Here are 100 books that A Drop of Patience fans have personally recommended if you like
A Drop of Patience.
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As a creative writer, I think it is important for me to put myself into the bodies and minds of people, unlike myself, and imagine how they move about in the world. In my book, I write about Blind Tom, a person from the nineteenth century who has little in common with me. However, there are some affinities and connections between Tom and myself. Although I am not blind, I suffer from a disability. Also, I like writing about music and musicians. I chose to write about Tom in part because he was a great musician who has never received the proper credit he deserves from musicologists and historians.
I like this disturbing novel written by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was also adapted into a fine feature film with a stellar cast of actors. The book is a study of darkness as the driving force of human nature. Be prepared: this is not an easy read. I can tell you that you will find many unsettling scenes in the book. I think anyone who enjoys dystopian novels will like this book.
No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order.
Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers.
A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
As a creative writer, I think it is important for me to put myself into the bodies and minds of people, unlike myself, and imagine how they move about in the world. In my book, I write about Blind Tom, a person from the nineteenth century who has little in common with me. However, there are some affinities and connections between Tom and myself. Although I am not blind, I suffer from a disability. Also, I like writing about music and musicians. I chose to write about Tom in part because he was a great musician who has never received the proper credit he deserves from musicologists and historians.
I love this book because it is the only other novel, besides my own, that I know of that features pianist Blind Tom. or at least a character based on Blind. In Cather’s novel, he is called the Blind d’Arnault. Cather is a fine writer who knows how to tell a story. It is a novel that I go back to for inspiration and ideas. I often write about music in my fiction and appreciate other authors who take up this challenge.
Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential literary works. It features literary phenomena with influence and themes so great that, after their publication, they changed literature forever. From the musings of literary geniuses like Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the striking personal narrative of Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our history through the words of the exceptional few.
My Antonia, a novel by Willa Cather, tells the story of friendship between Antonia Shimerda a young woman who moves to…
As a creative writer, I think it is important for me to put myself into the bodies and minds of people, unlike myself, and imagine how they move about in the world. In my book, I write about Blind Tom, a person from the nineteenth century who has little in common with me. However, there are some affinities and connections between Tom and myself. Although I am not blind, I suffer from a disability. Also, I like writing about music and musicians. I chose to write about Tom in part because he was a great musician who has never received the proper credit he deserves from musicologists and historians.
I think Helen Keller is one of the most fascinating and brilliant individuals in human history. In this book, she shows and tells us what it is like to be a person who cannot see, hear, or speak. I find the book quite moving. Some readers will be familiar with the biopics that have been made about Heller. Take my word these movies don’t offer the pleasure of reading Keller’s story.
These poetic, inspiring essays offer insights into the world of a gifted woman who was deaf and blind. Helen Keller relates her impressions of life's beauty and promise, perceived through the sensations of touch, smell, and vibration, together with the workings of a powerful imagination. The World I Live In comprises fifteen essays and a poem, "A Chant of Darkness," all of which originally appeared in The Century Magazine. These brief articles include "The Seeing Hand," "The Hands of Others," "The Power of Touch," "The Finer Vibrations," "Smell, the Fallen Angel" "Inward Visions," and other essays. "Optimism," written while Keller…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
As a creative writer, I think it is important for me to put myself into the bodies and minds of people, unlike myself, and imagine how they move about in the world. In my book, I write about Blind Tom, a person from the nineteenth century who has little in common with me. However, there are some affinities and connections between Tom and myself. Although I am not blind, I suffer from a disability. Also, I like writing about music and musicians. I chose to write about Tom in part because he was a great musician who has never received the proper credit he deserves from musicologists and historians.
I love this book because it is so beautifully written—lyrical, poetic, vivid, moving, and engaging. I find this book to be a thing of beauty, from sentence to sentence, from page to page. This is the way I write. I would encourage others who love prose stylists to read this book.
Blind people are not casual listeners. Blind since birth, Stephen Kuusisto recounts with a poet's sense of detail the surprise that comes when we are actively listening to our surroundings. There is an art to eavesdropping. Like Annie Dillard's An American Childhood or Dorothy Allison's One or Two Things I Know for Sure, Kuusisto's memoir highlights periods of childhood when a writer first becomes aware of his curiosity and imagination. As a boy he listened to Caruso records in his grandmother's attic and spent hours in the New Hampshire woods learning the calls of birds. As a grown man the…
I’ve become fascinated with the unconventional tumultuous world of the 1920s ever since I discovered my grandmother’s box of mementos that led to my debut historical fiction, Whistling Women and Crowing Hens. The lesser-known parts of our country’s history draw me in, and the potential for strong female characters keeps me writing. Before I fell down many research rabbit holes, I thought the 1920s were just speakeasies, fringed flappers, and bathtub gin—while entertaining, it’s only the “big city” side of this transformative decade. I’ve found I prefer reading what everyday townspeople experienced, or how “normal” women became unexpected heroes, or ways people persevered after the turmoil WWI caused. There are so many undiscovered stories to be told!
Don’t be fooled by the cover, The Masterpiece is an excellent dual-timeline about two seemingly ordinary women fighting for their independence in the same place, yet from two distinct time periods.
In 1928 Clara, a confident illustrator and art instructor and in 1974 Virginia, a recently divorced tollbooth operator, found themselves working at New York City’s Grand Central Terminal.
Davis brilliantly braids both stories about complicated flawed women challenging social injustices and entitled men of their time within a fascinating setting. (Yes, 50 years apart and they're dealing with similar issues!)
I stayed up late discovering how their stories coincide once Virginia uncovered a painting by Clara. Talk about unknown history—who knew there was an art school upstairs in the Grand Central Terminal or that it was almost demolished?!
In this captivating novel, New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis takes readers into the glamorous lost art school within Grand Central Terminal, where two very different women, fifty years apart, strive to make their mark on a world set against them.
For most New Yorkers, Grand Central Terminal is a crown jewel, a masterpiece of design. But for Clara Darden and Virginia Clay, it represents something quite different.
For Clara, the terminal is the stepping stone to her future. It is 1928, and Clara is teaching at the lauded Grand Central School of Art. Though not even the prestige…
I used to steal Tolkien and Piers Anthony books from my older brother’s bookcase and burn through library world mythology sections like a ravenous beast. When I reached college in the 1990s, I realized “world” mythology had usually meant “Western” myths, and that’s when I became a Japanese Studies major and dove headfirst into feudal Japan: kitsune, dragons, dream-eaters, tengu, and other fantastical creatures. I was in love. Perfectly natural that when I started writing novels, my brain conjured romantic fantasy based on East Asian myths. Hope you’re ready to fall in love as well, with the Japanese version of fox spirits—kitsune!
In 2000, there were few English-language fantasy books based on Japanese myths. I opened this one, and instantly, Heian Period Feudal Japan came alive in a lyrical, mesmerizing way, unlike the dry history books.
And unlike the fantasy I’d grown up with, the main voice of the book was a woman—a complicated, imperfect magical kitsune who also felt like a human woman. This book made me hungrier for more non-Western myths as a lens through which to view my own concepts of womanhood.
Based on the award - winning short story Fox Magic, Kij Johnson's THE FOX WOMAN is a haunting novel of love and magic, of Kitsune, the young fox kit who catches a glimpse of a Japanese nobleman and resolves to snare his heart. Kitsune embarks on a journey that will change her, her family, and all the humans she encounters...and the magic she conjures will transform all of their lives forever. Set against the backdrop of medieval Japanese society, THE FOX WOMAN is both a retelling of the classic Japanese animal fable and a stunning exploration of what it means…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
I am passionate about historical facts, and fiction. My narrative has a universeal appeal making my work relevant to readers of diverse backgrounds. My books entertain and at the same time educate the reader, giving him/her a greater appreciation of the complex world of Latin America and the resilience of its people. I love reading diverse approaches to history and exploring ideas of how our personal interpretations of history shape our opinions.
I really enjoyed this novel by Sofía Segovia. She takes us to a mystical world. Exceptionally well described, the main character, Simonopio, sees things nobody else can see, visions of what is to come. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, Simonopio is welcomed by Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt and care for him as if they were their own. His swarm of bees always helps Simonopio, and his mission is to protect his adoptive family from threats, both human and those of nature. For me, this is a fascinating book that shows the beauty of this little boy.
From a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel-her first to be translated into English-about a mysterious child with the power to change a family's history in a country on the verge of revolution.
From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him…
I have been fascinated by historical fiction since childhood, when I used to read historical stories for children by such writers as Rosemary Sutcliffe and Henry Treece, moving on to Dickens and Austen in my early teens. Many of the great books about girls growing up were written in the Victorian and Edwardian periods by e.g. Louisa M Alcott, L M Montgomery, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I devoured all these since they seemed to take me into a different world. I am a fiction writer rather than a historian since it is the great stories offered by history that spark my passion!
Another novel with a great opening line, "Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead," The Master is a subtle and complex portrayal of the Victorian writer Henry James.
It begins at a moment in his career when, although lauded as a novelist, he has failed as a dramatist. He retreats from public life, buying a house in Rye, Sussex, where he lives alone, haunted by people from his past and preoccupied with the details of the Oscar Wilde case.
I loved the exploration of creativity and the consequences of dedicating yourself to the creative life, especially in terms of the uncomfortable relationship between artistic integrity and public response. This is a virtuoso depiction of social and psychological repression, the pain of unacknowledged sexuality, and the cost of art.
Nineteenth-century writer Henry James is heartbroken when his first play performs poorly in contrast to Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" and struggles with subsequent doubts about his sexual identity.
As a career journalist/communications specialist and historical suspense novelist, the intersection of fact and fiction has always been a fascination and an inspiration. In journalism and nonfiction reportage, the best we can hope to ascertain are likely facts. But in fiction—particularly fiction melded with history—I believe we can come closest to depicting something at least in the neighborhood of truth. My own novels have consistently employed real people and events, and as a reader, I’m particularly drawn to books that feature a factual/fictional mix, something which all five of my recommended novels excel in delivering with bracing bravado.
I was immediately taken with author/filmmaker Nicholas Meyer's brilliant pairing of a flailing, cocaine-addicted Sherlock Holmes with a winningly rendered Sigmund Freud, whom a desperate Doctor Watson has recruited to save the self-destructive detective.
Freud’s efforts eventually teased out the darkest of secrets driving Holmes’ notorious substance abuse in a manner I found enthralling. I believe the best historical novels confidently ground you in a time and a place that captivates but also conjures a reality all their own in their blending of fact and fiction, which this novel does in spades.
I’ve revisited it many times over the years. A wonderful film adaptation by Meyer was also released many years ago, starring Nichol Williamson as Holmes and Alan Arkin as Freud.
First discovered and then painstakingly edited and annotated by Nicholas Meyer, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution related the astounding and previously unknown collaboration of Sigmund Freud with Sherlock Holmes, as recorded by Holmes's friend and chronicler, Dr. John H. Watson. In addition to its breathtaking account of their collaboration on a case of diabolic conspiracy in which the lives of millions hang in the balance, it reveals such matters as the real identity of the heinous professor Moriarty, the dark secret shared by Sherlock and his brother Mycroft Holmes, and the detective's true whereabouts during the Great Hiatus, when the world believed…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
I'm Marwan Mohammed, a sociologist for the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), a pure product of the French working-class suburbs; having failed at school, taken to the streets, and ended up in research after a detour through social work and community organizing. I founded several grassroots organizations in the Paris suburbs, such as C'noues (which became a futsal club that trained several top-level players, including my brother Abdessamad Mohammed, the French national team's all-time top scorer) and more recently NormalZup, an association that tackles educational inequalities at source. I'll be telling the whole story in a forthcoming book.
There are many remedies for racism, including education, transmission, and prevention. So as not to limit myself to the human and social sciences, I suggest this children's novel by Ayaan Mohamud. It's an embodied account, a fictionalized testimony that we discover by following Hanan, the main character, who attends a prestigious school where she is subjected to a very routine form of Islamophobic ostracism.
She follows her mother's advice to stay the course and not overreact for a while. But after a tragedy, this position is no longer tenable and she makes her voice heard, in other words, she takes her place as a visible Muslim in American society in a different way.
This novel will delight young and old alike and is a good complement to the more scientific works cited in this list of recommendations. It was originally written for my children, so they wouldn't shut up.
"Will leave you feeling moved and inspired. A must read!" Cosmopolitan
A stunning debut about finding the strength to speak up against hate and fear, for fans of The Hate U Give and I Am Thunder.
People like me are devils before we are angels. Hanan has always been good and quiet. She accepts her role as her school's perfect Muslim poster girl. She ignores the racist bullies. A closed mouth is gold - it helps you get home in one piece. Then her friend is murdered and every Muslim is to blame. The world is angry at us again.…
