Here are 100 books that The Living Sea of Waking Dreams fans have personally recommended if you like
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams.
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Growing up, my mother often shared stories of her evacuation to a small Wiltshire village during World War Two. Far from a warm welcome, the local children viewed the newcomers with suspicion, and they were made to feel unwanted. My mother did, however, form one lifelong friendship that was very important to her. Her tales inspired me to write a novel about an evacuee’s experience for my Creative Writing MA. Living in Dorset at the time, I set my story there. The research was fascinating, allowing me to weave together historical insights with my own memories and experiences of today’s rural life.
The thought of walking around an occupied town in France during WWII terrifies me. The prospect of running into Nazis, looking for any excuse to arrest me, is the thing of nightmares.
But my fears shrink to nothing compared to the experience of blind sixteen-year-old Marie-Laure attempting to navigate war-torn Saint-Malo from the memory of a handmade tabletop model. The strength of courage she shows in this story has never left me.
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION
A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.'
For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic…
I knew I wanted to be a writer of fiction when I was 10 years old, being raised by my father. He thoughtfully gave me a typewriter, and plenty of other encouragement too. As a youngster, I couldn’t read enough about what youngsters read about: animals, sports, cowboys, child detectives. Soon, I came to love books that probed human conflict through characters who reached deeply into my soul. Not simplistic “good versus evil” driven principally by plot, but gut-pulling interpersonal struggle coming to life (and sometimes death) in characters facing moral and legal dilemma, and facing it with wit, humor, and human frailty.
I think this novel did more to open white minds to the needless social harm of racism than any other book. It’s almost unparalleled success in reaching American readers of all ages, in my view, places it at or very near the top of the list of great American fiction.
Though not Harper Lee’s intent, her literary and commercial blockbuster remains an enduring tutorial for writers like me: writers preoccupied with storytelling and the voices telling it. Sometimes, after a long writing session, I read a random chapter of Mockingbird to relax and to keep myself modest.
'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'
Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped…
I am always drawn to these remarkable books because they illuminate the intricacies of the human experience and the power of resilience. Sparrow in the Razor Wire captivates you with its message of hope and redemption, demonstrating that the human spirit can thrive even in adversity. The Power Elite challenges you to critically examine societal structures, igniting your passion for social justice and change. The 33 Strategies of War empowers you with strategic insights to navigate life's challenges and turn obstacles into opportunities. The Color Purple celebrates love and self-discovery, while Becoming Ms. Burton inspires you with stories of overcoming adversity and personal growth.
This is a powerful and moving novel that tells the story of Celie, an African American woman in the early 20th century who overcomes tremendous adversity. Through letters addressed to God and later to her sister, Celie shares her experiences of abuse, oppression, and isolation. However, her journey transforms as she discovers her own strength, resilience, and voice.
The relationships she forms with other women, particularly with the bold and independent Shug Avery, empower her to reclaim her identity and embrace her sexuality. Ultimately, it is a celebration of sisterhood, self-discovery, and the indomitable spirit of women, reminding us that love and hope can flourish even in the darkest of circumstances.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker's iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book.
A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug…
I’m an eclectic reader and writer, happily moving from one interest to the next. My first published book was a travel guide to the wine country of Northern California. Then came The Recipe Club — a mostly epistolatory novel written with my friend Andrea Israel. My latest book (seeking representation! Agents, if you’re listening…) is hybrid literary fiction that takes you on a deep and steep rollercoaster ride, no seatbelts included. It’s a surprising loop-de-loop of what it means to be human, what it means to belong to family and to the world, and what it means to love.
Adais the five-part fictional memoir of Dr. Van Veen — psychologist, professor of philosophy, and student of time — who chronicles his life-long love affair with his half-sister Ada. A deliberately falsified family tree prefaces the book, and the alternative title to Van’s memoir is Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Nabokov is my favorite writer and Ada is my favorite Nabokov: a long, complicated, totally original, and brilliant novel that takes explores the landscapes of Self, imagination, and consciousness, all through the lens of family. It’s not an easy read, but it is one I find infinitely inspiring.
'A great work of art, radiant and rapturous, affirming the power of love and imagination' The New York Times Book Review
Ada or Ardor is a romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle's country estate, in a 'dream-bright' America, through eighty years of rapture, as they cross continents, are continually parted and reunited, come to learn the strange truth about their singular relationship and, decades later, put their extraordinary experiences into words.
Written in mischievous and magically flowing prose, Nabokov's longest, richest novel is a love story, but also a fairy tale,…
I have long been drawn to everyday experiences in courts. Since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, I’ve been writing and teaching about courts, social welfare, and disasters in a changing climate. Following the disasters requires noticing the routine cases filed, not only the notable constitutional claims the United States Supreme Court hears. That can be hard to do, because all the cases filed are not listed in any one place. In the pandemic, my interest in the more ordinary met the databases that people assembled, gathering as best possible the many cases filed about the pandemic.
Fires in Australia in 2019 and 2020 killed billions of animals in a climate disaster. The numbers are impossible to comprehend.
In this beautiful, elegiac book, Dr. Celermajer grieves the losses by telling of one of her beloved pigs. She moves outward to reflect on how individual stories allow us to remember enormous losses. She refuses to tell this story of a climate catastrophe by telling of a few wrongdoers.
In one powerful reflection, she concludes that it is essential if almost impossible to say ‘it is I, it is I’ when speaking of who brought these losses.
I went and sat alone where Jimmy has been lying. It is way down in the bush. The light is soft, the air and the earth are cool, and the smell is of leaves and the river. I cannot presume to know what he is doing when he lies here, but it seems that he is taking himself back to an ecology not wrought by the terror of the fires, not fuelled by our violence on the earth. He is letting another earth heal him.
Philosopher Danielle Celermajer’s story of Jimmy the pig caught the world’s attention during the Black…
I’m a Pom, as Aussies would say, born and bred in England to an Australian mother and British father. I emigrated to Australia as a ten-pound Pom way back when and though I eventually came home again I’ve always retained an affection and a curiosity about the country, which in time led me to write three books about my own family history there. The early days of colonial Australia, when around 1400 people, half of whom were convicts, ventured across the world to found a penal colony in a country they knew almost nothing about, is one of the most fascinating and frankly unlikely stories you could ever hope to come across.
A bold and broad-sweeping book, written in the 1940s, described as a novel but featuring a mix of real and fictional characters, The Timeless Land is a beautifully imaginative telling of the arrival of the First Fleet in what became Sydney in 1788, as seen through the eyes of the Aboriginal people, the Governor and his officers, convicts and the odd settler. The depiction of the part-real, part-invented Aboriginal people may cause raised eyebrows nowadays, but the book is based on thorough research and written with great imagination and sensitivity. I love the mix of the real and the imaginary, while never distorting the facts. It’s a brilliant way to paint a vivid portrait of a subject, I’ve done it myself (if I may be presumptuous enough to bracket myself with Ms. Dark).
An outstanding literary achievement, meticulously researched and deeply felt, this portrait of the earliest days of the European settlement of Australia remains unrivalled. the year 1788: the very beginning of European settlement. these were times of hardship, cruelty and danger. Above all, they were times of conflict between the Aborigines and the white settlers. Eleanor Dark brings alive those bitter years with moments of tenderness and conciliation amid the brutality and hostility. the cast of characters includes figures historical and fictional, black and white, convict and settler. All the while, beneath the veneer of British civilisation, lies the baffling presence…
I am an art school dropout and recovering rock critic who, since 1981, has published a dozen books on Australian music and popular culture, plus worked extensively in television and as a freelance journalist. I'm too old to be called an enfant terrible, but with the way I still seem to be able to court controversy, I must remain some sort of loose cannon! Sydney’s Sun-Herald has called me "our best chronicler of Australian grass-roots culture," and that’s a tag I’m flattered by but which does get at what I’ve always been interested in. I consider myself a historian who finds resonances where most don’t even bother to look, in our own backyard, yesterday, and the fact that so much of my backlist including Inner City Sound, Highway to Hell, Buried Country, Golden Miles, History is Made at Night, and Stranded are still in print, I take as vindication I’m on the right track…
There’s a genre of music books, in which I plead guilty to form, that is almost scrapbook-like, that mixes and matches elements to make, at best, a seamless blend of words and images, the sort of book that is a work of art in its own right like you used to find buried down the back of the aisles at counter-culture bookstores. Wild About You is the concept writ large, perhaps not least because editors Iain McIntyre and Ian D. Marks went through a couple of other similar-styled books before getting it quite so right with this one. As a portrait of the post-Beatles beat boom in Australasia in the 60s, it is definitive, written with vibrancy and beautiful and evocative for its illustrations and design. I’m still waiting for this dynamic duo to move onto the 70s!
The astonishing outpouring of rock 'n' roll in the 1960s in Australia and New Zealand gave birth to such iconic bands such as the Easybeats, the Masters Apprentices, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, the Purple Hearts, and the Missing Links. It also launched the careers of a generation of musicians who would go on to greater, international fame with their later groups (the Bee Gees, AC/DC, Little River Band, and more). Wild About You! includes chapters on 35 bands that made the scene, as well as the editors' list of the top 100 beat and garage songs of the era.…
I’ve always loved writing comedy, since my first attempt at a joke in the school magazine. I never thought I’d get to do it professionally but somehow, through cheek and luck, I found myself as a comedy scriptwriter for the BBC, penning lines for the likes of Lenny Henry and Tracey Ullman. I’ve since gone on to have a career writing more grown-up things but nothing gave me as much pleasure as creating those lines. So I’ve returned to my comedic roots, writing comic novels. And it’s still a thrill to know I’ve written words that make people laugh.
I’m a sucker for a good title, and this one had me hooked before I read a word. But the fun doesn’t stop there with this cosy spy thriller. Reading this book left me breathless.
The pace never lets up as the hapless Dawson travels to Australia where, confused, he is chased by a colourful collection of Germans, Russians, Brits, and Aussies, all intent on getting their hands on the eponymous teapot.
I love books where the underdog finds their inner hero, and Dawson–with some help from the resourceful Lucy–is such a character. I galloped through this witty, clever book, eager to discover the secret of that teapot. I wasn’t disappointed.
Praised by comedienne Helen Lederer, founder of Comedy Women in Print Prize, who called it "A curiously magical thriller with suburban subterfuge and sparkle."
A Very Important Teapot is a comedy thriller revolving around the hunt for a lost cache of Nazi diamonds in Australia.
Dawson's life is going nowhere. Out of work and nearly out of money, he is forlornly pursuing the love of Rachel Whyte. But Rachel is engaged to Pat Bootle, an apparently successful local solicitor who has appeared from nowhere.
Then, out of the blue, Dawson receives a job offer from his best friend, Alan Flannery,…
I started reading crime fiction as a teenager, so maybe it was inevitable that one day I would start writing it. I began with short stories, but then found an idea for a novel that wouldn’t let me go. One small paragraph about a tape recording left by a dead man. The books I love reading now are often set in small towns and communities, like the one I grew up in, where normal people tend to hide the worst secrets! Hidden motivations and seeing how the past plays out in the present are two elements I love in crime fiction—they help to work out who the killer is.
Humour done well in crime fiction is rare, I think, and this novel has plenty. I think you would call it a caper, with things constantly going wrong for Jac, the main character, in bizarre and amusing ways, but Draga, her Croatian housekeeper is hilarious. Draga’s solutions to fixing things are not what any sensible person might agree to, but Jac is desperate. She even resorts to using Draga’s favourite broom herself at one point. This one will keep you on the edge of your seat, yes, but you might also fall off it laughing. I’m hoping there will be a sequel.
The week begins like any other in Jacqueline Burne's messy life. And it just gets worse. Jac's business is in trouble, her husband is up to no good, and her eccentric housekeeper, Draga, is nagging her with unsolicited advice. Then Jac's annoying teen stepson lands on her doorstep and wants to stay.
Jac devises a plan to regain control of her life, but Draga jumps in to help and it goes horribly wrong. They soon find themselves on the wrong side of the law, where handcuffs and prison jumpsuits become a real possibility. As Jac juggles her many problems, dark…
I am a Research Professor in history at UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy. I now mostly write on the military history of British India history but for 27 years I worked at the Australian War Memorial, Australia’s national military museum, where I became Principal Historian. Much of my career was devoted to Australian military history and more than half of my 40 or so books are in that field. That puts me in a good position to comment upon what I think are the five best books in the field of Australian military history (my own excepted, of course).
My late colleague at UNSW Canberra, Jeff Grey, wrote this important book at the age of just 31. The product of a military family, Jeff blossomed from a specialist in Commonwealth operations in the Korean war into the author of a confident, opinionated (but impressively well researched) general history that went through three editions before Jeff’s untimely death in 2016. Jeff deserves credit for seeing that despite the resurgence in interest in Australia’s military history over the 1980s, no one had spotted the need for a comprehensive book that showed us how the bits went together. Thirty years on, no one has bettered it.
A Military History of Australia provides a detailed chronological narrative of Australia's wars across more than two hundred years, set in the contexts of defence and strategic policy, the development of society and the impact of war and military service on Australia and Australians. It discusses the development of the armed forces as institutions and examines the relationship between governments and military policy. This book is a revised and updated edition of one of the most acclaimed overviews of Australian military history available. It is the only comprehensive, single-volume treatment of the role and development of Australia's military and their…
