Here are 100 books that A Long Way from Paris fans have personally recommended if you like
A Long Way from Paris.
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I’ve been fascinated with living life on my own terms since I was a child and drew pictures with inspirational quotes such as ‘go your own way!’ and ‘aim for the moon!’ Fast forward to my thirties and I quit my 9-5 career to embrace what it means to live out my wildest dreams. I was terrified but, aren’t we all? I can’t get enough of inspiring books that teach me how to live big, believe in myself, and push far beyond what society tells us we should do. All of which helped me to build my dream life and live it. Now get out there and make your dream life happen!
Driving Over Lemons is a quintessential travel book that inspired me to throw away my regular life and start exploring the world.
This classic tale takes you to far-flung shores bathed in sunshine, filled with misadventures, and bursting with glorious food. What more could you need to start dreaming, take a leap, and make your perfect life a reality?
This is my go-to for the start of any big project and always gives me the courage to go for it and laugh in the face of adversity on the way.
A special anniversary edition with an updated chapter set 25 years on by Chris Stewart.
Over two decades ago we set up Sort of Books to help our friend, the some-time Genesis drummer Chris Stewart, bring his sunlit stories of life on a Spanish mountain farm to print. Ever the optimist, Chris hoped to earn enough money to buy a second-hand tractor for his farm. He got his tractor, as the book spent a year on the Sunday Times Top 10 charts and went on to sell a million and a half copies.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Linda is an award-winning author and travel enthusiast. Her two-book memoir series, French Illusions, is based on her diaries from 1979 and 1980. She has completed an adaption of these books into a screenplay and is currently seeking representation. Originally from Seattle, Linda now resides in Saint Petersburg, Florida with her longtime husband near her youngest daughter and grandchildren. To this day, she tells people that she is thankful for her storybook life.
With humor and grace, Valerie describes her trials and tribulations as she transitions from a divorce and corporate job in Johannesburg, to renting and eventually purchasing an old barge in the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. As she points out, “one of the first things you learn about living on a barge is that an awful lot of stuff is going to end up in the water.”
In this account of her first year of living on a barge in Rotterdam's Oude Haven, Valerie Poore’s overriding impression is that “one of the first things you learn about living on a barge is that an awful lot of stuff is going to end up in the water”.The year in question is 2001, and at forty something, the author takes the plunge to exchange her life in the corporate fast lane of Johannesburg, for life on a historic Dutch barge. Every month brings new challenges, obstacles and experiences. She meets a whole world of fascinating people, not least of…
I’m a writer, living in southwest France since 1995, and previously in Kenya for 20 years. Travel has always been my passion. I’ve written about hiking across France in Best Foot Forward, touring the perimeter by camping car in Travels with Tinkerbelle, cycling through the Marne Valley in The Valley of Heaven and Hell, and a Kenyan safari in Safari Ants, Baggy Pants and Elephants. Recently, due to COVID and with an elderly dog that suffers from separation anxiety, I couldn't leave for any length of time; I satisfy my wanderlust by reading other people’s adventures. My taste is for tales that include plenty of humour, and I’ve selected five which I have particularly enjoyed.
This made me laugh until I cried. It blends a harebrained idea with a social experiment. Two men decide to cycle from the southernmost tip of England to the far north of Scotland. They have no bicycles. They also have no clothes, food, or money.
Barefoot, wearing nothing but Union Jack boxer shorts, off they set in a freezing gale. The outcome of their journey will depend entirely on the kindness and generosity of strangers.
"...spent last night laughing so much my coffee came out my eyes..." "...this book is quite simply the best I've read in years..." "...a completely bonkers challenge and a brilliantly funny read, I couldn't put it down..." "...it reminded me of some of Danny Wallace and Dave Gorman's best bits..." "...this wonderful story had me crying with laughter more often than not..." "...inspiring, uplifting, need I say more? Quite brilliant..." "...funny, totally engrossing and actually quite moving..." "...one of the most heart-warming, genuinely funny books I have read in a long time..." …
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
The concept of whether a woman can truly be the subject of her own life has always fascinated me. It was an invisible struggle I didn’t know I had. Until I set out to finish the 54 unmet dreams of my late father, whose life had been cut short in a car crash. It wasn’t until I looked at the world through main character lenses, the kind that just seem to come more naturally to men, that I was able to see myself truly. This is just one lesson from my book. If you’ve ever felt different, remember: you’re not. You just haven’t seen yourself as the main character yet. These books will guide you.
This book was an integral resource when I began to write my book. It helped me shape the structure of my book.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”
This, and other books I've read, did this. My favorite books of all time have inventive structures. And reading these helped me find mine.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the…
I have been to Europe a handful of times, exploring Paris, Italy, Malta, Spain, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and Amsterdam. Europe lends itself perfectly to be immortalised in literature. The continent is steeped in thousands of years of charming history, oozing out of the cobblestoned streets and painted in layers on the buildings. Scratch the surface and a new, richer layer comes to the fore, exciting and amazing anew. Europe inevitably turns into one of the important characters in any book set there and many a writer have managed to capture its essence in their work. Alongside Peter Sarstedt, Europe inspired my work, taking the reader along on a wondrous journey.
John Baxter is a master at his craft. He describes his life in Paris in a vivid, easy-to-read style, never failing to delve into the history of the streets he is roaming. He has published a number of books on Paris and its historic neighbourhoods, all immersing the reader in the sights, sounds, and culture of Paris. This is probably the next best thing to living in Paris yourself.
From the incomparable John Baxter, award-winning author of the bestselling The Most Beautiful Walk in the World, a sumptuous and definitive portrait of Paris through the seasons, highlighting the unique tastes, sights, and changing personality of the city in spring, summer, fall, and winter.
When the common people of France revolted in 1789, one of the first ways they chose to correct the excesses of the monarchy and the church was to rename the months of the year. Selected by poet and playwright Philippe-Francois-Nazaire Fabre, these new names reflected what took place at…
Of the 16 books I have written, to date, every single one of them features strong women. I like to think I'm channeling a little bit of myself in there, or perhaps I'm simply projecting the sort of strength I'd like to possess. I don't know. What I do know is that with all that's going on in the world, it's more important now than ever before to remember how strong we can all be. To be strong women, to support strong women, to seek inspiration from strong women, and to inspire the next generation of women to do the same. And that's why I've chosen to recommend books on this subject.
This isn't a book I'd usually pick up, but after hearing rave reviews, I decided to give it a go, and I'm so glad I did! It's a slow-burn suspenseful crime novel, which would usually lose my attention as I'm more a fan of fast-paced reads, but Will's writing is so wonderfully rich and vibrant that it just wouldn't put me down! Yes, it had me that gripped.
The story follows Thanh, a young Vietnamese woman who has been trafficked into the country (England) along with her sister. They get separated, and Thanh is sold off as a 'wife' to a farmer in the Fenns who keeps her there, hidden from the rest of the world.
The story is told in first person, and it gives a pretty stark insight into the domestic horrors of human trafficking and the bleak options she faces. But it's also an incredible story of…
'Outstanding. The best thriller in years' MARTINA COLE 'One of the best thrillers I have read in years' THE OBSERVER 'I couldn't put it down. A visceral nightmare of a book with one of the most evil villains I've come across in a long time. Powerful writing' STEVE CAVANAGH 'Short, sharp shocker' THE TIMES 'an early contender for one of the best books of the year' S MAGAZINE
He is her husband. She is his captive.
Her husband calls her Jane. That is not her name.
She lives in a small farm cottage, surrounded by vast, open fields. Everywhere she…
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
Growing up in a Kentucky coal-mining community, I enjoyed reading about the lives of other people and how their experiences differed from mine. I read biographies of famous people, such as Paul Revere or Stephen Foster, and an occasional memoir, such as Harlan Ellison writing about infiltrating a juvenile gang or David Gerrold revealing how he came to write forStar Trek. Fiction also took me to places that I had never seen. But something about a coming-of-age tale especially resonated with me and I hope these recommendations will help you make that same connection with how others have navigated the magic and miseries of childhood.
My only fiction pick, this classic novel set in Florida in the 1870s is about 12-year-old Jody Baxter and his friendship with a fawn. I became familiar with this coming-of-age tale in an unusual way. In seventh grade, I was on a school speech team, and one of the other kids competed in the storytelling competition using an excerpt fromThe Yearling. That excerpt included the moment when Jody’s father talks to him about becoming a man: “What’s he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.” That phrase stuck with me, and was even more powerful years later when I read the novel in its entirety and learned all that Jody had gone through by the time he and his father reached that moment.
The Yearling is a novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published in March 1938. It has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Italian, Russian and 22 other languages. It won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. Rawlings's editor was Maxwell Perkins, who also worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other literary luminaries. She had submitted several projects to Perkins for his review, and he rejected them all. He advised her to write about what she knew from her own life, and The Yearling was the result.
I am a novelist who loves stories that express deep emotions and life-changing experiences, suspenseful stories that explore how humankind responds to tragedy, to heartache, and to joy, so that is what I write. My stories don’t come from me; they come through me. I often listen to scene-setting music full blast over and over again as scenes form in my head and the words pour onto the page. I don’t write my stories in order. I usually know the beginning and end, but I write whatever scene I “see” and then arrange them in the right order when I’m done.
Christian Schwarz deftly creates a rising tension between two sisters who are torn apart by secrets. Ruth gradually pieces together memories from her childhood, bringing the story to a climax when her secrets are revealed and the consequences come to pass. This story was one I read and studied multiple times during my journey to publication.
'POWERFUL . . . SUSPENSEFUL . . . RICHLY TEXTURED . . . [A] CHILLING, PRECOCIOUSLY GOOD START TO A BRIGHT NEW NOVELIST'S CAREER' New York Times
'[A] gripping psychological thriller . . . In the winter of 1919, a young mother named Mathilda Neumann drowns beneath the ice of a rural Wisconsin lake. The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, troubled sister, and husband . . . The narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discoveries that lead to the truth of what actually happened the night of…
As a lifelong weirdo, I’m intrigued by nonstandard choices. When I was eleven, slightly precocious (and slightly obnoxious), I dropped out of school—with the support of my parents, and against the advice of everyone else. After a year of homeschooling, I started attending university. This was the first in a sequence of unusual decisions. Some worked out better than others! I continue to wonder what motivates a person to step off the well-trodden, well-lit path. When is conventional advice likely to lead to fulfillment, and when should it be modified or ignored outright? I love a story (like these five) where someone tries something completely different.
Few authors have made me seriously consider writing a fan letter, but Wendell Berry is one.
His arguments on a given topic so often feel like the arguments I’d make—if I were a little clearer in the head, a little slower in consideration, a bit more experienced with land, a bit more adept with language.
He left behind a promising career as an academic to do what generations before had done: live on and care for a beloved piece of land. His relationship with his farm in Kentucky is aspirational for me. I want to know my land that well, care that much, be that entangled and inspired by love.
'He is unlike anybody else writing today ... After Donald Trump's election, we urgently need to rediscover the best of radical America. An essential part of that story is Wendell Berry. Few of us can live, or even aspire to, his kind of life. But nobody can risk ignoring him' Andrew Marr
'Wendell Berry is the most important writer and thinker that you have (probably) never heard of. He is an American sage' James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd's Life
Wendell Berry is 'something of an anachronism'. He began his life as the old times and the last of the…
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
My passion for novels about war with a love-related component is rooted in my upbringing. My father served in the military and suffered from PTSD all his life as a result. He regaled me with stories of his time in the army during World War II, but those stories were wildly comic or compelling tales of adventure in exotic, faraway lands. The darker aspects of his experience came out in his nightmares, and later in life, in the flashbacks he experienced after his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. My mother’s life was also impacted by war. Her first marriage ended when her husband was killed in battle, and she had her own kind of PTSD as a result.
Sometimes the voice of a narrator captivates me from the beginning to the end of book, and this was the case with How I Live Now.
It’s an unusual novel, and I don’t mean that as a criticism, but as a compliment. Elements of speculative romance/forbidden love infuse the dystopian, near-future setting—pastoral England on the threat of nuclear destruction.
The central character, Daisy, is sent from Manhattan to live with her cousins, and when her aunt heads off on a work-related trip, the kids are left to fend for themselves and navigate what feels like the potential end of the world. Will their relationships survive? Will they? Read and find out.
How I Live Now is an original and poignant book by Meg Rosoff
How I Live Now is the powerful and engaging story of Daisy, the precocious New Yorker and her English cousin Edmond, torn apart as war breaks out in London, from the multi award-winning Meg Rosoff. How I Live Now has been adapted for the big screen by Kevin Macdonald, starring Saoirse Ronan as Daisy and releases in 2013.
Fifteen-year-old Daisy thinks she knows all about love. Her mother died giving birth to her, and now her dad has sent her away for the summer, to live in…
