Here are 90 books that A Well-Tempered Heart fans have personally recommended if you like
A Well-Tempered Heart.
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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…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
After thirty years in corporate America, I retired to learn the craft of writing literary fiction—publishing my first novel at sixty-two. I write about characters faced with seemingly impossible situations whose choices ultimately reveal who they truly are. Through mindful self-awareness, I want readers to search within themselves to think about what they would do in a similar situation. These are five books that shaped my understanding of what literary fiction can do through deep characterization.
The heroine in this story struggles with cruel prejudices, rejection, heartbreak, and loneliness, leaving her unsure of who she can trust.
But she perseveres and becomes resilient to adversity, growing stronger with each situation. The personal truths she realizes in the process through self-discovery have the potential to provide universal wisdom for many of us.
OVER 12 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE A NUMBER ONE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
For years, rumours of the 'Marsh Girl' have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be…
My grandfather dictated a number of oral histories shortly before he died and left a series of sketchy diaries of his education at Sul Ross University (then Sul Ross State Teachers' College) in Alpine, Texas. Many years later, I got interested in his life and went to Sul Ross University to the archives, where the librarians gave me countless oral interviews from the 1930s and documents about the Civilian Conservations Projects in the area, namely the establishment of Big Bend National Park and the Balmorhea State Park Swimming Pool. This ignited my interest in the 1930s Depression and the New Deal—how, in a very short time, the U.S. federal government established work relief programs to help thousands out of work.
What I loved about this novel was learning about the Lincoln Indian Training School in Minnesota, where Native Americans were taken from their parents for “re-education.” They were not allowed to speak their own language. Krueger’s descriptions of sexual abuse and violence against children are harrowing.
The novel tells the story of two white orphans, Odie and Albert, who are placed in a Native American school, and how they come to escape the cruelties of the headmistress, whom they call “The Black Witch.”
When Odie commits a terrible crime, Odie and Albert flee the school, taking with them two other orphans, Mose, a mute Sioux, and Emma, a young girl who has been adopted by the headmistress. They float down the river in a canoe, reminiscent of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
The novel is narrated as a yarn with plenty of hyperbole and melodrama, and there are many twists…
1932, Minnesota-the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O'Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent's wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.
Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphans will fly into the unknown and cross paths with others…
Mia Lark is running out of options. There is only one way to change the score: the fantasy planet Revivium.
Armed with the powerful magic in the helm and the friendly AI, Hex that goes with it, Mia throws caution out the window. It’s time to find the main guildhall…
As the daughter of a prim and proper New England family, expectations were that I would follow societal norms: attend college, get married, and raise a family. I knew practically nothing about the world outside the United States, nor had I any curiosity about it. Everything changed in 1980 when I took a job as an accountant working for one of the world’s greatest adventurers, Richard Bangs. He literally dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the remotest heart of Africa, where I became infected by wanderlust. Ever since, as a single woman, I have embraced a life of adventure traveling around our amazing planet.
I lived in Bolivia in the late 1980s, and with three friends set off on a long wooden riverboat journey on the Rio Beni deep into the Amazon rainforest to the tiny jungle village of Rurrenebaque, a village strikingly similar to Ayachero where Ferencik set her story. I can verify that Ferencik’s detailed descriptions of the environment and its indigenous people perfectly capture the wilderness setting for this story.
The protagonist, Lily Bushwold, endures unimaginable challenges as she follows her new Bolivian love from La Paz back to his village. It is a world full of wonders and terrors, where she must use her wits to survive.
Featured in the New York Times Book Review Summer Reading Guide * A Crime by the Book "Most Anticipated" Novel * Featured in the New York Post Summer Round Up * Starred Publishers Weekly Review * A Publishers Weekly "Big Summer Books" * A Kirkus Reviews "Creepy Thrillers" Pick
In this pulse-pounding thriller from the author of the "haunting, twisting thrill ride" (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author) The River at Night, a young woman leaves behind everything she knows to take on the Bolivian jungle, but her excursion abroad quickly turns into a fight for her life.
After teaching high school English for thirty-one years, I retired and began my second career in writing. I have published five novels and one collection of poetry. When I met Jane Tucker in 1974, she became a good friend, fellow church member, and my dental hygienist. I had no idea she had worked as a welder on Liberty Ships during World War II when she was only sixteen years old. After I learned this in 2012, I began my journey into learning all about the Rosies during World War II and writing my fourth novel Becoming Jestina. Jane’s story is an amazing one, and I still talk to her regularly.
No list of books about women’s work during World War II would be complete without Penny Coleman’s book. If you just want an overall picture of how eighteen million women, many of whom had never before held a job, entered the workforce in 1942-45 to help the US fight World War II, then this is the book for you! The book is illustrated with black and white photographs. It is an ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
Illustrated with black-and-white photographs. When America's men went off to war in 1942, millions of women were recruited, through posters and other propaganda, to work at non-traditional jobs. In defense plants, factories, offices, and everywhere else workers were needed, they were--for the first time--well paid and financially independent. But eventually the war ended, and the government and industries that had once persuaded them to work for the war effort now instructed them to return home and take care of their husbands and children. Based on interviews and original research by noted historian Penny Colman, Rosie the Riveter shows young readers…
When I was 12, I was given The Book of Questionsby Neruda Pablo. “Tell me, is the rose naked or is that her only dress?” It was the perfect book for me, with an abundance of questions. As I got older, the questions turned more serious: what are these forces restricting women to a narrow strip of being? To a slim wedge of psychological existence? How did the definition of female pare down to only a fistful of traits—nurturing, accommodating, object of desire, etc.? I’ve found solace in books, with fully dimensional female characters who refuse society’s common assumptions. It’s these females I try to create in my work.
It’s mid-20th century, Budapest, and the narrator, a Hungarian writer named Magda, interviews Emerence about cleaning her house. I fell in love with this book early on, when Emerence makes it clear that she, not Magda, will decide whether she’ll take the job. To this day, Emerence haunts me. She’s a peasant, illiterate, an anti-intellectual, tall, and powerfully built. And she’s a relentless gift giver, a caretaker of the sick, and a tireless worker, sweeping the snowy or leaf-stricken street for the 11 buildings on the block. The contradictions and inconsistencies pile up, which is why she continues to roam around in my brain. And there’s the lovely mystery, which only reveals itself toward the end, as to why she’s never allowed anyone into her house.
This 1987 Hungarian novel in the modernist tradition combines emotionality and literary quality in the story of two women, a writer and her housekeeper.
Winner of the 2024 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award.
In this deeply researched novel of America's most celebrated outlaw, Mark Warren sheds light on the human side of Billy the Kid and reveals the intimate stories of the lesser-known players in his legendary life of crime. Warren's fictional composer…
I've been drawn to the experience of women on the home front since, at the age of seven, I witnessed my grandmother’s raw, unprocessed grief at the death of her favourite brother. Later, I read accounts by women and men caught up in that war who all displayed a breathtaking degree of selflessness. This novel is my homage to them. It meant a lot to me to write it, prompting tears several times while I typed. Evocatively written about sensitive issues, I wanted to capture the emotional toll that bravery involves and to write about the characters’ experiences with empathy and love. I hope it is a book you can curl up with.
It is very important to me to write about the home front in World War One with as much accuracy as is possible at over one hundred years’ distance. Kate Adie’s brilliant, readable, and engaging book is full of the kind of details a novelist thrives on.
Written with her authority and expert eye, I couldn’t put it down. It provided me with ideas and inspiration, along with Kate’s unique perspective and knowledge.
As I read, I felt I was in the hands of a reliable author whose take on the social and political context as it affected women during World War One was credible and true. It was an invaluable resource for me as I carried out my research.
'Adie uses her journalistic eye for personal stories and natural compassion to create a book definitely worthy of her heroines' Big Issue
'Fascinating, very readable . . . provides a complete wartime women's history' Discover Your History
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Bestselling author and award-winning former BBC Chief News Correspondent Kate Adie reveals the ways in which women's lives changed during World War One and what the impact has been for women in its centenary year.
IN 1914 THE WORLD CHANGED forever. When World War One broke out and a generation…
I am the USS Midway Chair in Modern US Military History at San Diego State University. I’ve been teaching courses on the relationships between war and society for years and am fascinated not just by the causes and conduct of war, but, more importantly, by the costs of war. To me, Americans have a rather peculiar connection with war. In many ways, war has become an integral part of American conduct overseas—and our very identity. And yet we often don’t study it to question some of our basic assumptions about what war can do, what it means, and what the consequences are for wielding armed force so readily overseas.
I teach at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and it’s important for my students to identify with the historical actors we study. Escobedo resonates with them because she artfully discusses how the “Good War” was perceived within Mexican American families living in Southern California. She argues that Mexican American women, especially those working in the defense industry, were “racially malleable” and members of an “in-between” community during the war.
There’s so much going on in this story—insights into race and gender, sexuality and family dynamics, fears about “race mixing,” and wartime demographic shifts. Yet in all this, Escobedo never loses sight of the women themselves and their powerful voices.
During World War II, unprecedented employment avenues opened up for women and minorities in U.S. defense industries at the same time that massive population shifts and the war challenged Americans to rethink notions of race. At this extraordinary historical moment, Mexican American women found new means to exercise control over their lives in the home, workplace, and nation. In From Coveralls to Zoot Suits, Elizabeth R. Escobedo explores how, as war workers and volunteers, dance hostesses and zoot suiters, respectable young ladies and rebellious daughters, these young women used wartime conditions to serve the United States in its time of…
I am a male feminist, internationally renowned sociologist, and recognized expert on gender identity, men and masculinities, and international education. During my thirty-five-year career, I have published twenty books and numerous book chapters and articles. I am a co-creator of the concept of toxic masculinity. I am the creator of the concept of total inclusivity and co-creator of the concept of totally inclusive self-love. My passion and desire for gender justice and an end to male oppression and violence, especially against women and girls, has been the single biggest drive for all my research and writings.
If this book doesn’t compel you to become a feminist, then you probably don’t have a heart. Or if you have, then it is likely as cold as the rapists’ described in it.
What do you feel when you read yet another account of mass rape, the trafficking, torture, and abuse of girls and women, and the gang rape of innocents? You should feel anger, if not despair. You might also well wonder what is wrong with men to make them behave this way.
Of course, you can choose not to read such accounts. But really, that is the coward’s way out. This is why this book is on my list–to challenge you to read it from start to finish and then, at the conclusion, decide you are not a feminist.
'Devastating... rape and sexual abuse continue to be a pervasive and all-too-often hidden feature of conflict zones the world over' HM Queen Camilla
From award-winning war reporter and co-author of I Am Malala, this is the first major account to address the scale of rape and sexual violence in modern conflict.
Christina Lamb has worked in war and combat zones for over thirty years. In Our Bodies, Their Battlefield she gives voice to the women of conflicts, exposing how…
Ramon Ramirez’s Dog is a collection of essays written over the years about the adventures and misadventures, mostly outside but occasionally inside the diplomatic career of a U.S. ambassador. Common threads weaving the stories together are a desire for a life well-lived, balancing career with family and friends, keeping physically…
As a critical care doctor, I love pausing when taking care of patients in a modern ICU to reflect on how far we’ve come in the care we can provide. I want to be entertained while learning about the past, and so I seek out books on medical history that find the wonder and the beauty (and the bizarre and chilling) and make it come alive. I get excited when medical history can be shared in a way that isn’t dry, or academic. These books all do that for me and capture some part of that crazy journey through time.
Kate Moore sucked me into the world of the radium girls, who literally glowed from the radium dust that covered them at work, and that they ultimately ingested, sickening them in horrific ways.
The book made me want to scream in anger at their treatment and cheer for those who were determined to defend them and deliver justice. The story is a huge eye-opener about the importance of industry oversight and occupational health regulations.
Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club choice New York Times bestseller
'Fascinating.' Sunday Times 'Thrilling.' Mail on Sunday
All they wanted was the chance to shine.
Be careful what you wish for...
'The first thing we asked was, "Does this stuff hurt you?" And they said, "No." The company said that it wasn't dangerous, that we didn't need to be afraid.'
As the First World War spread across the world, young American women flocked to work in factories, painting clocks, watches and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and…
