Here are 100 books that The Little House fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve loved learning about history since childhood, as attested by my bookshelves full of American Girl series, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and The Royal Diaries (Cleopatra was my favorite). After writing my first book about reenactors pretending to be French explorers, I worked as a history writer for Smithsonian Magazine. I especially love the philosophical and political questions of how we still interact with the past and how history is presented. I hope you’ll enjoy thinking about that and learning some history from these books!
This is the only fiction on a list otherwise full of nonfiction, but it more than deserves a place on this list. There are so many things to love about this book—its audacious opening line, the lush writing, the twisted relationships—but what I think history lovers might appreciate most is how deeply entwined the characters get with the history of Antiquities.
After all, the main group of characters in this dark academia only come together because they’re all studying Greek and Latin. In fact, the plot hinges on their obsession with Antiquity—but I won’t get too much more into that. I just recommend picking the book up and going along for the ride.
'Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together---my future, my past, the whole of my life---and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!'
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries.…
I have always been intrigued by missing persons. I wonder how their family copes with having no closure on the situation and how they can live wondering where their loved one is and whether they are dead or alive. I have read these recommended books many times to satisfy this craving. I enjoy a sense of the macabre even though the story may be about mundane everyday topics. This only adds to the sense of dread and wonder. I enjoy the intriguing twists and turns, keeping me on my toes and wanting more until the end. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have.
I recommend this book and the author’s fabulous writing, comprising of
dread and humour (which I love), all rolled into one. Three separate case
histories, interlinked, each littered with fabulous, memorable
characters. Jackson Brodie, the Detective trying to solve the case, is one of the best, with brilliant detective skills and a haunting
personal life.
An intriguing mix of family drama and mystery, giving it
more depth than just an ordinary thriller. I have read this book many
times, and it’s always new, never boring, and the ending is still a surprise.
Case one: A little girl goes missing in the night. Case two: A beautiful young office worker falls victim to a maniac's apparently random attack. Case three: A new mother finds herself trapped in a hell of her own making - with a very needy baby and a very demanding husband - until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape.Thirty years after the first incident, as private investigator Jackson Brodie begins investigating all three cases, startling connections and discoveries emerge ...
I have always been intrigued by missing persons. I wonder how their family copes with having no closure on the situation and how they can live wondering where their loved one is and whether they are dead or alive. I have read these recommended books many times to satisfy this craving. I enjoy a sense of the macabre even though the story may be about mundane everyday topics. This only adds to the sense of dread and wonder. I enjoy the intriguing twists and turns, keeping me on my toes and wanting more until the end. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have.
I was intrigued by the twists and turns in this story. The writing is matter-of-fact, describing everyday events that culminate in a wonderfully unexpected ending.
I love the characters and, even though the main character is really not nice, I was drawn to him, realising that the influence of your parents, your upbringing, can affect who you are.
A psychological thriller following Teddy Brex, a handsome, young autistic man who comes to the aid of Francine Hill, a beautiful young woman traumatised by the murder of her mother, and now stifled by the overprotectiveness of an obsessive stepmother; but Teddy has already committed two murders.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
I have always been intrigued by missing persons. I wonder how their family copes with having no closure on the situation and how they can live wondering where their loved one is and whether they are dead or alive. I have read these recommended books many times to satisfy this craving. I enjoy a sense of the macabre even though the story may be about mundane everyday topics. This only adds to the sense of dread and wonder. I enjoy the intriguing twists and turns, keeping me on my toes and wanting more until the end. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have.
I was drawn to this book by the insight into the mind of a mother who swears that the child she sees is not her own, despite reassurances from her husband, friends, and doctors, who say it is.
I always feel a sense of heart-thumping dread as I read it. I want to help the mother, who nobody will listen to. I feel it is a great piece of suspenseful writing.
One of the Sunday Times 100 Best Crime Novels and Thrillers Since 1945
The first extraordinary psychological suspense thriller from internationally bestselling author Sophie Hannah. Not to be missed for readers of Clare Mackintosh and Paula Hawkins
'Terrifying' Scotsman 'Ingenious' Sunday Times
It's every mother's nightmare . . .
She's only been gone two hours.
Her husband David was meant to be looking after their two-week-old daughter. But when Alice Fancourt walks into the nursery, her terrifying ordeal begins, for Alice insists the baby in the cot is a stranger she's never seen before.
There is something so magical about creating art and bringing an idea to life. As a writer and an art teacher, I love watching artists of any age find their own inspiration and joy in creating. I have used these books to launch all kinds of projects, from paintings to pottery, for every age and stage of artist. I hope you will find inspiration in these pages, too!
This is one of the most creative and magical books I’ve ever seen. Every time I share this book, I hear a gasp when I get halfway through it and flip it upside down to continue the story, upside down and backward. You have to see it to believe it! For older students, it’s a great way to introduce the tricky concept of negative space.
This book isn't just the STORY of a family’s round trip - it IS a round trip! Read forward and look at the sights, then flip the book over to see something different on the way back. The black-and-white illustrations for the trip into the city become something different when the book is turned upside down for the journey home. Clouds turn into puddles, fields of wheat turn into rain, lightning becomes mountain trails, and building lights morph into stars. "Round Trip" was featured on Reading Rainbow, the acclaimed PBS-TV series celebrating books and reading.
Understanding history is essential for understanding ourselves as human beings – for recognising where we’ve come from and why we live as we do. What I love about historical fiction is that it can take tumultuous times and show their effects on the individuals who lived through them. As a historical novelist, I try to bring history back to a tangible, human level. These short novels show that if a writer’s prose is fresh, witty, and moving, then historical novels don’t need to be enormous tomes to give us a new slant on the past and allow us to inhabit lives utterly different from our own.
This exquisite book tells the story of the one family in the remote Maesglasau valley in Wales, and the ferocious changes that the twentieth century brings to their traditional rural way of life.
Originally written in the Welsh language and beautifully translated into lyrical English, this is a poignant and unforgettable story. I love how the language is simple, but it delicately renders the lives of the family members, giving them dignity and beauty despite sorrow and hardships. It feels old-fashioned yet also timeless.
"The most fascinating and wonderful book" JAN MORRIS
"A restrained, lyrical tour de force" OWEN SHEERS
In the early years of the last century, Rebecca is born into a rural community in the Maesglasau valley in Wales; her family have been working the land for a thousand years, but the changes brought about by modernity threaten the survival of her language, and her family's way of life.
Rebecca's reflections on the century are delivered with haunting dignity and a simple intimacy, while her evocation of the changing seasons and a life that is so in tune with its surroundings is…
Four sisters in hiding. A grand duchess in disguise. Dark family secrets revealed. An alternate future for the Romanovs from Jennifer Laam, author of The Secret Daughter Of The Tsar.
With her parents and brother missing and presumed dead, former Grand Duchess Olga Romanova must keep her younger sisters…
I didn’t realize for a long time that I was drawn to reading and writing quiet, character-driven stories about found families–because I didn’t know that was a thing. But here we are. As an introvert, I love learning about people and exploring their relationships with one another, and I have devoted my writing and reading life to this endeavor (even before, again, I knew this was a thing). As a child, I spent my time in libraries, falling in love with these characters. Now, as an author and professor of writing, I believe these novels are also all incredible textbooks of character creation and storytelling.
I first read this as a teen and fell hard for the characters that populate this story and Novalee’s life. Pregnant and abandoned, Novalee’s life is the definition of loss at the start of the story—but by the end, her life is filled with such love and richness that it’s easy to forget how she started.
She continues to experience loss as the story continues, but the strength her found family gives her demonstrates how the right people can help us grow. These characters are quirky and loving, and I can’t help but wish they were all real every time I read it.
A 17-year-old pregnant girl heading for Califonia with her boyfriend finds herself stranded at a Wal-Mart in Oklahoma, with just $7.77 in change. But she's about to be helped by a group of down-to-earth, deeply caring people, including a bible-thumping nun and an eccentric librarian.
I am the son of Irish rural immigrants who at the age of nearly eighty already occupies several vanished worlds myself: London in the 1950s and 60s, the old world of the European peasantry, and a time when the greatest war in human history was still a daily presence. I spent most of my life as an academic historian writing books for an academic audience. Then, to my surprise, at the tender age of seventy, I discovered that I could write prose that had a certain grace and dignity and which seemed to move people as well as inform them. So, I began a second career as what is called a “writer.”
This is French peasant life in its last days, a life rendered from the outside by one who became an insider.
Berger went to live and work among the peasants of the French south in 1962. This world, like that of Spain at much the same time, saw the death of the old peasantry. It is not a work of observation like Norman Lewis’s book but a series of fictional stories. It treats peasants as human beings, on an equal standing with all others in society. They have depth and gravity. Just like us all.
How awful most writing about peasants is. This stands out proudly from that awfulness.
With this haunting first volume of his Into Their Labours trilogy, John Berger begins his chronicle of the eclipse of peasant cultures in the twentieth century. Set in a small village in the French Alps, Pig Earth relates the stories of skeptical, hard-working men and fiercely independent women; of calves born and pigs slaughtered; of summer haymaking and long dark winters f rest; of a message of forgiveness from a dead father to his prodigal son; and of the marvelous Lucie Cabrol, exiled to a hut high in the mountains, but an inexorable part of the lives of men who…
I am an author, poet, and visual artist. These interests converge in my approach to literature. I think that visual and psychological descriptions of environments and circumstances are essential to enlivening the narrative and setting its tone. Often in modern literature this is diluted in favor of straightforward accounts. I believe that a story is never told with any complete objectivity but has a psychological context that must be highlighted. In addition, vivid visual descriptions greatly assist the reader in inhabiting the world of the story as seen from the characters’ points of view.
Of all the elements of this story, I feel the love triangle between Eustacia, Wildeve, and Clym is of secondary interest to the environment in which it takes place, which is the weird and lugubrious heathlands.
Perhaps I am unfamiliar with heaths; as far as I know, we don’t have any in the U.S. Hardy describes the British heathlands like the landscape of another planet. Largely flat with shallow hills and vales, it sometimes bursts with floral color, and depending on the weather, it can be beset with raking orange sunlight or gloomy palls of mist.
The locals are fond of lighting evening bonfires, and Hardy’s descriptions of the firelight dancing on their faces are mesmerizing and compellingly suggests an unbroken cultural link with Britain’s pagan past.
One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar throughout…
Inspiring historical fiction based on the real life of Bertha Benz, whose husband built the first prototype automobile, which eventually evolved into the Mercedes-Benz marque.
"Unfortunately, only a girl again."
From a young age, Cäcilie Bertha Ringer is fascinated by her father's work as a master builder in Pforzheim, Germany.…
A lover of fiction since my teens, I only really took an interest in history in my 20s. I’m fascinated with WWII and the 1950s due to family histories and having visited key sites, like Bletchley Park and the Command Bunker in Uxbridge, near where I grew up. I’m not especially patriotic, but I am proud of what Britain had to do in 1940, as well as the toll the war took and the years of recovery. But it’s also the time, albeit decreasingly so, when people still alive today can look back at their youth, and we can all have a nostalgia for that time in our lives.
As a huge fan of Ian McEwan’s early novels with their dark drama, especially The Innocent, I initially gave up on this book after the first 70 pages—but then, thankfully, resumed a while later.
What seemed a genteel novel about manners transforms into something much more sinister and dramatic. I loved the tense atmosphere of it, with much of the story condensed into one hot pre-war summer’s day and then the later serious repercussions from what, at the time, seem fairly harmless childish actions.
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a…
