Here are 71 books that The Second Mrs. Astor fans have personally recommended if you like
The Second Mrs. Astor.
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After years as a London-based music journalist for publications such as Melody Maker, Q, and The Guardian, I turned to ghostwriting rock autobiographies and discovered how much more satisfying it is to tell someone’s full, unadulterated life story rather than to feed on carefully cultivated scraps gleaned from half-hour interviews. I never imagined anybody would be as lewdly transparent as my first memoir subject, Nikki Sixx, but many others have run him close—not least Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, in 2020’s appositely named Confess. Its follow-up, Biblical, is imminent. Does it go the extra mile? I don’t think it will disappoint…
Autobiographies by genuine A-listers can prove disappointing experiences, as the superstars in question tread delicately lest they puncture their carefully cultivated public images. Not so Sir Elton John, who in Meworked closely with Guardianwriter Alexis Petridis to deliver a racy, rambunctious, scurrilous account of his serial misdoings. Everyone had always known that Elton John was doing crazy shit. Nobody had grasped that he was doing quite as much as this.
In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life. Me is the joyously funny, honest and moving story of the most enduringly successful singer/songwriter of all time.
The Sunday Times bestseller with a new chapter bringing the story up to date.
'The rock memoir of the decade' - Daily Mail 'The rock star's gloriously entertaining and candid memoir is a gift to the reader' - Sunday Times ______________
Christened Reginald Dwight, he was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed…
I have always had an interest in reading factual information about other people’s lives. I am a realist, and prefer reading non-fiction that is true. I am especially interested in reading inspirational stories from people that have overcome adversity, illness, or discrimination.
We all need a laugh from time to time, and this book is pleasant light-hearted reading. ‘Ladies of a certain age’ look back with amusement and sometimes embarrassment at their younger selves. All women of a certain age can identify with this group of authors and the silly things we did during our youth way back when there was no internet or mobile phones and we had to actually talk to people face to face!
Remember ironing your hair? Rolling it in soda cans to straighten it? Lacquering it with enough spray that it could ward off bullets? Ever slather on cement-colored lipstick so heavy, you looked like a zombie princess? Remember hot pants and platform heels? The danger of patent-leather shoes? Were you a secretary, nurse, or teacher, but only, as our mothers urged us, until you found “Mr. Right.” In her new book, LAUGH OUT LOUD: 40 WOMEN HUMORISTS CELEBRATE THEN AND NOW…BEFORE WE FORGET, Allia Zobel Nolan and 40 funny ladies from the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop chronicle these blips in time…
I have always had an interest in reading factual information about other people’s lives. I am a realist, and prefer reading non-fiction that is true. I am especially interested in reading inspirational stories from people that have overcome adversity, illness, or discrimination.
I was drawn to this book because I had always loved Dave Allen's humour.
Through Ms. Soutar's book I learned of his early life in Ireland and how his attendance at strict Catholic schools run by nuns helped to shape his later stand-up comedy routines. Not everybody enjoys Dave's kind of irreverent humour, but for me he was a comedy legend.
The image of Dave Allen is seared into our minds. He sits on a tall chair with a glass of J&B, smoking his Gauloises, a fingertip missing as he tells the most hilarious, rambling stories. But what of the man behind the image? Carolyn Soutar's biography is the most revealing account of the famously private comedian, whose career began in the sixties but who remained influential to a whole new generation of comics in the 21st century. Having worked with him as his stage manager, Soutar was able to see how he behaved both on and off screen. She discusses…
I have always had an interest in reading factual information about other people’s lives. I am a realist, and prefer reading non-fiction that is true. I am especially interested in reading inspirational stories from people that have overcome adversity, illness, or discrimination.
I enjoyed Too Close to the Sun by Sara Wheeler. This book focused on the free spirit and playboy that was Denys George Finch Hatton, portrayed by Robert Redford in the film Out of Africa. Denys was from an upper-class family and lived an unconventional life according to his own rules. He is buried in the Ngong Hills, Nairobi, where he loved to spend his time hunting. He is a perfect example of doing what you want to do and not having to worry about money.
Conservationist, scholar, soldier, white hunter and fabled lover - Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. After a dazzling career at Eton and Oxford, he sailed in 1910 for British East Africa - still then the land of the pioneer. Sara Wheeler reveals the truth behind his love affairs with the glamorous aviatrix Beryl Markham, and - famously - with Karen Blixen, a romance immortalised in her memoir Out of Africa.
'No one who ever met him', his Times obituary concluded, 'whether man or woman, old or young, white or black, failed to come under his spell'.
I am Lynda Rees,The Murder Guru, multi-award-winning author of historical fiction, contemporary mystery, suspense, romance, middle-grade mysteries, and children’s fiction. I love all things historical, especially American history. I am part-Cherokee, a coal miner’s daughter born in the Appalachian Mountains, and I grew up in northern Kentucky when Newport prospered as a gambling, prostitution, and sin mecca under the Cleveland Mob. My fascination with history’s effect on today’s lives works its way into my written pages. Having traveled the world negotiating with heads of industry and foreign governments during a corporate career in marketing and global transportation, this workaholic adventurer has succumbed to my passion for writing.
I found this coming-of-age story a satisfying tale of evolving self-discovery in an unlikely situation and in a less-traveled setting. Thrilling twists and turns kept me enthralled from page one to the end. The setting was vivid and colorful, and I fell in love with the well-defined, colorful characters. I highly recommend it.
If you fell in love with 1960s North Carolina when reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Donna Everhart’s The Moonshiner’s Daughter will transport you right back. Everhart’s sensitive and expert storytelling will capture you in this Southern coming-of-age novel!
Set in North Carolina in 1960 and brimming with authenticity and grit, The Moonshiner’s Daughter evokes the singular life of sixteen-year-old Jessie Sasser, a young woman determined to escape her family’s past . . .
Generations of Sassers have made moonshine in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Their history is recorded in a leather-bound journal that…
I grew up thinking I liked reading about NYC more than I’d like living there. It was too hectic and loud for a bookworm like me, I thought, too dirty and dangerous. Then my husband was accepted to Cornell’s MD/PhD program, and we moved to Manhattan. Immediately, I found that while the city is as dirty as I’d feared (and it smells), its advantages far outweigh the rest. I can’t get enough of the parks, museums, food, diversity, or the history, much of which drives The Light of Luna Park. So, without further ado, here are my five favorite books that take place in New York from the 1800s to today.
The best characters are the ones with scandalous pasts, and Una Kelly certainly fits into that category. Though she applies to the Bellevue Training School for Nurses in the 1880s to avoid being implicated in a theft, she ends up uncovering far worse crimes happening under the doctors’ noses. Skenandore has done her research here, and you’ll be transported into the Bellevue Hospital of the 1880s with an almost alarming sense of reality. Despite richly detailed descriptions of grimy tenement living, the gore of 19th-century medicine, and all the seedy aspects of New York’s past, The Nurse’s Secret leaves the reader with hope rather than despair.
The unflinching, spellbinding new book from the acclaimed author of The Second Life of Mirielle West. Based on the little-known story of America’s first nursing school, a young female grifter in 1880s New York evades the police by conning her way into Bellevue Hospital’s training school for nurses, while a spate of murders continues to follow her as she tries to leave the gritty streets of the city behind…
“A spellbinding story, a vividly drawn setting, and characters that leap off the pages. This is historical fiction at its finest!” —Sara Ackerman, USA Today bestselling author of The Codebreaker’s Secret…
I have loved historical novels since my mom first read Anne of Green Gables to me as a kid. They are the novels I reach for first and love the most. The creative glimpse into other times and lives is, to me, the most exciting reading experience. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I do. My latest book – The Sunshine Girls is a dual narrative timeline, set in the current day and the 1960s-1980s.
Amanda Skenandore’s beautiful and insightful novel about a silent film star who was sent to live in a Louisiana Leper Colony in the 1920s. The book is rich and full of surprising historical details. While it might seem like a downer – it is funny and heartwarming, with a beautiful coming-of-age story and romance at its heart. Absolutely fascinating.
The glamorous world of a silent film star’s wife abruptly crumbles when she’s forcibly quarantined at the Carville Lepers Home in this page-turning story of courage, resilience, and reinvention set in 1920s Louisiana and Los Angeles. Based on little-known history, this timely book will strike a chord with readers of Fiona Davis, Tracey Lange, and Marie Benedict.
Based on the true story of America’s only leper colony, The Second Life of Mirielle West brings vividly to life the Louisiana institution known as Carville, where thousands of people were stripped of their civil rights, branded as lepers, and forcibly quarantined throughout…
I am Lynda Rees,The Murder Guru, multi-award-winning author of historical fiction, contemporary mystery, suspense, romance, middle-grade mysteries, and children’s fiction. I love all things historical, especially American history. I am part-Cherokee, a coal miner’s daughter born in the Appalachian Mountains, and I grew up in northern Kentucky when Newport prospered as a gambling, prostitution, and sin mecca under the Cleveland Mob. My fascination with history’s effect on today’s lives works its way into my written pages. Having traveled the world negotiating with heads of industry and foreign governments during a corporate career in marketing and global transportation, this workaholic adventurer has succumbed to my passion for writing.
Pamela Kelley makes historical fiction come to life on the page in this rags-to-riches story that empowers women during an unheard-of time, as Eliza Chapman, a lady’s maid, learns her father is actually one of the richest men in NYC, and this changes her whole world.
While I have enjoyed everything I have read from Pamela Kelley, this book moves to the top of my list from her. I love historical fiction and she really makes it comes to life. - Goodreads review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
"The Gilded Girl" is a modern historical romance that was captivating! It is a from rags to riches story that empowers women which was unheard of during this time period. Pamela Kelly's best book in my opinion." - Amazon review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
When Eliza Chapman, a London ladies maid, learns that her real father is…
I grew up in the weird world of a nerdy immigrant single mother, surrounded by comics and stories of every kind. I was attracted to writing (and drawing) from a really young age. Like a lot of 80s kids I was a latchkey, so there wasn’t really anyone around to tell me what was age-appropriate. I just grabbed books at random. Most of all what appealed to me were unique voices, when the books surprised me I didn’t care what they were about. When I finally started writing comics I got obsessed with trying not to repeat myself, keeping myself surprised. These books really helped me see the freedom I had in making comics.
This story really covered a lot of ground for me, it sorta collapsed my idea of how to present visual information, it’s “novelistic” in structure, snippets of a woman’s messy life told mostly in the equivalent of subtitles, the visuals sometimes tracking the emotions rather than a string of actions. It was also published by the publisher of Batman but there was nothing even remotely supernatural about it, it wasn’t edgy or dark beyond how any of our lives are.
COMPLETE GRAPHIC NOVEL Cranky columnist Anne Merkel is only happy when she's complaining...about her editors, about being single in New York City, about running out of Scotch. But when her long-lost sister shows up claiming to be Queen of the Leather Astro-Girls of Saturn, Anne's going to wish she'd never complained about anything... WINNER OF THE HARVEY AWARD Best Graphic Album of Original Work SPECIAL EDITION BONUS: Includes a never before published teleplay written by Kyle Baker, also a few other rarities.
My first books were little Golden Books. I loved reading those stories of the sleepy little puppy and the engine that could. I moved on from there to all kinds of books and I remain a very happy reader. I have channeled my love for reading to a love of writing. My writing career started with a focus on journalism and writing for magazines, newspapers, and radio. About 18 years ago I began writing romance novels. I read all kinds of different genre but I thoroughly enjoy following the expanding relationships that make up the core element of all romances. That’s the thing about romance novels. There’s something for everyone.
If you like small town settings with big old houses and hints of a ghost, intrigue, and simmering romance, you’ll love Storms of the Heart.
The story’s female main character, Emerson Lane, finds herself right in the middle of a raging thunderstorm at night on her way to her Uncle Wayne’s house in Twin Creeks, where she lived when her parents died in a car crash. She’s on a mission to reconnect with her uncle after leaving abruptly years ago to live in New York City. Trouble is waiting for her in the name of Sheriff Max Lomax, who she left behind.
Max has his own problems, but he is secretly but begrudgingly thrilled to see her, but questions whether this time she’ll stay. I liked the interesting characters in this story and the pleasant descriptions of Emerson’s hometown. The writing was so nice it felt like I could just…
