Here are 100 books that The Girls fans have personally recommended if you like
The Girls.
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I grew up living in a housing co-op on Vancouver Island, BC. While not technically a commune, it did have some of the hallmarks. There were gangs of partially clothed kids roaming wild. There were a bunch of idealistic adults who had dreams of shared land stewardship and, well, shared everything. The housing project succeeded in many ways (it still exists today) and, it failed in other ways (over the years there were many fractures in the community). I’ve always been fascinated by attempts at communal living. I suppose my obsession with cult life is just an extension of this. It is my life imagined one step further.
This book is about a young mother who takes her two daughters to Marrakech, Morocco in the 1960s so she can study Sufism, which, although not technically a “cult” does seem rather cult-like when described from the point of view of a five-year-old child who is watching her mother do strange ritual spinning to try to annihilate her ego.
You might remember the 1998 movie adaptation of this book starring Kate Winslet, but I think the book is better because of its dreamy, almost other-worldly descriptions of street life in Marrakech. This gem of a book is steeped in childlike wonder and longing and it will be over far too soon.
I have been fascinated with the sixties and its counterculture ever since I was about eleven or twelve, and I found out that the summer I was born, 1967, was called the Summer of Love. Because of this fascination, I started reading writers like Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson at an early age. Then, I became a lover of the Grateful Dead and went on tour with them as a fan for a couple of years in my late teens. It was the best way remaining in this country, in the 1980s, to be a hippie in some real way. I still love the music and literature of that time.
This book lays bare the furious tensions in American society during the Vietnam era. I have read it three times, and each time, it reveals new treasures and nuances.
It’s a dark story about a war correspondent who decides to get rich by smuggling heroin home from Vietnam. So, while it opens in Saigon, most of the book is set in a California riven by culture clashes and soured idealism. Stone is one of America’s best late-twentieth-century novelists.
In Saigon during the last stages of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong. His courier disappears, probably with his wife, and a corrupt Fed wants Converse to find him the drugs, or else.
Dog Soldiers is a frightening, powerful, intense novel that perfectly captures the underground mood of the United States in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered the violent world of cops on the make and professional killers.…
The first books I loved were Gothic classics like Jane Eyre and Rebecca, because of their isolated settings and secretive characters. When I first started writing, it was always stories about communities–the first novel I wrote featured a retirement village and a circus. Maybe that’s because I love observing communities in everyday life, like local pubs in which everybody has their place. When domestic suspense novels really took off, I started devouring crime books with close-knit settings and soon was writing them, too. I love the claustrophobia, the backstories, the landscape, the web of relationships. It can be done in so many different and brilliant ways.
Continuing with the Gothic theme, I have to mention one of my all-time favorite books. The estate of Manderley is almost another character in this novel, looming large over the story along with the legacy of its dead mistress. And the community poses an immediate threat to the book’s unnamed narrator, the new wife of the estate’s owner, when she comes in as an outsider and gets the cold shoulder from Manderley’s staff. Her desperate attempts to win everybody over lead to some gloriously nail-biting moments.
But what I adore about this novel is how it slowly reveals that the community’s loyalties are not what they seem. Even the significance of rooms and objects in the house–like Rebecca’s writing desk or the sound of the sea from a particular window–changes as the story unfolds.
* 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY * 'One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century' SARAH WATERS * 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .'
Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
My first true religion was being a boy alone in the woods and feeling a deep connection to nature in all its aspects. I felt a connection with all life and knew myself to be an animal—and gloried in it. Since then, I've learned how vigorously humans fight our animal nature, estranging us from ourselves and the planet. Each of these books invites us to get over ourselves and connect with all life on Earth.
I loved how the novel doesn't reveal right away what it is truly about but lets it dawn on you and then invites you into a moving family story. Another tale of humans and apes, it made me feel the joys and repercussions of deep bonds across species and between siblings.
I was moved by a family that begins as a scientific experiment, struggling to find love and justice and what we like to call humanity, though maybe we need to find another word.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club introduces a middle-class American family that is ordinary in every way but one in this novel that won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I was raised with a chimpanzee,” she explains. “I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse…
I’m a music historian who loves to read novels. Most of my childhood was spent either playing the piano or devouring whatever books I could get my hands on. Now, I try to share my love of music and good writing with my students at Boston University. When not at school, you can usually find me exploring the trails of New England with my dog.
Who knew a book about sleeping could be so funny and engaging?
As someone who constantly wants and needs more rest, I related to the protagonist’s hunch that a year of (almost uninterrupted) sleep would change her life. And it does, though not at all in the way she expects.
Moshfegh writes about trips to the local bodega and the edgy conceptual art scene in such a brilliant way that the book will (perhaps, unfortunately!) keep you up late.
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Amazon,Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible
A New York Times Bestseller
"One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound." - Entertainment Weekly
"Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh's] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood." -Vogue
I became a young man near the end of the sixties, and I have always been enthralled by the era's various idiosyncrasies, both good and bad. For instance, I loved the complex yet pleasant rock music and the freewheeling lifestyle. On the downside, the war in Vietnam cast its pall over the times, and I narrowly escaped being drafted and sent off to Southeast Asia. Overall, it was an era in which good and evil were starkly defined, and many people were attempting to create a better, more peaceful world. There is still much we can learn from this time.
I love this book because it sweeps me into the wild, wonderful, free spirit of the 1960s.
Although it is ostensibly nonfiction, Wolfe uses a singular hip, frantic voice to propel readers into the weird world of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they cavort with the Grateful Dead at the infamous, hedonic LSD-laced Acid Tests, journey around the country in the psychedelically-painted bus nicknamed Further, and eventually head for Mexico to avoid arrest.
I've read this book multiple times, and on each occasion, it's like time-traveling to one of my favorite eras.
I looked around and people's faces were distorted...lights were flashing everywhere...the screen at the end of the room had three or four different films on it at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been...the band was playing but I couldn't hear the music...people were dancing...someone came up to me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the back of my eye-lids...I sought out a person I trusted and he laughed and told me that the Kool-Aid had been spiked and that I was beginning my first LSD experience...
Riley Masterson has moved to Greenbrier, SC, anxious to escape the chaos that has overwhelmed her life.
Questioned in a murder in Alabama, she has spent eighteen months under suspicion by a sheriff’s office, unable to make an arrest. But things in gentrifying Greenbrier are not as they seem. As…
I am a teacher, a college professor, and a lifetime reader. I came from a small town, went to college to study writing, ended up getting graduate degrees in theatre, became a theatre director, and then went back to my first love, writing. Throughout my childhood, I bonded with my siblings, and we often feared our mother, who was a fascinating creature but often rough on us. She expected perfection and wasn’t in tune with her childhood. So even then, stories of children in danger—abandoned or scolded or shamed—have resonated with me.
I shiver at evil and am, at the same time, fascinated. How can so much badness exist? There is plenty to shiver at in Room, but I guess I always wonder how people survive brutality and if I would be able to do so. The mother in Room manages to keep love alive as she raises a child in brutal imprisonment.
And what hooked me was her use of imagination, making a world out of their non-world. The use of words is a major part of what she teaches her son. (I am a word freak.) Also, the novel honors something I really believe in: seeing and valuing everything, every little thing. The less you have, the more precious a scrap of paper is; any small thing can become important, and I think there is joy in that.
A major film starring Brie Larson. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Shortlisted for the Orange Prize.
Picador Classics edition with an introduction by John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra.
Jack lives with his Ma in Room. Room has a single locked door and a skylight, and it measures ten feet by ten feet. Jack loves watching TV but he knows that nothing he sees on the screen…
My new thriller centers around a small, mysterious cult and their shocking demise. For years, I’ve read true crime books on the subject, and I wanted to infuse the reality and truth of real-life events into my fictional novel. In a similar vein, these books represent a range of thrillers inspired by true events, ranging from cults to serial killers to teenage criminals. I hope you find these books as gripping and haunting as I do.
I find this book to be an unsettling but impactful read, both thought-provoking and complex. We Need to Talk about Kevin follows the mother of a troubled teenager responsible for a school shooting.
It’s about nature versus nurture, the relationship between mother and child, and deeply seated guilt. It draws inspiration from real events, including the 1999 shooting at Columbine, which wasn’t the U.S.’s first mass shooting at a school, but it would become one of the most infamous.
Shriver’s novel raises unsettling questions about a mother’s guilt and self-justification and a community’s heartache and blame. I consider it to be a captivating and moving book.
Eva never really wanted to be a mother; certainly not the mother of a boy named Kevin who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher who had tried to befriend him. Now, two years after her son's horrific rampage, Eva comes to terms with her role as Kevin's mother in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her absent husband Franklyn about their son's upbringing. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to…
My new thriller centers around a small, mysterious cult and their shocking demise. For years, I’ve read true crime books on the subject, and I wanted to infuse the reality and truth of real-life events into my fictional novel. In a similar vein, these books represent a range of thrillers inspired by true events, ranging from cults to serial killers to teenage criminals. I hope you find these books as gripping and haunting as I do.
I’m fascinated by the in-depth character development and details in this book. The film is a classic, but I think the book is even better. Many people think of Hannibal Lecter as the obvious villain of Silence of the Lambs, forgetting that Clarice and the FBI were seeking his guidance to find “Buffalo Bill,” a fictional serial killer attacking women.
Buffalo Bill is an amalgamation of real serial killers, including Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, and Gary Heidnik. By cherry-picking the methods and traits of real killers, I think Harris created a truly terrifying villain. I find the characters, and especially the villain, to be rooted in reality, making them stick in your mind long after the last page.
As part of the search for a serial murderer nicknames "Buffalo Bill," FBI trainee Clarice Starling is given an assignment. She must visit a man confined to a high-security facility for the criminally insane and interview him.
That man, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is a former psychiatrist with unusual tastes and an intense curiosity about the darker corners of the mind. His intimate understanding of the killer and of Clarice herself form the core of Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs--an unforgettable classic of suspense fiction.
Ophelia, a professor of Dante, is stricken when she discovers that her husband Andy has been cheating on her with a winsome colleague. What follows is Ophelia’s figurative descent into hell as she obsessively tracks her subjects, performs surveillance in her beat-up Volvo, and moves into the property next door…
I’m a poet, novelist, and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Teesside University in the UK. I like to write and read about particularly gender power dynamics, and how those come to play in domestic situations. I love lyrical novels and books that explore characters’ interiority, and I’m interested in how, generally speaking, ‘toxic’ and ‘abusive’ relationships have become synonymous – even though they are quite different. These novels helped me write my own, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I did!
This novel is a masterclass in unreliable narration. It follows Will, a young man estranged from his family and religion, as he attends college and falls in love with Phoebe.
As Will takes over and narrates his recollections of their relationship, Phoebe’s friendship with a man named John Leal, and her inculcation into a religious cult, he becomes increasingly untrustworthy. Will rails against John Leal, his lies, and the damage he has done to Phoebe, revealing his complicity in toxic masculinity and his own harmful actions.
Kwon renders her characters as entirely believable, frightening people, in lyrical and considered prose.
'Absolutely electric . . . Everyone should read this book' GARTH GREENWELL'Every explosive requires a fuse. That's R. O. Kwon's novel, a straight, slow-burning fuse' VIET THANH NGUYEN'In dazzlingly acrobatic prose, R. O. Kwon explores the lines between faith and fanaticism, passion and violence, the rational and the unknowable' CELESTE NG'A sharp, little novel as hard to ignore as a splinter in your eye' WASHINGTON POST'Raw and finely wrought' NEW YORK TIMES'The Incendiaries packs a disruptive charge, and introduces R. O. Kwon as a major talent'…
