Here are 100 books that The Plague Dogs fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a teacher, sailor, kayaker, and environmental-vegan animal lover. I live by the sea among marine wildlife. I grew up sailing, then sailed the Pacific on the tiny wooden boat that was my first marital home. We had no engine, no modern technology. Like the sea beings, we had a wing in the wind and a fin in the sea so we lived in their world, on their terms. Alone, helming under the stars, I dreamed of dolphin culture and mentally made lists of possible dolphin vocations. This helped me create fiction from the dolphin viewpoint. Input from scientists brought authenticity to my marine environmental fantasies and messages.
This book is about taking the physical path to spiritual freedom, without the need for any religion. It inspired me to cross oceans under sail, to complete ultra-distance multi-disciplinary sports events, and to build my own faith in the divineness of the natural world. Would you believe it helped me win bike races?
And I love that it does all this through the lens of a beautiful feathered sea being. This non-human viewpoint released the author from the prison of human arrogance. Glorious. And it inspired some wonderful music.
This classic work is now available for the first time in paperback. Since 1951, when the last of the Witchcraft Acts was repealed, many books have been written about the reappearance of witchcraft and the development of a pagan theology. Churchmen have denounced it. Sociologists have wondered at it. Journalists have penned sensational stories about it. But until the publication of this book, no one had told the real story of it from the inside as frankly as it is told here.
Doreen Valiente, one of witchcraft's most widely known figures, was a close friend of the late Gerald Gardner,…
I am a life-long equestrian. I believe I was born with manure in my blood! I have always loved horses. I bought my own horse with my own money when I was thirteen and had to work to support him myself. I continue to own and ride horses more than fifty years later! I love competing in Dressage and riding the trails in the beautiful Colorado mountains. My interest in researching and writing historical horse stories grew out of my love of both horses and history.
Some books stay with you for a lifetime. Such is the case with Black Beauty for me.
This historical fiction novel (although it wasn’t “Historical” when it was written!”) is considered a classic because of its staying power and message. Anna Sewell’s work inspired the creation of the ASPCA because of the depictions of animal cruelty in the book.
Now, half a century later, it has inspired me to not only write historical fiction horse stories but I also chose to write in first person from the horse’s point of view the way Black Beauty is written.
Continuously in print and translated into multiple languages since it was first published, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty is a classic work of children's literature and an important text in the fields of Victorian studies and animal studies. Writing to ""induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment"", Sewell realistically documents the working conditions of Black Beauty, who moves down the social scale from a rural carriage horse to a delivery horse in London. Sewell makes visible and tangible the experience of animals who were often treated as if they were machines. Though she died shortly after it was published, Sewell's book…
By chance, I was entrusted with rare historical documents about the immigrant generations in our family, which inspired this novel and grounded it in reality. Who wouldn’t wonder why they came? Besides, I have always been fascinated by pre-modern times and how steam power changed everything and dragged us along, kicking and screaming. And, even though they arrived in America in 1836, I grew up on the farm where they lived, so I heard tales of their amazing journey. It may be 186 years on, but it’s time to tell their story, which, it turns out, is a story for us all.
Janie Chang is a master writer who weaves the power of myth into her story of a 1937 escape of Chinese university students as Japanese bombs drop on their city. Charged with protecting an irreplaceable trove of ancient books, the students face air raids, a ragged life on the road, and a growing fear of traitors from within. The Library of Legends is an evocative tale of love, war, and survival, beautifully written.
"The Library of Legends is a gorgeous, poetic journey threaded with mist and magic about a group from a Chinese university who take to the road to escape the Japanese invasion of 1937 - only to discover that danger stalks them from within. Janie Chang pens pure enchantment!" -Kate Quinn, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Alice Network and The Huntress
From the author of Three Souls and Dragon Springs Road comes a captivating historical novel-the third in a loosely-connected trilogy-in which a young woman travels across China with a convoy of student refugees, fleeing the…
As a child, all I wanted to read were books about adventure. I also had an adventurous childhood, growing up in the Louisiana swamps with a father who actually hunted alligators and took me with him. As I came of age, I longed to tell stories, and, as they say, it’s best to write about what you know. To date, I’ve penned six novels, all set in the exotic wetlands of Cajun, Louisiana. I feel missionary about this—that my writing gifts allow me to decode my homeplace in a way that makes it easier for outsiders to see the singular niche it occupies on the American landscape.
I love this book because it is one of the most stunning leaps of imagination I have ever read. The story is fresh, original, enchanting, and engrossing, crossing both literal seas and a large sea of imagination with surprises at every turn.
Pi, the young Indian boy at the center of the story, is beautifully drawn as he confronts his survival on a raft that he shares under the most unusual of circumstances. The issues—courage, resilience, humility, spirituality—resonate with all of us contemplating the human condition.
After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan—and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger.
Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi Patel, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with the tiger, Richard Parker, for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his…
I was always in love with love. I had my life all planned out, I was going to marry my high school sweetheart and have a family and live happily ever after. Newsflash, that didn’t happen and I’m glad it didn’t! As I’ve gotten older I still find myself in love with love, but now there are other things included with it such as quiet rebellion and a determination to simply be me. I find that I enjoy the suspense aspect because I know life isn’t perfect. We don’t all have stalkers or physically abusive exes, but books are a safe place to experience the emotions of these situations.
Water for Elephants was a book I went into not knowing what to expect! It was another recommendation from my mom and she was so right!
I love watching people fall in love, especially when I’ve had my own trials and tribulations in relationships! Jacob and Marlena are such a testament to true love triumphing over everything, and that is my number one reason for suggesting this book!
It also gives an incredible depiction of the Great Depression. Because of this book, I came away with a better understanding of my grandparents’ childhood struggles.
THE INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NOW A FILM STARRING REESE WITHERSPOON AND ROBERT PATTINSON
'Great story, loads of fun; hard to put down.' STEPHEN KING
The Great Depression, 1929. When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and utterly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits in the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth: a second-rate travelling circus struggling to survive by making one-night stands in town after endless town. Jacob, a veterinary student now unable to finish his degree, is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. He…
I am saddened and frustrated by polarization in American life today, and I believe that the Civil War has lessons to teach us about how we can avoid deeper divisions in our country. I grew up in Maryland, a border state, and have relatives that fought for the North, as well as relatives who fought for the South. In addition, I have Quaker ancestors who hated slavery and supported the Union, but who would not fight because they were pacifists. I am passionate about understanding the tensions that have always run through American life, and want to explore the topic deeply in my reading and writing.
I had appreciated the author as a writer of insightful essays and opinion pieces, so I was intensely curious about his first work of fiction. He blew me away with his imaginative telling of the liberation of enslaved people during the Civil War. Fact and fiction dance back and forth in this book, which reveals the horrors of slavery while celebrating the joy of the unstoppable human quest for freedom.
'One of the best books I have ever read in my entire life. I haven't felt this way since I first read Beloved . . .' Oprah Winfrey
Lose yourself in the stunning debut novel everyone is talking about - the unmissable historical story of injustice and redemption that resonates powerfully today
Hiram Walker is a man with a secret, and a war to win. A war for the right to life, to family, to freedom.
Born into bondage on a Virginia plantation, he is also born gifted with a…
I spent a decade researching my own dramatic family story in Southern Italy – a story of murder and passion – so I took a deep dive to learn about a hidden culture my relatives left behind when they came here to America in steerage. As a fellow at the New York Public Library, I literally read hundreds of books, articles, and papers over those ten years to try and educate myself about the world I was entering for my own search. These are the books that touched me the most deeply – and continue to – not just with their own intense research but with their emotion and gorgeous prose.
I loved the generational sweep of this novel, its gorgeously written history of Calabria, and its character and relationship studies. Though it is fiction and borders on magical realism, Grames spent time in her ancestral village to give the setting and background a wonderful sense of authenticity.
I loved Stella, who overcame bad luck over the decades, and her intense relationship with her sister, Tina. As a woman who wondered about the back story of her own Italian grandmother and old aunts, I was captivated by the descriptions, the attention to language and detail, and this heartbreaking tale of crushing patriarchy.
'You don't read this book, you live it' Erin Kelly
'Holds the reader under a spell from start to finish' O, the Oprah Magazine
'If you're going through Elena Ferrante withdrawals, this is the book for you' Harper's Bazaar
If Stella Fortuna means 'lucky star,' then life must have a funny sense of humour.
Everybody in the Fortuna family knows the story of how the beautiful, fiercely independent Stella, who refused to learn to cook and who swore she would never marry, has escaped death time and time again.
From her childhood in Italy, to her adulthood in America, death…
I’m a teacher, sailor, kayaker, and environmental-vegan animal lover. I live by the sea among marine wildlife. I grew up sailing, then sailed the Pacific on the tiny wooden boat that was my first marital home. We had no engine, no modern technology. Like the sea beings, we had a wing in the wind and a fin in the sea so we lived in their world, on their terms. Alone, helming under the stars, I dreamed of dolphin culture and mentally made lists of possible dolphin vocations. This helped me create fiction from the dolphin viewpoint. Input from scientists brought authenticity to my marine environmental fantasies and messages.
This long narrative poem has the most lyrical descriptions of sailing I’ve ever read, so back in my teens, I memorized it. It takes 30 minutes to recite. While voyaging under sail in the Pacific, reciting it twice would get me though the first lonely hour of my long night watch. Even today, reciting the poem sends my spirit back to the open sea.
The first turning point of the story is when the charismatic albatross is shot for no reason. The second turning point is when the mariner breaks the curse by overcoming his revulsion for the ocean’s non-charismatic “slimy things that crawl” and he blesses them. So we learn to value all life, charismatic or not.
Great title poem plus "Kubla Khan," "Christabel," 20 other sonnets, lyrics, odes: "Frost at Midnight," "The Nightingale," "The Pains of Sleep," "To William Wordsworth," "Youth and Age," more. All reprinted from authoritative edition.
I’m a dog nut who loves reflecting on the powerful life lessons we can learn as we watch our furry best friends age happily and gratefully by our sides. I’ve also been working as a journalist for more than 30 years now — so that makes me one of the oldest dogs in my own newsroom. I’m a senior writer and editor for the website of NBC’s TODAY show, and the My Old Dog book stemmed from a viral TODAY.com story I wrote about photographer Lori Fusaro’s efforts to change people’s perceptions of older shelter animals. Writing that story was one of the best things that ever happened to me!
The author’s bio in Old Dogs: Are the Best Dogs says this of Gene Weingarten: “He wants his tombstone to read only: ‘Gene Weingarten, a funny man who loved dogs,’ and to be carved in the shape of a fire hydrant.” This gives you a sense of why Old Dogs has been one of my favorite books for years. It’s masterfully written by Weingarten, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing and former humor columnist for The Washington Post. (Fun side note: Weingarten is the editor who discovered Dave Barry years ago at the Miami Herald!) Old Dogs is a collection of profiles of sweet senior dogs — and you’ll love every pooch you meet in these pages. (I have a special soft spot for Harry and Honey!)
The memories that people have of dogs they have loved and lost are almost always of the animal in his final years; somehow, those are the images we treasure most. There is a reason. Old dogs can be rheumy-eyed and grump, gray of muzzle, graceless of gait, eccentric of habit, pimply, wheezy, lazy, lumpy. But that is not the whole of him. The old dog is resolute. He is canny. He is noble. She is funny, and seems to know it. She is sweetly vulnerable. He has character and dignity and an elegance of bearing that belies his circumstances, and…
Since I brought home my first rescue thirty years ago, my life has been full of dogs and dog-related activities that I can hardly imagine the person I would've been without them. My own books often feature one or more dogs, not because I particularly decide to write about dogs, but more because I live with dogs, it’s what I know. When I’m browsing for a good read, if a book features a dog, that’s a draw for me, just because dogs are dogs; they are such good creatures, so infinitely lovable, that their presence enhances a book for me just as their presence in my life enhances my every day.
Unlike so many books where the point of view character is a dog, Haig has really thought his way into the dog. His creation, Prince, is not a counterfeit, a man in a dog suit, as it were, but a real dog. Haig’s empathic projection of how a dog might see things and interpret events is both charming and very believable. Further, Prince is a truly relatable character, without being ‘cute’. His well-meaning, doomed struggle to make sense of things he cannot understand, and to take control of a bad situation and save his family, is the very essence of tragedy; he is prevented by his very nature from achieving what he so desperately desires.
The ending will break your heart, but it’s a fantastic read that will leave you feeling richer for having read it.
FROM THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
Meet the Hunter family: Adam, Kate, and their children Hal and Charlotte. And Prince, their Labrador.
Prince is an earnest young dog, striving hard to live up to the tenets of the Labrador Pact (Remain Loyal to Your Human Masters, Serve and Protect Your Family at Any Cost). Other dogs, led by the Springer Spaniels, have revolted. As things in the Hunter family begin to go badly awry - marital breakdown, rowdy teenage parties, attempted suicide - Prince's responsibilities threaten to overwhelm him and he is forced to break the Labrador Pact…
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