Here are 92 books that Underneath the Lemon Tree fans have personally recommended if you like
Underneath the Lemon Tree.
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I’m a Brighton based writer. I’ve lived with bloody depression and frigging anxiety, since a child. I’m the founder of The Recovery Letters project, which publishes online letters from people recovering from depression, addressed to those experiencing it. It was published as a book in 2017 and Cosmopolitan named it "One of the 12 mental health books everyone should read". I also edited What I Do to Get Through: How to Run, Swim, Cycle, Sew, or Sing Your Way Through Depression. My fourth book, How to Tell Anxiety to Sod Off, is due out in 2022.
This book saved my life. And no, I’m not exaggerating. I read it at the peak of my depression when I’d lost all hope and my emotional pain was at its peak. I spent the whole time going ‘Yes! That’s me, that’s happening to me! Thank god someone understands’.
It is short, so that you can actually finish it. This is SO important when your concentration has evaporated due to depression. It’s written by a psychiatrist who understands what your brain is doing but also, crucially, tells you what to do and emphasises how serious this illness is.
'People affected by depression tell me this is the most powerful and helpful book ever written on the topic. I keep meeting people who say this book changed their lives.' - Jeremy Vine, BBC Radio 2
Do you have depression? Firstly, stop blaming yourself. Secondly, don't struggle on alone - read this book instead. It has helped thousands of people just like you.
Dr Tim Cantopher knows two essential truths about depression and depressive illness.
One: it's strong people who are most vulnerable to it; people whose standards are high, whose ethics are powerful, who want their lives to be…
I’m a Brighton based writer. I’ve lived with bloody depression and frigging anxiety, since a child. I’m the founder of The Recovery Letters project, which publishes online letters from people recovering from depression, addressed to those experiencing it. It was published as a book in 2017 and Cosmopolitan named it "One of the 12 mental health books everyone should read". I also edited What I Do to Get Through: How to Run, Swim, Cycle, Sew, or Sing Your Way Through Depression. My fourth book, How to Tell Anxiety to Sod Off, is due out in 2022.
Sometimes pictures express depression better than words, and that’s the case in this beautiful, powerful and hopeful little book. Depression can be hard to describe, hard to find the words to tell other people how you feel. Matthew Johnstone uses Winston Churchill’s image of depression as a black dog and in 48 pages reveals what depression can do to you.
This book is especially good to show to your loved ones when you’re finding it hard to express the pain of your depression.
'I Had a Black Dog says with wit, insight, economy and complete understanding what other books take 300 pages to say. Brilliant and indispensable.' - Stephen Fry
'Finally, a book about depression that isn't a prescriptive self-help manual. Johnston's deftly expresses how lonely and isolating depression can be for sufferers. Poignant and humorous in equal measure.' Sunday Times
There are many different breeds of Black Dog affecting millions of people from all walks of life. The Black Dog is an equal opportunity mongrel.
It was Winston Churchill who popularized the phrase Black Dog to describe the bouts of depression he…
I’m a Brighton based writer. I’ve lived with bloody depression and frigging anxiety, since a child. I’m the founder of The Recovery Letters project, which publishes online letters from people recovering from depression, addressed to those experiencing it. It was published as a book in 2017 and Cosmopolitan named it "One of the 12 mental health books everyone should read". I also edited What I Do to Get Through: How to Run, Swim, Cycle, Sew, or Sing Your Way Through Depression. My fourth book, How to Tell Anxiety to Sod Off, is due out in 2022.
This book is a beautiful, inspiring weaving tale of a psychiatrist who has recurrent depression and has worked with people with depression. She doesn’t disguise how hard depression is, she doesn’t patronise, she explains depression from her personal point of view, explores what happened in her childhood, and explains a clinician’s point of view of depression.
It’s embedded with bucket loads of empathy, compassion, and hope. You hear about the patients she’s helped and you come out feeling humbled and grateful for her telling her story. Very useful for professionals working in psychiatry and mental health but equally useful for those of us with this terrible illness.
'If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.'
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Having spent her life trying to patch up the souls of others, psychiatrist Linda Gask came to realise that being an expert in depression didn't confer any immunity from it - she had to learn take care of herself, too. Artfully crafted and told with warmth and honesty, this is the story of Linda's journey, interwoven…
I’m a Brighton based writer. I’ve lived with bloody depression and frigging anxiety, since a child. I’m the founder of The Recovery Letters project, which publishes online letters from people recovering from depression, addressed to those experiencing it. It was published as a book in 2017 and Cosmopolitan named it "One of the 12 mental health books everyone should read". I also edited What I Do to Get Through: How to Run, Swim, Cycle, Sew, or Sing Your Way Through Depression. My fourth book, How to Tell Anxiety to Sod Off, is due out in 2022.
This isn’t a traditional travel book and not a traditional memoir about depression, but a combination of both. Her journey to Antarctica becomes a metaphor for her mental health struggles throughout her life, starting from childhood.
What I love about this book, and her writing in general, is the dark humour, her acerbic observations and true understanding of how paralysing and perilous depression can be. She understands how painful depression is, the depths it can take you to and seeing your own darkness reflected by someone else is both comforting and validating.
'I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal . . . I find myself hungry to find the next morsel of who Jenny was and what her life was like' EMILIA CLARKE (on Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?)
This strange and brilliant book recounts Jenny Diski's journey to Antarctica, intercut with another journey into her own heart and soul . . . a book of dazzling variety, which weaves disquisitions on indolence, truth, inconsistency, ambiguousness, the elephant seal, Shackleton, boredom and over and over again memory, into a sparse narrative, caustic observation and vivid…
ForThe Oxford Times, I wrote the lives of 120 inspirational people from five continents.My 3 novels are inspired by real lives including the charity founder Nancy Mudenyo Hunt and the artist Qu Leilei,the hero of Andy Cohen’s film Beijing Spring. Stories of 30 not-famous choir members inI Love you Allshow that we are each unique. My memoir has a particular purpose. I dug deep into my life and my husband Atam’s to reveal the intersection of gender class and race—the barriers that shaped my life and how Atam and I tried to transcend them.
When I grew up in Luton, to cross the path of anyone who wasn’t white was rare. When Pakistan-born Safraz moved there, in 1974, the population of the industrial town was changing rapidly. Safraz’s memoir recounts with poignant humour, the effects of racism but also the friendships and the MUSIC! It’s been turned into a moving film Blinded by the Light by Gurinder Chadha. Prejudice is not white – it is human. Safraz married Bridget, a union initially disapproved of by his mother and siblings because she was a non-Muslim white woman.
Sarfraz Manzoor was two years old when his family emigrated from Pakistan to join his father in Bury Park, Luton. His teenage years were a constant battle to reconcile being both British and Muslim. But when his best friend introduced him to Bruce Springsteen, his life changed for ever. In this affectionate and timely memoir, Manzoor retraces his journey from the frustrations of his childhood to his reaction to the tragedies of 9/11 and 7/7. Original, darkly tender and wryly amusing, this is an inspiring tribute to the power of music to transcend race and religion and a moving account…
I was first introduced to George Orwell on 30 October 1969 when I bought the Penguin Road to Wigan Pier at Sussex University bookshop. The light blue sticker on the inside verifies time and place. The price shows that I was willing to fork out as much as 4 shillings, (or two days worth of cigarettes) for one of the most enduring friendships of my life.
Although he instructed that no one should write his biography, Orwell has had many superb biographers including Taylor (2003) and Bowker (2003), and his close friends Richard Rees, Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1961), and George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit (1966). John Rodden has written widely on Orwell’s reputation. However, the best full-scale biography remains the first, by Bernard Crick. Sonia commissioned it, then rejected it, but I like it because Crick knows more about politics than the others and, in the end, Orwell was a political writer.
The authoritative biography of George Orwell, written with the cooperation of Orwell's widow.
'In its thoroughness, and its mastery of a considerable volume of material, this is the definitive biography of Orwell.' Sunday Times
'It is hardly worth using up space to declare just how good it is. Different readers will come away from its seventeen pungent and packed chapters with diverse memories of its excellence.' Guardian
Historical fiction, specifically historical mysteries, is my favorite category whether I’m reading for pleasure or writing my own stories, and the decade of the Roaring Twenties is certainly the most colorful era in American history. As a historian, I want to learn; as a writer, I want to teach. But—and this is a big “but”—it’s critical that historical novels are both accurate and subtle. If I find the author has misrepresented the history or larded the story, I’m done. Which is why I can recommend the following five Roaring Twenties series. All feature characters that grow as the series progresses so it’s best to begin at the beginning and proceed mostly in order.
Daisy has solved 23 murder mysteries so far. These Christie-esque plots are set in London, at posh country estates, and in other parts of the British landscape. Daisy works as a journalist—an unusual job for a young woman in the ‘20s, especially one who is aristocratic and wealthy and, therefore, shouldn’t be working at all. Her assignments and social connections inevitably entangle her in murder investigations, which she solves with the help of a competent Scotland Yard inspector who in later books becomes her husband.
No stranger to sprawling country estates, well-heeled Daisy Dalrymple is breaking new ground at Wentwater Court to cover a story for Town & Country magazine. But her interview gives way to interrogation when suave Lord Stephen Astwick meets a chilly end on the tranquil skating pond.
With evidence that his death was anything but accidental, Daisy joins forces with Scotland Yard so the culprit can't slip through their fingers like the unfortunate Astwick slipped through the ice ...
Praise for The Daisy Dalrymple Mysteries:
'Appropriate historical detail and witty dialogue are the finishing touches on this engaging 1920s period piece.'…
I was first introduced to George Orwell on 30 October 1969 when I bought the Penguin Road to Wigan Pier at Sussex University bookshop. The light blue sticker on the inside verifies time and place. The price shows that I was willing to fork out as much as 4 shillings, (or two days worth of cigarettes) for one of the most enduring friendships of my life.
This is a four-volume collection. First, because the first thing you should read about Orwell should be by him. Second because by getting away from the more famous stuff - Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm especially – the essays, journalism, and letters get you closer to the life he lived. The inside cover says I bought them in January 1973. I remember reading out extracts to my girlfriend in bed in wintry Leyton. Make of that what you will, but the three of us are still together. Sonia Brownell was Orwell’s second wife. Ian Angus is an Orwell scholar, librarian, and founder of the Orwell Archive at UCL.
Essays, journalism and essays by the brilliant, indispensable George Orwell from 1943 to 1945. Even many decades after his death, the more we read of Orwell, the more clearly we can think about our world and ourselves.
During the Second World War, George Orwell was rejected for service and so became the literary editor, reviewer, and frequent columnist of the left-wing weekly, Tribune. “What I have most wanted to do,” Orwell said, “is to make political writing into an art.” And there is ample proof here that he achieve his ambition.
I’ve worked in and around journalism long enough to know that not all journalists are heroes. Few even aspire to be. But there is something quietly heroic about the daily task of holding the powerful to account, even in democracies where the risk of imprisonment or assassination is less than in more authoritarian states. Here is my selection of books to remind all of us about some of these more heroic aspects of the journalism trade. I hope you find reading them enjoyable and maybe even inspiring.
If fictional journalists are your thing, then this book will almost certainly introduce you to some you’ve never heard of as well as those you (really should) have. Lonsdale insightfully identifies and dissects themes that crop up time after time in creative writing about journalists, from swashbuckling rogues to unethical scumbags. In the process, she has plenty to say about the craft of journalism itself and its enduring value to society. There is humour too, as when she quotes the immortal line of Stella Gibbons (author of Cold Comfort Farm): "The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style." Lovely.
Why did Edwardian novelists portray journalists as swashbuckling, truth-seeking super-heroes whereas post-WW2 depictions present the journalist as alienated outsider? Why are contemporary fictional journalists often deranged, murderous or intensely vulnerable? As newspaper journalism faces the double crisis of a lack of trust post-Leveson, and a lack of influence in the fragmented internet age, how do cultural producers view journalists and their role in society today?
In The Journalist in British Fiction and Film Sarah Lonsdale traces the ways in which journalists and newspapers have been depicted in fiction, theatre and film from the dawn of the mass popular press to…
I first became interested in the history of the British Empire as an undergraduate. Understanding this history helped me relate my parents’ experiences growing up in a postcolonial nation with the history of the United States, where I grew up. As an academic historian, my research and teaching emphasize connections—between disparate places, between the past and present, and between our personal experiences and those of people born in distant times and places. My first children’s book allowed me to translate my scholarly work for a young audience. I hope this list of books that inspire my approach to history encourages your own investigations of imperialism and its pasts!
Claudia Jones was a Black Trinidadian woman who moved with her family to Harlem during its Renaissance. Her experiences seeking work radicalized her, and she joined the Communist Party. In 1952, the United States government deported her, and because the colonial government of Trinidad wouldn’t accept her due to her political commitments, they sent her to Britain.
There, she became the editor of the West Indian Gazette, which brought together global and local news. Jones was one of the first people I chose for my book because her life experience and writing show us that solidarity is never a flattening of identity. Instead, it is reaching beyond ourselves to find a connection in shared struggle.
Claudia Jones, intellectual genius and staunch activist against racist and gender oppression founded two of Black Briton’s most important institutions; the first black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Times and was a founding member of the Notting Hill Carnival. This book makes accessible and brings to wider attention the words of an often overlooked 20th century political and cultural activist who tirelessly campaigned, wrote, spoke out, organized, edited and published autobiographical writings on human rights and peace struggles related to gender, race and class. “Claudia Jones was an iconic figure who inspired a generation of black activists and…
