Here are 65 books that The Perfect Golden Circle fans have personally recommended if you like
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My choice of books reflects a lifelong passion for literature and the natural world. I’ve always enjoyed travelling, to cities or more remote locations, learning as much as I can about the people that live there, and my first published article was about a hotel in Mali, photographed by my sister. Ten years later we published our first book, The Foraged Home. With Living Wild we wanted to look more deeply at how people lived, not just where, focussing not only on day-to-day life and their work, but their relationship with the surrounding landscape, asking big questions about our place in the world.
Six-year-old Calvin - along with his stuffed (?) tiger Hobbes - chafes against the ordinariness of his existence and ponders the meaning of life, often while strolling in the woods, or plummeting from a cliff edge in his little red wagon.
I first read Calvin & Hobbes when I was 12. Over the years, this brilliantly illustrated comic strip (which ran from 1985-1995) has only become richer and funnier and more poignant.
Calvin and Hobbesis unquestionably one of the most popular comic strips of all time. The imaginative world of a boy and his real-only-to-him tiger was first syndicated in 1985 and appeared in more than 2,400 newspapers when Bill Watterson retired on January 1, 1996. The entire body of Calvin and Hobbescartoons was originally published in hardcover as a truly noteworthy tribute to this singular cartoon in The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. Available for the first time in paperback, these four full-colour volumes in a sturdy slipcase include all the Calvin and Hobbescartoons that ever appeared in syndication. This is the…
As a teenager I loved the post-apocalyptic genre, especially John Wyndham and H G Wells, and as a scientist I’ve become increasingly aware of the threats to society, especially from climate change and pandemics. But it seems to me that any collapse will be gradual: yes, the weather will worsen, and the seas will rise; but those won’t happen overnight. We’re unlikely to see a pandemic that kills everyone, but we could well see a train of smaller ones. This is the world of Truth Sister: it’s changed, but we’ve had time to adapt. The books in my list have different takes on how a post-civilisation world might look. Enjoy!
This one’s actually the middle book of Attwood’s Maddaddam trilogy, which deals with the results of “the waterless flood,” a viral pandemic which has wiped out most of civilisation.
The Year of the Flood focuses on the lower classes, which again interests me in terms of the effect on “ordinary” people. There’s a dystopian element here, as Attwood explores the religious sect in which the protagonists find themselves.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—the second book of the internationally celebrated MaddAddam trilogy, set in the visionary world of Oryx and Crake, is at once a moving tale of lasting friendship and a landmark work of speculative fiction.
The long-feared waterless flood has occurred, altering Earth as we know it and obliterating most human life. Among the survivors are Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, who is barricaded inside a luxurious spa. Amid shadowy, corrupt ruling powers and new, gene-spliced life…
My choice of books reflects a lifelong passion for literature and the natural world. I’ve always enjoyed travelling, to cities or more remote locations, learning as much as I can about the people that live there, and my first published article was about a hotel in Mali, photographed by my sister. Ten years later we published our first book, The Foraged Home. With Living Wild we wanted to look more deeply at how people lived, not just where, focussing not only on day-to-day life and their work, but their relationship with the surrounding landscape, asking big questions about our place in the world.
Like many children, one of my obsessions was the dinosaurs, a group of animals - chickens and their kind notwithstanding - that only existed in books, the fossil record, and, chiefly, my imagination. In truth, I’m still obsessed by them, but also by the more than 99% of life forms that have ever existed on Earth and which are now extinct.
In Otherlands, Thomas Halliday, a palaeobiologist, explores Earth’s deep past, attempting to ‘see ancient life forms as if they were commonplace visitors to our world, as quivering, steaming beasts of flesh and instinct, as creaking beams and falling leaves’. A beautiful, humbling book.
“Immersive . . . bracingly ambitious . . . rewinds the story of life on Earth—from the mammoth steppe of the last Ice Age to the dawn of multicellular creatures over 500 million years ago.”—The Economist
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • “One of those rare books that’s both deeply informative and daringly imaginative.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Prospect (UK)
The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In…
My choice of books reflects a lifelong passion for literature and the natural world. I’ve always enjoyed travelling, to cities or more remote locations, learning as much as I can about the people that live there, and my first published article was about a hotel in Mali, photographed by my sister. Ten years later we published our first book, The Foraged Home. With Living Wild we wanted to look more deeply at how people lived, not just where, focussing not only on day-to-day life and their work, but their relationship with the surrounding landscape, asking big questions about our place in the world.
At once a voice arose among / The bleak twigs overhead / In a full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited; / An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, / In blast-beruffled plume, / Had chosen thus to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom . . .
Hardy’s nature poems deal in darkness and light (but mostly darkness), the changes wrought not only by seasons, but by human activity and our relationship with the natural world.
In The Darkling Thrush, the poet listens to the ‘ecstatic sound’ of the bird, ‘some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.’ A troubled ending, but, given WWI was just around the corner, a reminder how fragile it all is.
A selection of the writer's greatest nature poetry, selected by Tom Paulin, published in a beautiful new edition by Faber.
At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom . . .
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.
I’ve always been fascinated by history and the sense of place. That has led to a career in Egyptology, but I’ve come to realise that that fascination has been a part of my other interests whether it be Arsenal Football Club, rock music, or cycle touring. I’ve had the opportunity to travel a lot in recent years. My horizons have broadened, and I’ve come to appreciate the natural environment and man’s place in it more and more. None of the books on my list were chosen because of this – I read them because I thought I would enjoy them, but there’s a common theme linking them all – places, people, interactions.
This book is about a historic house in rural Suffolk in the East of England, which the author inherited from the artist John Nash. Blythe has himself made a career of writing about various aspects of the local landscape and how it, and the ways in which people have made their lives in the English countryside, have changed. The yeoman’s house itself, ‘Bottengoms’, was built in the 16th century, adapted, fell into ruin, and was then restored, and continues to be maintained to this day. It incorporates a garden and is set into the archetypally English countryside of Suffolk. Blythe’s gentle prose conveys a sense of sadness at the old ways of the traditional agricultural economy that have been lost, but in maintaining his beautiful house and sharing its story he is helping to keep some aspect of those ways, and that landscape, alive.
What happens in an old farmhouse when the farmers have left? Perhaps only a poet-historian-storyteller can say. These traditional work centres were established centuries ago, sometimes in the village street, often far away in their own fields. But the pattern of the toil was the same. This quietly vanished a few years ago. Ronald Blythe describes the going of it in his celebrated Akenfield. Some years before this his friend John Nash had rescued an already abandoned farmhouse in the Stour Valley from total dereliction. It was called Bottengoms. Nobody knows why. John Nash called himself an Artist-Plantsman. Behind both…
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…
I’ve been fortunate enough to have had a different kind of life. I was brought up by two writers who took me to magical places, far away from cities, to meet magical people. I spent my childhood searching for horse chestnuts and looking for otters. I wasn’t interested in electronic games and loud music: I wanted instead to be out in nature, watching for wild things and listening to the song of birds. It comes back to Iona, to this tiny little island on the west coast of Scotland which I will feel always is my spiritual home. In that place, I have everything I need. Nothing that a big city can offer tempts. Ever.
This is a work of non-fiction, and it’s my very favourite in the world. On one level it’s about a man who leaves the world behind and goes to live in the most remote corner he can find to live with a pet otter. But it’s about a whole lot more than that. Gavin Maxwell brings to life the sound of the birds and the crashing of the waves; you can smell the seashore beyond the door of the house and you can walk out onto the beach to see the beauty in every direction. It’s a love song to the natural world, that’s what it is. And if it doesn’t leave you moved, then you’re harder than stone.
The classic account of otters in the Scottish highlands and the naturalist who cared for them there.
While touring the Iraqi marshes, Gavin Maxwell was captivated by an otter and became a devoted advocate of and spokesman for the species. Maxwell moved to a remote house in the Scottish highlands, co-habiting there with three otters and living an idyllic and isolated life at least for a while. Fate, fame, and fire conspired against this paradise, and it, too, came to an end, though the journey was filled with incident and wonder.
An extraordinarily evocative writer, Maxwell was also talented as…
I’m a graphic novelist and designer based in beautiful Minneapolis. I tend to be varied in my artistic style and medium, moving between comics, illustration, design, and occasionally animation. Having created a graphic novel adaptation of The Great Gatsby, I feel very passionate about the subject of graphic novel adaptations. One of the most important things is that there should be a compelling reason for it to be a graphic novel in the first place; the graphic novel should do something that a prose book cannot. For my adaptation, that was the visual depiction of metaphors, the ethereal character designs, and the lush jewel-colored watercolor. The books I recommended add to the original story in unique and compelling ways.
I’m always a fan of graphic novels that capture the mood of the book, rather than trying to make everything perfectly accurate to the original. Mariah Marsden’s adaptation of Anne of Green Gables perfectly captures the magic and beauty of one of my favorite childhood books.
I mentioned how much I enjoyed this adaptation to a friend who’s also a fan of L.M. Montgomery. However, my friend hated this adaptation (especially how Anne’s nose is drawn!) which I actually found very liberating as I considered adapting The Great Gatsby. I’d been concerned about how people who loved Gatsby would view my adaptation, but this made me realize that some people would love my book and some people wouldn’t—and that was okay!
The spirit of Anne is alive and well in Mariah Marsden's crisp adaptation, and it's a thrill to watch as the beloved orphan rushes headlong through Brenna Thummler's heavenly landscapes. Together Marsden and Thummler conjure all the magic and beauty of Green Gables. Like Anne herself, you won't want to leave. - Brian Selznick, author/illustrator of "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" and "The Marvels"
The magic of L.M. Montgomery's treasured classic is reimagined in a whimsically-illustrated graphic novel adaptation perfect for newcomers and kindred spirits alike.
When Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert decide to adopt an orphan who can help manage…
I’ve loved scary stories ever since I was a kid thumbing through Goosebumps, and I’m delighted that my children enjoy them as much as I do. Since they’ve outgrown spooky picture books like mine, middle grade horror audiobooks are our favorite way to pass the half-hour drive to school—but not every excellent book has an equally excellent narrator. Some sound downright bored with the material; others have such engaging voices that I will never read the books again without hearing them in my head. These are five of the most deliciously creepy middle grade novels that we’ve discovered for those long car trips.
A Southern Gothic historical horror, Hoodoo is a story of fair and foul folk magic in 1930s Alabama. Hoodoo Hatcher is the only person in his family without a knack for the hoodoo that gave him his name—and that’s a problem, because the evil Stranger is coming for him, and he’ll need all the courage and smarts he can summon to keep himself and his family safe. To me, the greatest joy of this wonderful book is Hoodoo’s distinctive, humorous voice, and Ron Butler brings him perfectly to life in his performance; it’s not easy for an adult to make a child’s voice sound authentic, but Butler knocks it out of the park.
Twelve year old Hoodoo Hatcher was born into a family with a rich tradition of practicing folk magic - hoodoo, as most people call it. But even though his name is Hoodoo, he can't seem to cast a simple spell. Then a mysterious man called the Stranger comes to town, and Hoodoo starts dreaming of the dead rising from their graves. Even worse, he soon learns the Stranger is looking for a boy. Not just any boy. A boy named Hoodoo. The entire town is at risk from the Stranger's black magic, and only Hoodoo can defeat him. He'll just…
