100 Books Like A Very Important Teapot

Believe me; I know how hard it is to write humour. To produce a successful comedic novel with laugh-out-loud lines as a debut novelist is no mean feat, but for me, Jane Ions has pulled it off with this book. 

I found the voice of Sally Forth (I know!) engaging and hilarious from the off. There was so much for me to enjoy, from the wayward teenage son living in a lean-to in the garden to Sally’s long-suffering and respectable husband, who just happens to be an MP.

I love this kind of well-observed comedy that treats its characters, no matter how misguided, with kindness and compassion. 

The on-target humour of this book helped get me through the lockdown. It is a comic novel about love, lust, and guerrilla dentistry in 1980s Leicester. How could I resist that? 

I found the main character–teenager Lizzie Vogel, the guerrilla dentist in question–to be a hilarious and compelling creation, filled with the arrogance and naïveté of youth, very much in the tradition of Adrian Mole. 

In fact, the book teems with entertaining, richly observed characters and absurd situations. Though there is plenty to laugh at, what impressed me most was Nina Stibbe’s gift for making her characters so real that, even while I was laughing at their antics, I felt great sympathy for them and their disappointments. 

I’ll never understand why humorous writing is less respected than the more literary kind. Yet, I believe creating characters that are both convincing and amusing and steering them through a complicated plot–without letting the humour flag–takes great skill. For me, this is what the author Stevyn Colgan achieves in his South Herewardshire books, the first of which is A Murder to Die For. 

I found the laughs just kept on coming as farce piled upon farce. As well as giving me a good chuckle, I relished the rural setting, a touching reminder of the splendors and eccentricities of English village life that I, for one, would be sad to lose.

A confession: Lissa Evans is one of my very favourite authors. I’ve greatly enjoyed all her books, and this one is a brilliant example. It’s crammed full of likeable and fallible characters–as well as some equally believable horrors–attempting to deal with the ridiculousness of life. 

Reading it, I felt I was never far away from a good laugh, either a chuckle-worthy turn of phrase or a riotous set piece. Yet, along with escaped city pigs, procreating giant snails, and porno-mag chomping tortoises, I loved that there is poignancy and even tragedy. So much so I found myself late at night worrying for the fate of some of her characters.

The first time I set foot in Sydney, Australia (after a 19-hour flight from Los Angeles), I knew that I needed to learn as much about the history of that continent as possible.

In bars and cafes, I would listen to Australians speaking to each other, marveling at their accents. I wondered how a colony of convicts could thrive in a place completely different from their homes in England and Ireland. I wondered what they did to the Aboriginal people to claim as much land and wealth as they had.

This is why I was drawn to Christina Baker Kline’s book, which follows three young women in Australia, telling the story of its colonization in the 19th century from very different perspectives. Kline’s prose is effortless–descriptive without getting in its own way, but not simplistic. At some point, when I was reading this book cover to cover, I looked up… show more.

I love a tense, character-driven thriller, and this one was set in a remote town I’ve visited. 

I love that the book is set in 1963, a decade that had particular significance for Australian women, their roles, and the expectations placed upon them.

It’s not fast-moving, but the setting is an almost palpable character in its own right. I found it dark, rife with corruption, violence, oppressive heat, and both the best and the worst of what Australia has to offer.

I knew from the blurb this was going to be my kind of book. I really loved the post-apocalyptic Australian setting and the way the desert wasteland society is structured. The concept of dirt farmers is particularly genius.

As well as the excellent world building, there’s page-turning action, an epic zombie battle, and a clever setup for the next installment. This is the first in The Territory trilogy, which follows the increasingly important role of Squid and Lyn, two teenagers caught up in a battle against ghouls and who learn secrets about themselves and their society as they trek across the Outback.

No easy way describes Kaaron Warren’s darkest mind full of mischief and intensity. She’s a global legend, no worries, with her distinctive Australian tongue. Find wicked excitement in Warren’s horror, disturbing in its nature, leaving nothing untouched. Even babies are not safe. This primer is a quick introduction to ominous storytelling, that may pave way to curiosity into award-winning works, including Tide of Stone or Into Bones Like Oil. Starting here, with illustrations and an exegetical analysis by Michael Arnzen, is perhaps the soundest way to dip a toe into the humour, surreally, and darkness of this author’s alluring text. 

A bold and broad-sweeping book, written in the 1940s, described as a novel but featuring a mix of real and fictional characters, The Timeless Land is a beautifully imaginative telling of the arrival of the First Fleet in what became Sydney in 1788, as seen through the eyes of the Aboriginal people, the Governor and his officers, convicts and the odd settler. The depiction of the part-real, part-invented Aboriginal people may cause raised eyebrows nowadays, but the book is based on thorough research and written with great imagination and sensitivity. I love the mix of the real and the imaginary, while never distorting the facts. It’s a brilliant way to paint a vivid portrait of a subject, I’ve done it myself (if I may be presumptuous enough to bracket myself with Ms. Dark).

 A controversial pick, but I believe this is the finest fictionalised version of Ned's life story written so far. Carey captures a very authentic sense of Ned’s voice and character by basing the book heavily on Ian Jones’ work and the Jerilderie Letter that Ned wrote with gang member Joe Byrne. It retains enough of the truth to craft a realistic world for his creations to exist in, and blends so well with his inventions, that someone unaware that the book is fiction will have a hard time working out some of the fact from the fiction. It is lyrical, powerful, and helped turbo-boost interest in the Kelly legend at a time when it had begun to taper off somewhat.