Here are 93 books that A Separate Peace fans have personally recommended if you like
A Separate Peace.
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My life was altered forever when my family moved from California to Suffolk, England. I attended an English school and was exposed to English literature, music, and history. I visited Poet’s Corner in Winchester Cathedral in London, Shakespeare’s home and grave in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and numerous English villages and gardens. Through these experiences, I fell in love with words and rhythm and how they can be used to tell stories. In college, I took a trip across Europe that further transformed my life as I encountered the art and history of Italy and France and the fascinating tableau of cultures across the continent, a trip that further expanded my appreciation of art, architecture, and creativity.
This story has remained one of my most favorite of all time.
While teaching English at a community college, I assigned this book to my students. Its tale, about a young Andalusian, Santiago, who leaves home to seek his destiny, changed my students’ lives and mine.
Together, we grew to appreciate that the best teacher is personal experience. We identified how travel teaches lessons, such as using caution judiciously and the necessity to work hard to achieve goals.
We also discussed how travel provides opportunities to develop skills like learning new languages and raises awareness about other people’s customs and perspectives.
A global phenomenon, The Alchemist has been read and loved by over 62 million readers, topping bestseller lists in 74 countries worldwide. Now this magical fable is beautifully repackaged in an edition that lovers of Paulo Coelho will want to treasure forever.
Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. This is such a book - a beautiful parable about learning to listen to your heart, read the omens strewn along life's path and, above all, follow your dreams.
Santiago, a young shepherd living in the hills of Andalucia, feels that…
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…
I’ve always been preoccupied with how personal tragedy, loss, and grief can ultimately teach us truths about existence and our own strength that we might never have learned otherwise. As a child, I was confounded by the fact of death and the transience of life, and as an adult, I’ve spent much time contemplating how literature is able to testify to the magnitude of these things in ways that ordinary language cannot. This interest led me to complete a PhD on the topic of elegiac literature and has also influenced the themes of my own fiction. I hope you find connection and inspiration in the books on this list!
There’s a driving intensity to this book's narrative and atmosphere, which remains as compelling and fresh today as when I first read it years ago. Part of its power derives from Eugenides’ use of first-person plural narration through the collective voice of a group of neighborhood boys still haunted, years later in adulthood, by the untimely deaths of five adolescent sisters in 1970s suburban Michigan.
Part-detectives, part-elegists, they piece together their memories of not only the girls but of a particular place and time now vanished. I’m always struck by the book’s deft melding of pathos and humor and by the way that what is essentially a personal suburban tragedy gradually begins to speak to a wider malaise that calls into question the American dream itself.
Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come.
That girl didn't want to die. She just wanted out of that house. She wanted out of that decorating scheme.
The five Lisbon sisters - beautiful, eccentric and, now, gone - had always been a point of obsession for the entire neighbourhood.
Although the boys that once loved them from afar have grown up, they remain determined to understand a tragedy that has…
When I learned, at seventeen, of my father’s Jewish heritage, I flung myself headlong into reading about Judaism. Naturally, this led me to the Holocaust and World War II, and my novels are inspired by family stories from this harrowing time. While doing research, I traveled to Germany and London, interviewed WWII veterans, and read countless memoirs, academic nonfiction tomes, and historical fiction books about this era. I now speak at libraries and to community organizations about the Ritchie Boys, Secret Heros of WWII. People sometimes tell me concentration camp stories are too disturbing, so I recommend books about Jewish survival, heroism, and everyday life during the Third Reich.
I was immediately hooked by this brilliant novel because of its unusual omniscient narrator, the Grim Reaper. Death, stressed out by the surfeit of “clients” he must deal with during World War II, reveals himself to be a sensitive narrator who sees everything. He especially keeps his eye on a young German girl, her loving foster parents, and the Jewish man they hide and protect.
I fell in love with these characters as they struggled with moral decisions, wartime hardship, danger, and tragedy. Despite the realistic portrayal of German life during WWII, I found this book to be an uplifting read.
'Life affirming, triumphant and tragic . . . masterfully told. . . but also a wonderful page-turner' Guardian 'Brilliant and hugely ambitious' New York Times 'Extraordinary' Telegraph ___
HERE IS A SMALL FACT - YOU ARE GOING TO DIE
1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall.
When an EMP brings down the power grid, Dr. Anna Hastings must learn what it means to be a doctor in a world deprived of almost all technology. She joins devoted father Mark Ryan and his young daughter on a perilous journey across a thousand miles of backcountry trails.
I’ve always been fascinated with the first-person voice, the way it magically pulls us into a story through the character’s/narrator’s perspective, and how when done well, can feel so natural and personal. I’ve tried to write in this perspective over the years, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. I hope I have done it adequately with this current novel. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert when it comes to the first-person, but I am an interested participant. I am a creative writing professor, but I am also a student of writing and always will be. The more I investigate, the more I read, the more I learn. Focusing on this topic has been no exception.
Some first person voices are just so naturally nostalgic, like you’re sitting around a campfire listening to someone telling you a story.
“The year my mother started hearing voices from her dead brother Clyde,” or “But Gigi was the first to fly.” So many moments to hold onto in this novel, each an introduction to another tale, or a memory you can’t wait to listen to and run off down the street to share it for yourself.
The voice of August is so real and clear and poetic that one forgets there’s even a writer behind it. This close first-person voice lets us in, welcomes us into the secrets of the street. “Everywhere we looked we saw the people trying to dream themselves out.” And dream I did, along every glorious page, only I never wanted out.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FROM A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNING AUTHOR
A TIME MAGAZINE TOP 10 NOVEL OF 2016 | SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2016
FROM THE WINNER OF THE ASTRID LINDGREN MEMORIAL AWARD 2018
They used to be inseparable. They used to be young, brave and brilliant - amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone. August, Sylvia, Angela and Gigi shared everything: songs, secrets, fears and dreams. But 1970s Brooklyn was also a dangerous place, where grown men reached for innocent girls, where mothers disappeared and futures vanished at the turn of a…
The child’s immersion into nature is a most relevant theme for me as an environmental educator, but it is critical to America as a whole. Our future depends upon it. We continue to live in a culture that shoves nature into the background, something viewed as pleasant scenery but not truly interactive in our lives. The “store” has become the source of things to many young people. The current generation of American parents is not equipped to teach children about nature and its indelible place in our survival as a species; therefore, books must become surrogates in this mission.
I loved this book for its dissection of the human relationships formed against a background of wilderness.
With survival comes tension, and though this throws discord into the lives of the characters, it makes for a compelling plot. This is one of those books that will form an indelible bond with the reader, who cannot help but imagine his/her interaction with the cast, should he/she have been part of the story.
A plane crashes on a desert island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast. As the boys' delicate sense of order fades, so their childish dreams are transformed into something more primitive, and their behaviour starts to take on a murderous, savage significance.
First published in 1954, Lord of the Flies is one of the most celebrated and widely read of modern…
As a troubled teen who wasn’t raised in a traditional family environment, I had always gravitated toward books with transformative characters—underdogs who were lost or lost their way by accident and on purpose.
The genre never mattered to me as much as my ability to relate to struggling protagonists who needed to escape their situation or environment, regardless of what they had to do, right or wrong. Love them or loathe them, I learned something from each of them. I hope you enjoy their journeys as much as I have.
The story of Clay Jensen is both beautiful and repelling in that it forced me to consider the unseen impact my insecurities and actions may have had on others when I was a teen. I couldn’t imagine being a shy, bright, and likable California high school student unexpectedly thrust into the center of a girl’s suicide by being named one of the contributors to her death. But that’s the point. Neither can Clay.
In his case, the only way to discover why he was included is to listen to a set of thirteen tapes made by the victim. These tapes take him on a journey of personal growth and transformation despite his only having the loosest of connections to her. In doing so, he takes us right along with him, considering how our briefest interactions could have profoundly impacted someone else.
THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
Featuring cover art from the Netflix original series, with exclusive interviews and photos inside! "Eerie, beautiful, and devastating." --Chicago Tribune "A stealthy hit with staying power. . . . thriller-like pacing." --The New York Times "Thirteen Reasons Why will leave you with chills long after you have finished reading." --Amber Gibson, NPR's "All Things Considered"
You can't stop the future. You can't rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play. Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package…
Connections In Time Bain's Story
by
S.G. Boudreaux,
Finding Family, Discovery, Destiny. This is what nineteen-year-old Bain Brinley is searching for.
In his homeland, far in the mountains, he stepped into what he could only describe as a time-portal and landed in a strange land known as Egypt. Then he falls through another portal during a storm, only…
I have read adventure, crime, and thriller books all my life. Reading is a huge relaxation for me and a good novel will transport me from the stresses and strains of daily life into another place in my head. A place where I feel involved with the characters and the environment, a place where I can imagine I could be. A good storyteller is different from a crime writer. They take the reader on a journey that might be through history or different continents. A journey that the reader wants to travel as well. I try to emulate this in my writing.
The story of the young orphan Pip, the escaped convict Magwitch, the recluse Miss Haversham, and her adopted daughter Estella. Dickens weaves the story back and forth between the characters.
You could pick many of Dickens’ books, but I think this story has everything: murder, love, intrigue, and tragedy. A storyteller extraordinaire. I’d go as far as to say that he is Britain’s greatest storyteller.
'His novels will endure as long as the language itself' Peter Ackroyd
Dickens's haunting late novel depicts the education and development of a young man, Pip, as his life is changed by a series of events - a terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor - and he discovers the true nature of his 'great expectations'. This definitive edition includes appendices on Dickens's original ending, giving an illuminating glimpse into a…
As a writer, I’ve always been drawn to exploring the teenage experience. Maybe that’s because my experiences in high school and college were rife with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows—everything was intensely beautiful and painful at once. That tension played a major role in my self-discovery process, and story-wise, it makes for a compelling character. But in a lot of literature, I find the depiction of teenage characters to be either sensationalized or infantilizing, melodramatic, or unconvincingly flat. When writing my own adolescent subjects in The Wayside, I turned often toward the rich, complex characters in the stories here.
Along with Anthropology of an American Girl, this is one of the books that made me want to become a writer. More specifically, it opened my eyes to what a writer can do with a teenage subject.
The story follows a prep-school student, Lee, but Sittenfeld handles her experience with all the nuance of “adult” subjects. I also admire how Sittenfeld captures the labyrinthine social politics of an elite boarding school and comments on class and race hierarchies without ever feeling didactic.
I think people mistake this book as YA—I certainly did when I first picked it up as a thirteen-year-old—but don’t be fooled by that candy-colored ribbon belt on the cover. This is as complex a novel as they come.
An insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.
Growing up in theatre, I was completely immersed in plays, which tend to be deep dives of the human psyche, and I latched on to those examinations like a dog with a bone. I’ve always loved the complexities of the human mind, specifically how we so desperately want to believe that anything beautiful, expensive, or exclusive must mean that the person, place, or thing is of more value. But if we pull back the curtain, and really take a raw look, we see that nothing is exempt from smudges of ugliness. It’s the ugliness, especially in regard to human character, that I find most fascinating.
For me, insight into the extravagant celebrity status-like lives of the characters in this movie is akin to the guilty pleasure of watching reality TV. This book brings out the voyeur in me, giving me permission to explore a perfect example of rich kids gone wild and the horrific consequences of unchecked actions.
I grew up in a lower economic class family surrounded by very wealthy, undisciplined friends, and so many of the characters and decisions hit close to home. I won’t lie; I felt a little better about myself and my own life after I finished reading. Yet, I’ll also admit that I didn’t want the train wreck to end.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The timeless classic from the acclaimed author of American Psycho about the lost generation of 1980s Los Angeles who experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age. • The basis for the cult-classic film "Possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality." —The New York Times They live in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money in a place devoid of feeling or hope. When Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college, he re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches,…
The Go-Giver tells the story of an ambitious young man named Joe who yearns for success. Joe is a true go-getter, though sometimes he feels as if the harder and faster he works, the further away his goals seem to be.
I am a writer who was first a reader and am convinced that novels can speak profound truth. They’ve helped me too many times to believe otherwise. I write novels about how we unwind from painful pasts to create new and better lives. In my experience, that requires us to face difficult truths and choose to be different until we are. I write fiction because I can begin with something awful, cut out boring detours that didn’t matter, and get my honorable and well-intentioned characters to happy endings faster than I’ve gotten to mine. These books map similar journeys, and all have left me better off for having read them.
I fell into this story with the first line and barely came up for air until I was done.
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book filled with so much beautiful and tragic truth, or an ending that filled me with so much optimism. Thousands have written gorgeous reviews about the story, the characters, the writing—so I won’t even attempt that here.
These lines, from the book, are among the most beautiful and meaningful to me: “If you are surrounded by those who call what you are different instead of beautiful. If your mind or body has cried out for peace and acknowledgement and understanding, just know…You are part of an infinite family. The people who have been through terrible things and survived them. If you are reading these words, you WON today.”
A modern cult classic, a major motion picture and a timeless bestseller, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a deeply affecting coming-of-age story.
Charlie is not the biggest geek in high school, but he's by no means popular.
Shy, introspective, intelligent beyond his years, caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie is attempting to navigate through the uncharted territory of high school. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and music - when all one requires to feel infinite is that…
