15 books like The House

Machiavelli is often despised as the man who promoted both authoritarian leaders and the notion that the ends justify the means, but this is to misunderstand the importance of the context within which he was writing: 16th century Florence – which was besieged by enemies on every side who proclaimed adherence to the Christian faith but acted as monsters. Machiavelli’s writing made two things clear to me. First, leaders and leadership cannot be understood if you abstract them from their context – when political morality is a contradiction in terms then leaders must be wary of sacrificing their followers for the sake of that same fallacious morality. Second, he lays out how dictators obtain and retain power – and in doing so establishes what we need to do to stop them or remove them. 

I absolutely love the portrayal of a deeply flawed character thrown into the murky world of espionage. For me, Magnus Pym epitomizes the double standards of British and American society, desperate to protect themselves during the Cold War while revealing the inner conflict between self, family, and country.

I also love how the tension builds and builds as Pym, the double agent, rises through the Secret Service and risks everything.

Every Bond book has a London connection. You could put almost any Bond book on this list, but I chose this one because it is the first.

I feel a sense of connection to the protagonist and the city because this is where the missions originate. Even as the story plays out in northern France, communication with London is key, and I feel it.

The book that triggered my deeper exploration into the world of political corruption, Dobb’s classic still stands shoulder to shoulder with HBO’s powerhouse TV reimagining of the source material, and ticks all the political thriller boxes—corruption, blackmail, and murderous intent at the highest levels of government. The masterfully crafted Francis Urquhart is one of the most intriguing fictional characters I’ve met, determined, manipulative, and utterly ruthless, and the twisty plot moves along at a cracking pace. Do people like Urquhart really exist? Undoubtedly, although the real versions are infinitely crueler and more corrupt. If you loved the TV show, as I did, the original book will not disappoint.  

This is more your standard genre political thriller: written from the perspective of a British Prime Minister and those pulling the political strings.

I really appreciated the insights the author brings, having been an observer of government machinations and an insider of the British Labour Party. I believe it has reflections for anyone interested in understanding the fragility of democracy.

I deliberately didn't read this until after I had written my book to avoid being influenced since there are parallel warnings about how the British Establishment has a stranglehold over real power and only plays lip service to the concept of democracy.

Henry Mayhew’s sprawling record of nineteenth-century London can be overwhelming, but his ear for the vernacular and eye for weird detail means that the reader can dip in and find something.

London’s population exploded in the nineteenth century, bulked out by a huge number of itinerant workers. Mayhew interviews these people–in the prologue to the first volume, he describes himself as a "traveller in the undiscovered country of the poor"–and because he gives no judgment on their lives, the book feels more like a modern documentary.

The voices are one thing; Mayhew’s statistics are another–"expenditure in ham sandwiches supplied by street sellers is £1,820 yearly…a consumption of 436,800 sandwiches." Anyone who thinks that Dickens’ writes grotesques should read this. The first book that really brought old London alive for me. 

If you’re looking for a fresh and funny take on romance then, The Midwife Crisis is the book for you. Written in my family’s hometown of Galway, in Island, not only could I relate to this author's story, but it was a new take on a normal love genre.

Did you know that African and indigenous people worked together in what is today Bolivia and Argentina? They were both enslaved and those who had bought their freedom. Bolivia, high in the mountains, might seem remote, but in the 1500s and 1600s its rich silver mines were the motor of the Spanish Empire’s economy. And Spain was the superpower that dominated Europe, America, and the Atlantic.

Bolivia and the zones that supplied it with coerced and free workers, mules, food, wine, textiles, and the stimulant coca leaf was called Charcas, and it was the most valuable and important part of all of the Americas at the time.

This wonderfully detailed book by an outstanding Bolivian historian tells the story of the Black and indigenous laborers who made this possible.

The entertaining story of actress and elocutionist come UK suffragist from my hometown of Adelaide, where women were first granted suffrage in 1894. Muriel Matters was a fierce ‘lady’ who chained herself to the UK House of Commons ‘Ladies’ Gallery’ and really made a name for herself as an expat, whilst helping other women along the way.

Sassoon chronicled the war’s psychological, emotional, and physical landscape in several books of poetry and a three-part, partly-novelized memoir in which he cast himself as a typical well-off Englishman, George Sherston. The tale — of which Memoirs of an Infantry Officer is the second installment — follows Sassoon’s/Sherston’s evolution from a dreamy, poetic youth into a brave and loyal officer who eventually comes to publicly oppose the war. (An act that famously landed in him a psychiatric hospital, where he met a budding poet named Wilfred Owen.) 

Sassoon’s matter-of-fact depiction of life in the British trenches, with its wild and sudden swings between boredom and terror, is indispensable. His literal description of that life gradually takes on the quality of a hallucination as the reality of the war hardens in his mind and in the reader’s.