79 books like The Skeletons of Scarborough House

A brilliant thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining book, Jemima is a young lady who is in need of a number of life changes. 

She’s overweight, treated like a skivvy by her flatmates, and belittled by her colleagues.

She does embark on big changes in her life, and when she achieves the goals that she sets for herself, realises that it doesn’t matter how much you change the outside of your body, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

A definite life lesson and we should also just be kind, because we never know what is happening in someone’s life. 

This book taught me that ultimately it’s up to you to make yourself happy and that we all have a right to be happy. 

I always say that this was the book that changed my life. It’s about a lady who reads a feature in a magazine about clutter clearing and starts doing it in her house, then realises that it’s her life that needs a huge overhaul, not just her house.

I wrote to the author after reading it and we’ve become firm friends with her being a huge inspiration to me in both my publishing and author journey. I would like to think that my books have similar messages, through a romantic comedy setting and plot. 

The book is about a lady who is trying to find her perfect man and is literally knocked off her feet by a man she meets on the platform of her local station on her daily train journey to London Euston.

They fall head over heels in love and her journey is the highlight of her day until she finds out a huge secret about him which means that their future is impossible.

This book has stayed with me, one part in particular since I read it over 30 years ago. It was the book that taught me that love comes in many shapes and sizes and that you can’t always choose who steals your heart.  

Belinda Jones is truly skilled at writing books that pick you up on a grey, damp, miserable day and transports you to the destination of another country where you truly get to experience their culture too. 

This was one of the first books that made me realise how you truly can travel the world through books. I always felt like I’d had a great holiday after reading these books and would recommend them to anyone who can’t physically get away. 

Books really are portable magic. This also made me want to write in a similar way where my readers want to go to my locations. 

I have included this book because it was clear from page one that the author really knows how a GP surgery works and the role of the nurse. I wasn’t surprised to read in the author's note at the end that she didn’t publish this until after she had retired from her nursing role.

The detail of how she manages to steal a death certificate and the sheer deviousness involved rings very, very true. The story slowly moves from a “Is it possible?” to actually committing the act in a way that made riveting reading.

I also really liked the fact that the female protagonist was older and described as something of a plain Jane. It made her much easier to identify with (not that I would ever have considered killing a patient, honest!) 

This is extraordinary, meditative, and beautiful. For me, it fulfils the most important element of any book – that magical sense of stepping into another world. In this case, it is the world of Katherine Swift as she describes the creation of her garden in Shropshire. Yet it is so much more than that. The book is built around the daily structure of monastic prayer, as in a medieval Book of Hours, and this contemplative mood flows through every page, taking us on a discursive journey involving horticulture, history, and the stories of some of the people who previously lived at Morville. Whenever I read it, I get that all-important sense of connection with nature and the rhythm of life.

Go on. Give yourself a treat! Read the book which started it all! There’s nothing quite like reading the original source. Harvey wrote in Latin but this is a good translation with an excellent introduction by Andrew Wear, an expert on the period. And as a bonus, the Everyman edition includes The Anatomy of Thomas Parr – an account of the dissection of a Shropshire farmer said to be 152 years old, performed by Harvey himself. What killed Parr? Coming to London, a city “full of the filth of men”. Be warned!

Helen Moorwood digs deep into the connections between “William Shakespeare” and the Stanley family whose massive marble tombs in Tong church are a sight to behold and weave a tale worthy of any detective novel.

She digs deep into the genealogy of the Stanleys and explores each and every rabbit hole to get to the truth!

I first fell in love with this book as a teenager. I first discovered it when the BBC did a fabulous adaptation of the novel and I was compelled to go and read the novel.

The book follows the story of Prudence Sarn, a woman living with a facial disfigurement at the time of the Corn Laws and the Napoleonic Wars. Her brother decides to make his fortune growing corn on the family farm, and promises Pru a cure for her facial scars if she helps him, however, his obsession with money soon turns them towards disaster, and the local community turn on Pru, accusing her of being a witch.

Returning to academic study in my forties, I wrote my PhD novel and thesis on the life of Mary Webb, a nature mystic, and it just served to make me love the novel even more. Webb’s descriptions of rural Shropshire… show more.

I can never get enough ghost and haunted house stories that have social commentary themes. This is one of the books that helped inspire my own book. Trevor Riddell’s parents are separated, and Trevor and his father move to his lumber-robber-baron grandfather’s mansion in the woods of the northwest, where Trevor’s father and aunt hope to talk their ailing father into a big-money real estate deal involving the house and land.

This book has everything I love: ghosts, intrigue, mystery, history, emotionally-complex antagonists, and epistolary story-telling through letters and journals. Woven into all that, Stein manages to insert a moral about conservation and trees (and other things I’ll let you discover on your own). Ghost stories have a history of being morality tales, and this is a modern version—true to the tradition—that I really enjoyed.