Fans pick 100 books like Ulverton

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre follows the format of a romance novel: a governess falls in love with her employer, they overcome impediments, and they live happily ever after. Add a madwoman in the attic, Thornfield Hall in flames, and Mr. Rochester’s voice calling to Jane across the winds, and you have an unforgettable romance novel.

I admire Jane immensely. Her journey from being a suffering student at Lowood School to an independent woman is as relevant as ever. Through every experience, she asserts her autonomy but never wavers in her moral compass.

In Brontë’s world, love involves every fiber of one’s being, not just emotions or desire. Mr. Rochester is a complex, conflicted man who proves himself worthy of Jane’s love. For me, they have set the standard of the romantic heroine and hero. 

Set in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, this story of a newly-married couple overseeing the construction of their dream home is as clean-cut, luminous and full of hints of fragility as the building itself – a modernist cube of glass. The husband is rich, the wife excited by her new role as patron.  Their architect -  a sharply observed portrayal of a tetchy artist who will insist on sticking to his vision regardless of his clients’ doubts – wants to make them a masterpiece, and he does.  But the husband is Jewish.  We are in the 1930s.  Glass walls are not going to keep them safe. 

In lucid, elegant prose Mawer conjures up central European culture in those edgy, febrile years when artistic and intellectual energy were so vital, and politics were so deadly.

After I visited Sicily at 22 (the same age as Mariella in the book) and stayed with relatives in Siracusa, I fell in love with Sicily (and all of Italy) and wanted to know everything I could about it, its history, its customs, architecture, food, and especially to understand the collective psyche of its people. 

My grandmother was born in Sicily and never spoke English even after moving to the United States, and my uncles and father spent a good part of their childhoods in Catania, where the Sicily part of Becoming Mariella takes place. I had never before felt the deep longing of a cultural belonging, and this book, written in 1958, is one of the finest works of twentieth-century fiction (according to Daunt Books), and opened my eyes to the pride and richness of the Sicilian people and its aristocracy, their stubbornness and an understanding of how,… show more.

Clumsy peasant schoolboy, Meaulnes, and his friend – the narrator of this haunting story – get lost, and happen upon a great house, deep in the woods, where a phantasmagorical fancy dress party is underway. Everything at ‘the lost domain’ is topsy-turvy. Children are in charge. The passage of time is suspended. Social inequality has been erased.   The time the boys spend there is dream-like, disconcerting, life-spoiling because nothing can ever be so strange and marvelous again.  

Later, after much searching, Meaulnes make his way back, but the domain is like youth itself. If you return, it will be to find everything drabber than you remembered,  and the people you adored merely human. 

This book is even greater than its reputation.  Generally thought of as one of the last works of romanticism, a celebration of illusion, it is actually clear-eyed, tough-minded, bracingly truthful about the inevitably of disillusion. Alain-Fournier was… show more.

The Rape of the Rose is an unforgettable novel that details the horrors of the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Britain. Hughes, also a poet of note, portrays the enslavement of children in those “dark Satanic mills” with disturbing precision, offering his youngest characters shreds of dignity, which life has deprived them of so roundly. He also shows men and women maimed and worked to death by owners intent on extracting every last ounce of their labor. A major figure in the novel is a father who flees a mill and joins the Luddite Revolution. I read this book thirty-five years ago and remember it vividly. It presents the underbelly of the Industrial Revolution—and the ample reasons for the rebellions it triggered. 

But can you fight the future? Isn’t it inevitable? This is often how tech companies try to make us think, and that anyone who opposes “progress” is a Luddite. But, as Patrick Sale makes clear in this excellent and heartbreaking historical study, the original Luddites—a protest movement that swept the industrial heartland of 19th Century England—were not anti-technology; they merely thought technology should serve people, not profit. Faced with the destruction of their livelihoods and their traditional way of life, they destroyed machines and burnt factories because that was the only outlet they had for their rage and desperation. And when the “inevitable march of progress” comes to trample you too, you may see that they had a point.

This excellent book provides a detailed history of technology and employment during the Industrial Revolution and up to the present. It is very well-researched and provides many useful insights.

For example, although the term ‘Luddite’ is often used negatively to describe those resistant to technology, the real Luddites were justified in their concerns as they were ultimately displaced due to automation. People were even put to death because they destroyed some of the new machines.

One of the main ways AI might affect our lives is in terms of employment, or rather, a lack of employment.

Frey empowers us to have a greater understanding of previous technological innovations and how they affected workers so that we are able to have more nuanced opinions on the matter. 

I love how this book has been part of a resurgence of interest in the Luddites and has helped recontextualize the history. It really has punctured the hype around the idea that the Luddites were anti-tech – the book so brilliantly lays out the very fact that this important piece of hype-busting has been needed for some time for us to really come to terms with technology in today’s society.

It’s also just brilliant historical story-telling, and it’s written with fervour, which I always like in a book.

Full disclosure: I almost put this book down after reading the first two chapters, full of info dumps. I kept reading though, and I ended up being glad I did. The town of Lud sits near the edge of Fairyland, but the citizens want nothing to do with the fairies thankyouverymuch! They are rational, logical people, and anything from Fairyland, especially fairy fruit, is strictly prohibited. Of course that doesn’t stop an illegal trade in fairy fruit from developing... This novel doesn’t follow the pacing and structure that most readers are used to, but when you abandon expectations and accept it for what it is, it’s a wonderful blend of fantasy, courtroom drama, and political satire.  

The filmmaker Humphrey Jennings was a leading British surrealist and a founder of the pioneering social research project Mass–Observation. 

Built out of quotations from letters, diaries, literature, scientific journals, and official reports, Pandaemonium is his "imaginative history" of the industrial revolution in Britain. These "images," he writes, "contain in little a whole world—they are the knots in a great net of tangled time and space—the moments at which the situation of humanity is clear—even if only for the flash time of the photographer or the lighting." 

Published long after Jennings's death, Pandaemonium formed the basis for Danny Boyle's spectacular opening ceremony at the 2012 London Olympic Games. Jennings's use of revelatory images has strongly influenced my own approach to writing history.