Fans pick 91 books like The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels

I absolutely love the high-intensity emotion and forbidden love in this story. Tanya Bird did an incredible job of pulling me into the tension between two characters, and I love how each book is about a different love story between characters within the same world!

A bit different from my usual fantasy picks, this series has a more dystopian and historical fantasy vibe, but it’s such a well-crafted dark world and the romantic tension is so good that I almost forget there are no real magical type elements.

I think this book explains why genocide happens under the cover of war. It made me see why both World War I and World War II were marked by genocides. I really liked how the author explained why the Armenian Genocide was a key event of World War I.

Balakian is a poet who turned to history writing to explain the experience of genocide and demonstrate the central importance of the international response to genocide. He uses interesting source material from eyewitnesses and official archives to trace both the humanitarian response and military decisions that brought the US into the war on the side of the Allies in the wake of the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century.

It might seem pompous and affected to recommend this masterpiece by one of the greatest deities in the literary pantheon (who’s no stranger to accusations of pompousness and affectation himself…)—especially when it’s not immediately clear who’s on the other side of Isabel Archer’s “will they or won’t they?” story. Is it the competent, hardworking Caspar Goodwood? The aristocratic, lovelorn Lord Warburton? Her kind, ailing benefactor Ralph Touchett? Or the uncaring art collector Gilbert Osmond? It is evidence of Henry James’ genius that I felt, at the end of the novel, that I had encountered every one of these characters at some point in my life (occasionally in myself)—and his brilliant heroine became the unhearing recipient of all the advice I’ve ever needed to give myself on how to choose a partner.

This is the book that got me into naval history and made me want to be a naval historian.

Bennett was a serving officer in the RN and the son of a naval officer. He writes with pace, experience, and clarity about the major naval encounters of the First World War. It is a book that would be a good primer for anyone wanting to start the WW1 at sea journey. I purchased it in a second-hand bookshop in Cambridge and never looked back.

I was riveted by this revisionist history of how America got into World War I and changed American society and politics. He shows how much of American collective memory about why WWI was fought, and the perception of Germany in America was fashioned, to a large extent, by British propaganda. He also shows why Germany had no choice but to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare, which eventually brought the United States into the war.

Had the British modified the naval blockade on Germany, which starved the German population in a horrific manner, the United States might never have become involved. But Great Britain was determined to make sure Germany would never again pose a threat to its colonial overseas empire. President Wilson at first understood that American neutrality was the means by which he could have brokered peace, but British and French recalcitrance, and eventually the deaths of relatively few… show more.

Charles Bean’s epic volumes were pioneering, illuminating, thorough, deeply researched and far superior to equivalent official histories produced by other nations involved in the conflict.

Although Bean’s books were written long ago — between 1921 and 1942 — they are still the starting point for any credible project concerning itself with what the AIF did in battle. And he edited various volumes in the Official History series compiled by other writers as well, including a book about the home front during the war.

Bean was remarkable. His Official History, and the records and research materials underpinning it, have been crucial in so much of my work—not only my lost generation multi-biographies, and also my books on Pompey Elliott and Will Dyson, but many other research projects as well.

This is the first novel I read about grieving families who commissioned photographers to search for the place where their loved one died, in order that a photo could be taken for them to have as a keepsake.

I love learning something new when I read a book and I discovered so much about the after-effects of losing someone without having knowledge of their last moments and a place to pay one’s respects. 

This is about Edie, a widow wanting answers about her husband who she believes might still be alive, despite being classed as ‘missing, presumed dead’ in 1917. She commissions her late husband’s brother to search for him and photograph his final resting place, if indeed there is one.

A wonderful, haunting story of enduring love and loss.

I was very pleased to read that book. It comforts us to know that the people we lost are living through us, through our actions I share the author's view that the world we live in is not our home. Like the author, I think we're just passing through this world, which means we will all see each other again when the time comes.

This modern gothic follows Ivy Radcliffe as she suddenly inherits an estate house in England, during the tail end of World War I.

Throughout this story grief is explored very intimately through Ivy mourning the loss of her brother to the war, but also the way that the communal grief of the war affects individuals and shapes English society and how it functions.

Without giving away too many spoilers, memory places a huge, multilayered role in the story, and of course we see the way that grief and memory are connected, both through the way Ivy remembers her lost brother and characters mourning the way life once was before the war and, ultimately, will never be again.

This is a short punchy book that provides a great introduction to the topic of codebreaking in England during the Great War, giving a sweeping overview and then some entertaining and tantalizing stories about the people involved. At just over a hundred pages, this is a quick read that serves as a fun introduction to the topic.