31 books like The Last Word

This is another ghost story told in the traditional vein. However, it is not set within the bounds of some old building but in an entire mountain village, populated by more than one ghost.

I think this is a gentle, rather beautiful read. The cold surroundings are depicted so well, it is easy to envisage them in your own mind. We begin to get to the heart of the story when Freddie crashes his car one snowy night. Circumstances mean he has no choice but to accept the hospitality of an elderly couple and spend the night under their roof. While staying with them, the tragic, ancient history of the place begins to show itself to Freddie, drawing him irrevocably into its story.

Yes, it is somewhat predictable, but I find that almost comforting. There may not be any huge surprises or great reveals, yet the way in which the… show more.

Mystery, quest, treasure, and historical adventure, this novel has it all.

Labyrinth links a twelfth-century French heroine in a land of legends, castles, and knights with a present-day heroine who finds two ancient skeletons at an archaeological dig and is drawn into a quest for the Holy Grail.

I love mystical, historical quests, and mysterious symbols, especially when the setting is so real you feel you are there. This one kept me reading far into the wee hours and I enjoyed learning more about medieval France.

A gripping personal account of an airman’s adventurous escape through France and over the Pyrenees. After Herbert Spiller’s Halifax bomber crash-landed to the east of Paris in October 1942, he had the good luck to be helped by the priest and abbot of St-Dizier. They saw him safely on to a train to Paris, where he was taken under the wing of the Comet escape line and then passed south down the line and eventually over the Pyrenees … sometimes at a high cost. Several of the French people who assisted him later died either by execution or in the concentration camps. “You can imagine ... the sense of debt that hangs over me when I ponder on the fact that nine people died through helping me to live and return to duty,” Spiller writes, dedicating his book to all those who risked their lives to help him.

One of the most inventive novels I’ve read in recent years, this beautiful Pyrenean patchwork is supposed to evoke the orchestra of voices of the mountain region in which the book takes place.

Thus, you have the points of view of local farmers and their families, but also of the mountains themselves, of storm clouds and baskets of mushrooms and plenty of animals, wild and domesticated. The Deer takes us on a delightful tangent, but the most memorable chapter might be the one from the point of view of the spirited, breathlessly energetic dog.

In this short beautiful novel, Conxa looks back on a life blasted apart by the Spanish Civil War. The Pyrenean setting of the story is as magnificent and brutal as the action here, but what I love most is the calm, timeless voice of Conxa as she tells her story of love and war and family. This is a brilliant book about what it means to live a long life and the lingering effects of the past.

During WW2 members of the Resistance guided Allied service personnel -- and others, including compromised agents, resisters, and Jews -- escaping from occupied France along what were known as escape or evasion lines, the majority leading over the Pyrenees to safety. In this book, BBC broadcaster Edward Stourton walks one of those ‘cruel crossings’, the Chemin de la Liberté, while at the same time telling the stories of those escaping and the courageous men and women who helped them, drawing on interviews with some of the last remaining survivors. It makes for compelling reading.

This book inspired by true stories of children misplaced and stolen during World War II.

This is a deeply affecting and powerful novel on the intertwined stories of four displaced children after the war ended, who have to question their true identities.

There is great tenderness in the writing of Jennifer Rosner, where a child wonders if bats have upside-down dreams and a young woman discovers the emotional depth of photography.

"There is a moment, liquid time, just before photograph's image appears on the developing paper, when Ana conjures the faces of her parents. Their actual features have blurred in her memory but she fills in with her imagination."

Questioning memory and the present is powerful to me and others who left home.

I love books about women who don’t hear the word ‘No.” And A Spy Above the Clouds is just such a book.

Constance Vivier-Clarke, “Viv” is a young American, a once hopeful Olympic downhill skiers whose pampered life is on the skids. World War 2 had broken out and she’s been shoved to the sidelines, told to go home and get married. 

But Viv has other ideas and talks her way into driving an ambulance for the American Hospital in Paris, and eventually, because of her skiing abilities, becomes a member of “Churchill’s Angels” working with the resistance to carry secret messages across the French Alps. 

This is a book that inspires. A book that challenges. And at the end of the day a book that readers will not soon forget.  

I liked the unique addition of a library ghost in this book. The main character, Carrie Singleton, is hired as a program director in the small town of Clover Ridge, Connecticut. During her first event at the library, she witnesses a murder and is later aided by the library ghost in discovering the killer. I enjoyed the mystery, the characters, and, as a cat lover, I also loved Smoky Joe, the library cat who “adopts” Carrie and also helps her. Great start to a fun, paranormal cozy series.

“For us it is a farm with a different kind of harvest,” Teale describes of how his aging Trail Woods farm yields observations, memories, and adventures. Teale has been called a “20th-century Thoreau” for his work as a naturalist, writer, and nature photographer. But in chapters titled A Hammock in the Woods, Stone Fences, The Man in the Brushpile, and more, his expression of love for living things transcends scientific observation; he shares his relationships with stones, plants, and animals so that we recognize they are made not only of earth, but of spirit, too.