Here are 91 books that The Girl Who Lost a Leopard fans have personally recommended if you like
The Girl Who Lost a Leopard.
Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I was a child who was very dissatisfied with the idea that this world, with its rules and routines, is all there is. Sunday school filled me with a fear of hell, and heaven sounded boring, a lot of people wearing white and singing. This forced me into the world of fairy and folktales: spirits, tricksters, masquerades, elves, werecreatures, and merpeople. It was all so exciting and, more than that, comforting. The just were rewarded, and the wicked were punished within the timeframe of the story, not later when they died.
I grew up reading fairy tales from other lands and taking our own oral stories back home for granted. At the very least, our stories belonged to dark, scary places.
This book changed all that. It was magical! It showed me new Igbo mythology and made my culture appealing and heroic. What's not to love?
Fantasy has long been one of my go-to genres. I also studied history in college and grad school. And while my academic focus was 20th-century America, I’ve always enjoyed studying other regions and eras. So if you can boil a book down to the equation History + Fantasy = Magical Learning Experience, I’m in. Those are also the types of novels I love to write.
This one gets a content warning too: Black Leopard, Red Wolf is decidedly not a children’s book. It contains graphic depictions of violence, sex, and rape.
But the worldbuilding—my god, the worldbuilding. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is an African fantasy set before Europeans intrude, and there’s very little that feels “Western” about the story. The monsters are distinct (roof-walkers who stalk you from the ceiling, lightning vampires whose thralls crave their master’s charged blood, men who mutated themselves into spiders, and many more). The societies function according to different rules. The magic works in intriguing ways.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf also offers an unorthodox mystery to unravel. And while the voice lost me on occasion, there’s a messy genius here I’m glad I engaged with.
I come from a family of some of the earliest big-game hunters turned conservationists of India and grew up treading jungles with my naturalist father. As a child, I was often found trying to catch a snake or spin a yarn or reading from the collection of wildlife and natural history books at home. Jungles were as much a part of growing up as was going to school, and I learnt precious life lessons from them. To pursue the cause of conservation, I’ve written several fiction and non-fiction books, as well as articles in national dailies/magazines on wildlife and nature, and I was appointed the Honorary Wildlife Warden of Udaipur, India.
500 square miles of terror. 125 deaths. One hunter.
The Rudraprayag man-eater’s reign of terror went on from 1918 to 1926.
The remarkable hunter cum conservation Jim Corbett’s inimitable style, simple language, and unadulterated love for the forests will keep you hooked to this gripping tale of true adventure as he follows the footsteps of the leopard in the wild mountains. What makes Corbett special is that he empathised with not just the plight of humans, but of animals too. “(The crime) of the leopard was not against the laws of nature, but against the laws of man,” the hunter wrote in his book.
Corbett was a real-life hero and an inspiration for my father. And subsequently for me too.
Jim Corbett's books are usually collections of stories about how he tracked and shot man-eaters in the Indian Himalayas. The present volume consists of a single story, which is perhaps the most exciting of all Corbett's jungle tales.
I’ve always been an animal lover who's also interested in what makes different creatures tick: how they’ve evolved as living beings, where and how they exist, and what role any given one plays in our world at large. I also find bodies of water calming to gaze at, fun to splash in and sail on, and it’s intriguing to study them as ecosystems. Each type—from small transient sidewalk puddles to vast enduring seas—can support some form of animal life under the right circumstances. And, for me, the fact that we humans spend most of our time experiencing life on land makes marine life that much more mysterious and magical to learn and write about.
This adorable story revolves around Shawn, whose love for the majestic shark is so strong that he revels in learning all the things about its life and function in the sea.
When it’s time for his class to draw predator names for a project assignment, Shawn is devastated to wind up with the Leopard Seal instead of the Great White Shark that Stacy drew. Tensions flare between the two when Stacy refuses to trade predators.
The rest of the story unfolds as Shawn slowly realizes he can love sharks andseals, and that a really great thing about humans—like Stacy and him—is that they can figure out how to become friends with each other.
Shawn loves everything about sharks. He loves their dark, blank eyes and the way they can grab something tasty like a seal in just one bite. He loves sharks so much it's really all he thinks about, until Monday.
On Monday, Ms. Mitchell tells the class they may each pick one predator's name out of a bowl, and that is the animal they will learn about. Shawn wants to pick sharks so badly he almost falls out of his chair. But Shawn does not pick sharks.
I’ve turned lessons from a 30-year career with the Central Intelligence Agency into crime fiction loaded with intrigue and deception. My Detective Emilia Cruz mystery series pits the first female police detective in Acapulco against Mexico's drug cartels, government corruption, and social inequality. Readers will love Detective Cruz’s complex plots, fast action, and exotic location. I’m originally from upstate New York, the setting for the upcoming Galliano Club thriller series. My family tree includes a mayor, a Mensa genius, and the first homicide in the state of Connecticut with an automatic weapon. After killing two people, including his wife, my great-grandfather eluded a state-wide manhunt. He was never brought to justice.
I love the combination of a historical mystery with a
little-known location, but this book also charmed me with a spare but fluid
writing style. Ceylon in the 1930s under British rule (today Ceylon is
the independent nation of Sri Lanka) sets the first book in the addictive Inspector Shanti de Silva mystery series
in a riveting yet mostly overlooked moment in history. Add a superbly written
cast of characters and set them at odds against each other, and I’m hooked on
the whole series.
De Silva is the head of a 3-person police force in the
smallish city of Nuala where he must straddle the divide between the local
population and his British bosses. Reports of a cruel tea plantation owner lead
to a missing worker and the owner’s suspicious debt. A dubious business
associate, a frazzled wife, and a chatty mynah bird all combine to add layers
of…
Meet Inspector Shanti de Silva, the new chief of police in Nuala, a sleepy town in the beautiful tea country of colonial Ceylon. He moved from the big city in search of a quiet life, but now that he’s faced with the suspicious death of an arrogant plantation owner, it looks like Nuala won’t be as peaceful as he’d hoped. He’s going to need all his experience to unravel the mystery and prove his worth to his new British boss. A vintage-style mystery set in the 1930s, spiced with colourful characters and a dash of humour.
When my father died in 1998, bladder cancer, I was 41 years old and privileged to be his primary caregiver for five weeks. My first major loss and it was as though a mack truck had been driven through my chest. Ten years later, my mother died, after nine years of dementia, which is like losing someone twice. That was a more ravaging grief. Twelve years later, my nephew died, a month away from his 36th birthday. And in 2022, one close friend of mine took his own life and another died of cancer at age 57. Grief is the subject I gravitate toward in the books I read and the essays I write.
This book is about the most horrifying loss imaginable: the author loses her parents, her husband, and her two young sons all at once, in the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the day after Christmas, 2004. She and her family were spending the holiday in Sri Lanka when the wave hit and overtook the jeep in which they were attempting to flee. I can’t come up with a better justification for suicide than this—she’s lost everyone; she wonders why she was spared, just to suffer these losses every minute of every hour of every day. The book is both a horror story and a testament to human strength. I assure you, you won’t be able to put it down.
The book opens and we are inside the wave: thirty feet high, moving at twenty-five mph, racing two miles inland. And from there into the depths of the author's despair: how to live now that her life has been undone?
Sonali Deraniyagala tells her story - the loss of her two boys, her husband, and her parents - without artifice or sentimentality. In the stark language of unfathomable sorrow, anger, and guilt: she struggles through the first months following the tragedy -- someone always at her side to prevent her from harming herself, her…
Nicholas Jubber has written for the Guardian, Irish Times and Telegraph, amongst other publications. He has won the Dolman Travel Book Award, for which he has been shortlisted three times, and his books have been picked by National Geographic, Wanderlust and the New York Times, amongst other publications, for their books of the year.
The scale of this ancient Indian epic is off the charts, fusing Hindu iconography with story beats of startling familiarity. Monkeys build a bridge between India and Sri Lanka, an army of demons takes on the vanguard of the gods and the villain is felled by a celestial bow. An influence on storytelling down the ages – notably Star Wars – it’s a tale as exciting as it is charming, with a surprisingly downbeat coda, as Queen Sita discovers that being rescued by her divine husband isn’t enough to survive the prejudices of her age.
Which version to read? Arshia Sattar’s 1996 translation is available in Penguin translation. I can’t testify to its accuracy, but it’s a magnificent read.
One of India's greatest epics, the Ramayana pervades the country's moral and cultural consciousness. For generations it has served as a bedtime story for Indian children, while at the same time engaging the interest of philosophers and theologians. Believed to have been composed by Valmiki sometime between the eighth and sixth centuries BC, the Ramayana tells the tragic and magical story of Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, an incarnation of Lord Visnu, born to rid the earth of the terrible demon Ravana. An idealized heroic tale ending with the inevitable triumph of good over evil, the Ramayana is also an…
I’ve been a street musician, set up kindergartens, worked in special needs education, and run wood-fired showers in a field for meditation retreats. I’m also associate professor of sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. I became a Buddhist partly out of interest in a very different culture and started wondering how Buddhism got from Asia to the West. I think about this through my own experience of teaching meditation, being an activist for 35 years, living in five countries, and learning ten languages: what do you have to do to make an idea come alive in a different culture?
I love this warm-hearted and rich account of the first Americans to become Buddhist: the romantics who fell in love with Asian cultures, the rationalists who thought of Buddhism as a science or philosophy of human existence, and the esotericists who sought magical powers and powerful initiations. From Lafcadio Hearn’s celebration of “old Japan” to Countess Canavarro who set up a nun’s order in Sri Lanka, via Theosophists, vegetarians, and atheists, this book is a fantastic collection of people’s lives which were both transformed by meeting Buddhism and yet remained distinctively American even in their new form.
This work examines 19th-century America's encounter with one of the world's major religions. Exploring the debates about Buddhism that followed upon its introduction to the USA, the author shows what happened when the transplanted religious movement came into contact with America's established culture and fundamentally different Protestant tradition. The text, first published in 1992, traces the efforts of various American interpreters to make sense of Buddhism in Western terms. Tweed demonstrates that while many of those interested in Buddhism considered themselves dissenters from American culture, they did not abandon some of the basic values they shared with their fellow Victorians.…
I have always been fascinated by beauty and art. As a child growing up in India, I sketched frequently. Later, I became obsessed with photography. In 1999, I moved from my first academic job to join the newly forming Center of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.The move was an opportunity to rethink my research program. In addition to studying spatial cognition, attention, and language, I decided to investigate the biological basis of aesthetic experiences. At the time there was virtually no scholarship in the neuroscience of aesthetics. It has been an exciting journey to watch this field grow. And, it has been exhilarating to start the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, the first research center of its kind in the US.
Ellen Dissanayake was a primary force in the modern era to bring evolution into the conversation of why we have and often revere art. For her, art promotes social cohesion in small groups and making objects special through ritual lies at the root of making art. If you want to learn about how evolution might have promoted the creation of art, this book is the place to start.
"Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies of birth, death, transition, and transcendence. Drawing on her years in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea, she gives examples of painting, song, dance, and drama as behaviors that enable participants to grasp and reinforce what is important to their cognitive world."-Publishers Weekly"Homo Aestheticus offers a wealth of original and critical thinking. It will inform and irritate specialist, student,…
I was born in South Africa. My mother was a daughter of Polish immigrants, while my father was a first-generation Jewish Lithuanian (a ‘Litvak’). I emigrated at 20 and have spent much of my life in Europe, with extended periods in Nigeria, the Caribbean, and back in South Africa. Being mobile and displaced is both part of my personal experience and my chosen professional career. Although I do work on other themes (like island societies, creolization, and globalization) I found myself increasingly writing on migration and diaspora.
The issue of when one can call a dispersal a ‘diaspora’ has been a long-running debate between those interesting in diasporas. Displaced peoples can return, fragment, or assimilate. What factors are in play that impel any one ethnic group to cohere, link to similar communities aboard and continue to connect, emotionally and in other ways, to their place of origin? This is a tough question to answer and Van Hear has a brave try in answering it. He has undertaken field research in Africa and Sri Lanka and his command of the sources and comparisons is impressive. Of course, there are many refugee flows that post-date this book, but it nonetheless stands as a first crack at addressing the issue of diasporic formation.
Charts the connections between migrations crises and the formation and demise transnational communities, looking at 10 contemporary migration crises aroun the world. Examines factors that are accelerating and constraining the growt of transnational communities, and provides a perspective on the soc
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
Sri Lanka,
poaching,
and
Europe.
