering Heights features an afterword by David Pinching.
One wild, snowy night on the Yorkshire moors, a gentleman asks…
I’m a novelist, essayist, and journalist who’s written extensively about the problems and consolations of faith, about belonging in and out of faith, and about the tribes of what I think of as the In Between. When you’re in between, you’re neither in it nor out of it, whatever “it” might be for you. You bear an “infinity of traces,” as the writer Antonio Gramsci called these formative influences. My first novel looks at these influences directly, while my second one looks at them indirectly. I’m late in the game with a third novel now—a detective story that investigates a murder along with these same themes.
Indispensable. And the scandal of this autobiographical novel hasn’t worn off in a hundred-plus years. Stephen Dedalus is our young man, the self-appointed artist-priest. We see turn-of-the-century Ireland through his eyes and Irish Catholicism, too, each with its special richness and oppressiveness. Ultimately, it’s Stephen’s desire to escape "these nets" that drives his story. He’ll find God in his own way or, failing that, replace him with Art.
A masterpiece of modern fiction, James Joyce's semiautobiographical first novel follows Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth who rebels against his family, his education, and his country by committing himself to the artist's life.
"I will not serve," vows Dedalus, "that in which I no longer believe...and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can." Likening himself to God, Dedalus notes that the artist "remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." Joyce's rendering of the impressions of…
From an early age, I was steeped in stories. My mother is a great storyteller and would tell vivid and exciting stories of her childhood, giving me a great sense of my own life as a part of the story of generations. We moved around a lot for my father’s job, which was sometimes disorientating and could lead to loneliness, and I took refuge in libraries and in writing stories of my own. By the time I left school, literature was my big love and mainstay, and I took a degree in English and later taught it in schools. Reading and writing stories has since become my life.
I was blown away by this book when I first read it, and it may be one of the best books I’ve ever read.
I laughed out loud at the wisecracking wit while tears actually dropped into my lap at the aching sadness as I read of the struggles of Yolande to stop her famous pianist sister Elfride from committing suicide and as she mines their strict Memonite past (including their father’s own suicide) for reasons for Elfride’s depression.
I kept gulping out hilarious bits to my partner while wiping my eyes and blowing my nose. I found it hard to put down to go and eat. When I finished it, I didn’t feel I’d read it; I felt I’d had a whole experience, and I set about recommending it to my reading group and all my friends.
From the bestselling author of Women Talking, a "wrenchingly honest, darkly funny novel" (Entertainment Weekly).
Elf and Yoli are sisters. While on the surface Elfrieda's life is enviable (she's a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, and happily married) and Yolandi's a mess (she's divorced and broke, with two teenagers growing up too quickly), they are fiercely close-raised in a Mennonite household and sharing the hardship of Elf's desire to end her life. After Elf's latest attempt, Yoli must quickly determine how to keep her family from falling apart while facing a profound question: what do you do for a loved one…
I’m an Irish writer drawn to the ways in which the biggest questions – of human nature, existence, late capitalist realism, politics, ethics, and consciousness – play out via the minutiae of specific locations; in this case, the city of Dublin, where I’ve spent most of my adult life. I don’t think of cities as monuments but living and complex microcosms of concerns and urgencies the whole world shares.
McGahern is famous for writing slow-burning accounts of life in mid-century rural Ireland.
The Pornographer, however, is about a lonely bachelor who writes porn in his suburban bedsit then gets the bus into town to seduce women in gloomy dancehalls. He makes one of them pregnant and a battle of wills begins: he thinks she should obtain an abortion, she thinks they marry. This is remarkable because it is set in 1960s Dublin, a time and place in which the Catholic Church reigned supreme.
The book’s depiction of a night-time city composed of grimy pubs and starchy hospital wards is unforgettable, but its fascination for me lies in the protagonist’s casual cruelty towards his lover: this was what I had in mind when developing Cormac, the protagonist of my book – a passive, affable, but ultimately detached man who wreaks emotional havoc by accident and reflects a very Irish, still…
One of the preeminent writers of our time, John McGahern has captivated readers with such poignant and heart-wrenching novels as Amongst Women and The Dark.
In The Pornographer, Michael creates an ideal world of sex as a writer of pornographic fiction, while he bungles every phase of his entanglement with an older woman who has the misfortune to fall in love with him. But his insensitivity to this love is in direct contrast to the tenderness with which he attempts to make his aunt's slow death in a hospital tolerable. Everywhere in this rich novel is the drama of opposites,…
I’m an Irish writer drawn to the ways in which the biggest questions – of human nature, existence, late capitalist realism, politics, ethics, and consciousness – play out via the minutiae of specific locations; in this case, the city of Dublin, where I’ve spent most of my adult life. I don’t think of cities as monuments but living and complex microcosms of concerns and urgencies the whole world shares.
A non-fiction recommendation this time, and a recent release.
Hennigan’s essay collection is a beautifully written account of the final years, and opaque recollections, of her grandmother Phil, who spent much of her life in various psychiatric institutions.
I have been interested in this theme for years – Ireland, in the first decades after independence from Britain, has some of the highest rates of citizen incarceration in the world: prisons, borstals, orphanages, magdalen laundries, and psychiatric hospitals both provided employment and regulation and also kept a whole population of ‘problem’ people out of sight).
This fact, and its repercussions in culture today, fascinate me, and Hennigan’s gentle and loving consideration of Phil’s trauma, loneliness, mania, and the maternal lineage it involves (her own mother was institutionalized) is also an angry illustration of just how badly women and the working class have been treated here.
"Phil doesn't like physical affection. She doesn't love you because you don't exist. She doesn't care if you have something important coming up. A busy week, a daunting appointment, a divorce, because she believes the world is going to end in the morning. Every morning."
Having grown up visiting her grandmother in various psychiatric hospitals, Molly Hennigan began writing about the gaps in and intimacies of her relationship with this matriarch. Tracing the organic path of her grandmother's experience to her great-grandmother's time in Irish mental hospitals, she explores her own family trauma and what it means to be an…
I’m an Irish writer drawn to the ways in which the biggest questions – of human nature, existence, late capitalist realism, politics, ethics, and consciousness – play out via the minutiae of specific locations; in this case, the city of Dublin, where I’ve spent most of my adult life. I don’t think of cities as monuments but living and complex microcosms of concerns and urgencies the whole world shares.
A post-Donna Tart’s Secret History-esque tale of literary mystics who make up a secret society at Trinity College Dublin which tends, unfairly, to get left behind in analyses of Irish ‘Celtic Tiger’ fiction.
This is fiction from or dealing with the abrupt and accelerated modernity that hit Ireland like a cultural torpedo in the early 2000s, and quite a lot of it fails to capture the discombobulation of living through that time.
The First Verse is a campus novel about sexy secretive students and shady deeds which also plots a queer geography of Dublin’s gay scene as well as illustrating the emotional tension that exists in Dublin between city centre and its polarised northern and southern suburbs.
Dublin is such a mannered city, caught in Georgian poses while falling apart as postmodernity obliterates its value system, that it surprises me there aren’t more Dublin novels about baroque subcultures. McCrea is…
A thrilling twist to the suspenseful games of The Rule of Four and The Da Vinci Code sends a gay student reeling through the pubs, nightclubs and streets of present-day Dublin. 'In this brilliant first novel, the best of recent memory, a young Irish writer of great psychological dexterity takes on a handful of exciting themes. For a hundred years, Ireland has provided the English-speaking world with its most eloquent writers; Barry McCrea now joins this illustrious company.' - Edmund White
From an early age, I was steeped in stories. My mother is a great storyteller and would tell vivid and exciting stories of her childhood, giving me a great sense of my own life as a part of the story of generations. We moved around a lot for my father’s job, which was sometimes disorientating and could lead to loneliness, and I took refuge in libraries and in writing stories of my own. By the time I left school, literature was my big love and mainstay, and I took a degree in English and later taught it in schools. Reading and writing stories has since become my life.
I find so true this depiction of a family cruelly affected by their father’s grim past as an IRA commander, which has turned him into a strict, even cruel, disciplinarian.
I shuddered with empathy with the children and wife and rejoiced in the eventual escape of the sons he beat while still, in the end, feeling for him and his loss of their love.
I read it years ago, and it always stayed with me, so I recently recommended it to my reading group and read it again. I was no less moved.
I am Casey Kelleher, a crime writer and author of 17 novels. I have always been a complete and utter bookworm, but my true passion is crime and psych thrillers. Most of my stories concentrate on the victim–or, as I prefer to call them, the survivor. That’s who I champion in my stories, highlighting the strength of that person who has overcome whatever harsh reality that’s been forced upon them. But I also like to get inside the perpetrator’s head. I want to know the ‘whys’ of what they do. Psychology is very complex, but I do believe that there can be good and bad/darkness and light in all of us.
I loved this book because it caught me completely off guard with just how dark and twisted it turned out to be. The twist was shocking and unexpected, and the characters' motives and the depths of depravity they went to to get what they wanted were just mind-blowing.
Liz Nugent is a master at these types of psych thrillers, and I am such a huge fan.
From the #1 internationally bestselling author of Strange Sally Diamond and Unraveling Oliver—a brilliantly plotted, utterly immersive novel lauded by A.J. Finn—#1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window—as “extraordinary…crackles and snaps like a bonfire on a winter’s night.”
My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it.
On the surface, Lydia Fitzsimons's life seems idyllic. Her husband, Andrew, is a prosperous, respected judge; they live in the spacious, comfortable, well-appointed house where she was raised. And she is utterly, obsessively devoted to her son, Laurence—her adored only child, her…
The collection Little Musings, available on Amazon, covers several decades of Joy's work as poet and painter. It touches on many aspects of her life, including the loss of her mother, in Do Not Mourn Her and Loss - Double Rainbow. Her childhood was spent in Plymouth, and in A Plymouth Girl Reflects, she recalls the aftermath of the air raids. Being in close proximity to Cornwall, that area also a major theme here, especially in Newquay, Cornwall, and On Air, By Melancholy. Four of the poems, "Absent Friends," "Isle of Thanet," "At Jim's Cafe," and "Captain Ahab of Thanet" are focused on the Thanet area of East Kent, where Joy now lives.
The Tide Between Us is similarly typical of many Cornish novels which involve travel to the West Indies. The maritime links between those areas were extremely strong at those times. It therefore relates to the Transatlantic factor in my own novels which involves the West Indies and the slave trade.
1821: Among the thousands of Irish deportees to the Caribbean British Colonies is a 10 year old Irish boy, Art O’Neill. As an Indentured Servant on a sugar plantation in Jamaica, Art gradually acclimatises to the exotic country and the unfamiliar customs of the African slaves.When the new heirs to the plantation arrive from Ireland they resurrect the ghosts of brutal injustices against Art. He bides his time and hides his abhorrence from his new master by channelling his energy into his work. During those years he prospers, he acquires land, he sees his coloured children freed after emancipation as…
