100 books like Tyll

Set on the beautiful island of Barbados, Edugyan’s take on the slavery/emancipation interface focuses on primary characters that are male. The relationship between two of them, one White and one Black, becomes an exploration of how slavery created a toxic psychological legacy that distorted the nature and possibilities of friendship and trust.  

I’ve loved Barbados since my first visit as a teenager, and I became more attached after some of my siblings called it home. Known as ‘Little England,’ a downside of this sunny paradise, and a relic of slavery, is its unequal economic and social class divisions. The population is over 90% Black but most of the valuable land and resources are owned by non-Blacks. I encourage readers to look beyond its surface beauty and explore its deeper history. 

There are dozens of journeys contained within this unclassifiable work of fiction. With each episode or story or exploration, the reader begins to perceive how travel transforms and erases us, even as it shows us the true strangeness of the world. If that sounds vague, then I’d say that you don’t read Flights for its many stories, as you do for Tokarczuk’s quiet, steely, attuned prose and exhilarating ideas.  

It’s 1764 on Manhattan Island, and a stranger from London arrives at a small town called New York. He expects to receive a thousand pounds. A cast of dynamic characters appear. There are intrigues and adventures. All writers try to be vibrant on the page—to write smart, vivid, witty descriptions and dialogue. And then you come upon a writer like Francis Spufford, who is able, somehow, do it a degree or two better than everyone else.   

This isn’t just a book, it’s a magic trick—and I’m not sure how Flanagan pulls it off. Writing about the prisoners of war forced by Japanese soldiers to build the Thai-Burma Railway during World War II, he pulls no punches in his depictions of human cruelty, and readers will feel every single one. As he renders misery and starvation in relentless focus, the subject matter is pitch black… and yet, by bridging the story to the present, when the survivors and their captors are trying to live normal lives beneath the weight of their history and their actions, Flanagan turns this from a litany of human suffering into something far more complex and interesting. Black magic, maybe, but magic just the same.

Wedgewood published this in 1938, on the cusp of World War II.

In many ways the disaster that was the Thirty Years war provided an allegory of what was to come. Many authors have tackled this subject since Wedgewood wrote, some far more massive than her 500 pages, but there’s a reason this one remains in print. Wedgewood wrote an eminently readable narrative that is as delightful to read as its subject is dreadful. She excelled at what narrative should provide: a sense of development, how a huge event happens from beginning to end, all while keeping the reader’s attention. 

Wedgewood conveyed the nastiness, carnage, and utter craziness of the conflict in a dispassionate, easily understandable way.

It is impossible to understand Germany or indeed continental Europe without understanding the horrific conflict that raged on its soil during the first half of the 17th century. One of the most devastating conflicts ever fought in Europe, it tore communities and families apart along dynastic, religious, and political lines. Famine and disease added to the horrors of war, depopulating regions in Germany by up to two-thirds of pre-war levels. The conflict left a deep scar in German collective memory, the consequences of which can still be seen in religious, linguistic, and cultural divisions today. It was a collective experience of trauma with loud echoes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Wilson’s excellent work remains the best overview in English.

The Thirty Years War remains seared into the popular consciousness across Germany and Austria as a momentous catastrophe against which other conflicts are still measured.

The conflict was indeed terrible, yet its impact was uneven across time, place, social status, and gender.

Sigrun Haude writes sympathetically about how ordinary people coped with calamity whilst skillfully weaving individual stories with the wider dynamic of military and political events. 

In terms of Scottish political and cultural history, this is a hugely important book that will astonish and delight everyone engaged in the matter of Scotland. What impresses is the range and scope of Murray Pittock’s global vision for Scotland, but what engages is the minute human detail of the people in the diaspora that he reveals to us, positive and negative. This is the polar opposite of dry history, it is a magisterial work that Scots will actively return to again and again, as we redefine our role in Europe and the world in the 21st Century. I have interviewed Murray for several BBC programmes and he has always come across as a brilliant communicator, who like me, is passionate about Scotland.

Connects military gamblers from Frederick II to Hitler, demonstrating that “rolling the iron dice of destiny” (Bismarck) by starting wars they hoped would be short but even though they knew they could not win if they went long instead, was always the German national tradition. I learned a great deal from this key book about the irrationalities of decisions made to go to war, contrary to the assumption in most analysis that decision-makers weigh the odds with care. And how many wars are started with a roll of the dice and without a real plan to win them? Or at least, no Plan B once Plan A goes awry, as it always does. 

If you are to be a serious student of war, warfare, and tactics, then you will need a general reference guide. This book should be your go-to reference for general knowledge on this subject. Jones elegantly combines three major components of war (tactics, strategy, and logistics) to explain the last 2,500 years of military history, from phalanxes in ancient Greece through to the Thirty Years’ War that shaped modern Europe. Well written and thoroughly researched, I have kept it on my desk for the last thirty years.