62 books like Aubrey/Maturin Novels

This novella explores the idea of the musical earworm.

The narrator’s wife is an accomplished pianist; she and a violinist begin performing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata together, which serves as a motif and a proxy for adultery. The protagonist catches them together and commits an unforgivable act of violence.

It is rare in literature to portray the way music can soundtrack our lives—yet that is how many of us experience music, rather than seated in a concert hall on a Saturday evening. Tolstoy’s novella shows how a single piece of music can take on the repetitive, hallucinatory sheen of madness.

A celebrated composer squares off against a newspaper editor as old friends become enemies.

Ian McEwan has always woven classical music into his novels; his book Saturday features a neurosurgeon listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations while he operates. But the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam features a working musician as a main character. 

Some readers view Amsterdam as second-tier McEwan. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I love how vain and prickly Clive Linley can be. McEwan writes wonderful passages about the physical process of composing, often at the piano, for a man who “regarded himself as Vaughan Williams’s heir.”

I was sixteen when I first read Jane Eyre, and I was thoroughly unprepared for how it would change the course of my life.

My mother died when I was eleven, so I found a kindred spirit in the orphaned main character Jane. By the time she grew up and became a governess for the brooding Mr. Rochester, I cared deeply about her happiness.

As intense chemistry sparked between Jane and her employer, I realized that my true joy in life would be to write “can’t put it down” love stories like this one.

I love a story that tells it straight, right from when the person was a know-nothing beginner and was trying and failing, and trying and failing…and oh, the failures that Paulsen somehow survived! The drive and obsession that kept him going all the way to the big one, the Iditarod, shows me the beauty of what an individual can do, even all alone, unwitnessed and unhelped, in the middle of the freezing winter night, with a pack of dogs that doesn’t even care about him a little bit yet.

In reading this book, I feel I have witnessed how a person starts from nothing and then becomes an expert at something. In this case, it’s more than 10,000 hours, Anders Ericsson.

This is Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn mixed with some Robinson Crusoe all packed into one! This is an absolutely charming book that you will not be able to put down, and which also happens to be nonfiction!

It follows the story of one of the most interesting and famous men the Bahamas Isles have ever known, a retired chemistry teacher from Canada named Evans Cottman. This low-key and humble man saw himself slowly transformed into a renowned doctor with all of the colorful dialects, weather, people, and customs of the isles surrounding him.

It is perhaps a little stretch to call this a historical fiction; the inclusion of a completely fictious country blurs the line a little with fantasy. But there is no magic in this story, other than the magic of a thrilling, rip-roaring adventure.

The story is one of mistaken identity, as Rudolf Rassendyll discovers he has an uncanny resemblance to the king of a tiny, fictional nation called Ruritania. He soon finds himself caught up in the court intrigues of that world, having to take the place of the King when he is captured by the villains, and even take the place of the King in his romance with the beautiful Princess Flavia.

This book will keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish. You will at once both root for and hate the clever, laughing antagonist, Rupert of Hentzau. 

This novel explores what it means to leave music behind.

August Blue follows a concert pianist who walks off the stage, mid-performance, then follows her doppelganger across Europe. As she moves further from her artistic career, music becomes a memory. 

I admire the dream-like nature of the story, and the way Deborah Levy manages to capture in prose the idea of a sound heard, remembered, and slowly forgotten, as in this passage: "There were weeks when I played fragments of my score through the night, which is when I felt most in communion with [her]. I projected myself into her and she became music."

This non-fiction book about the mutiny on HMS Hermione was a massive inspiration behind Leeward which features a fictional mutiny in the Caribbean.

I read it after listening to a podcast featuring Angus Konstam and was instantly hooked. The historical events were shocking and brutal and had far-reaching political consequences at the time. Angus Konstam describes them so cinematically and with such intriguing historical detail that I absolutely devoured the book.

I became immersed in my own research and started imagining what it would have been like on those ships – both the Hermione and the Surprise which hunted her down. 

This is my favorite type of space opera: bigger-than-life characters, tons of action, with great sense of wonder and a world full of surprises. The women characters are excellent, as well.

There is a touch of fantasy in this series that I found sparked a hint of the numinous.

I came across this book while researching why the US Army (and Marines) struggled so badly in the Vietnam War. As with all the books I’m recommending here, it spoke to me of how men go to war for their duty but stay at war for their brothers.

It speaks volumes of the frustrations and contradictions of a war in which an American generation skewed to the poor and racially discriminated against was sent to fight a highly motivated army of liberation and paid the price for their obedience. And told me more about what really happened in the valleys of that benighted country than any history book could.

I read it cover to cover and then read it again, eagerly consuming its truth at a time when the scars were so fresh that the truth was barely starting to emerge, and I commend it to you both as a… show more.