Here are 100 books that Adèle fans have personally recommended if you like
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I started reading thrillers when I was twelve—Grisham, Patterson, anything I could get my hands on. I learned quickly that in those stories, men were the ones doing the saving. They had the adventures; women were either the obstacle or the one being rescued. That’s why I love where the genre is now. I get to read stories where women take control—sometimes saving the day, sometimes going further than they probably should. It’s changed how I read, and honestly, it’s shaped how I think about storytelling. These are the kinds of books that made me want more—and made me want to be part of that shift.
I have a sister—a twin, actually—and I would do anything for her.
But if she murdered someone… would I cover it up? I couldn’t stop asking myself that while reading this, even as I found myself laughing at how effortlessly funny it is. Ayoola’s total indifference is what hooked me—she doesn’t question herself, doesn’t spiral, she just acts, and there’s something unsettlingly magnetic about that.
And Korede, fully aware and still complicit, pushed me to think about how far love can stretch before it turns into something else entirely. It’s bright, biting, and way more layered than it first appears, and I couldn’t get enough of that tension between devotion and control.
Sunday Times bestseller and The Times #1 bestseller
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019 Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019 Winner of the 2019 LA Times Award for Best Crime Thriller Capital Crime Debut Author of the Year 2019 __________
'A literary sensation' Guardian
'A bombshell of a book... Sharp, explosive, hilarious' New York Times
'Glittering and funny... A stiletto slipped between the ribs and through the left ventricle of the heart' Financial Times __________
When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber…
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 was born and grew up in Seoul. My bestselling debut novel has been longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize and shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. My book is inspired by my great-aunt, one of the oldest women who had escaped alone from North Korea. It is available from Harper Perennial in the U.S. and Virago in the UK. The novel’s translations continue to meet readers worldwide, including in Italy, Romania, Greece, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, and South Korea.
Eileen is one of the most twisted and unconventional literary heroines I’ve ever read. Behind her quiet demeanor and dull face hides her mind, which is like a killer’s, always furious and seething.
While working at a juvenile correctional facility, Eileen meets Rebecca, another key character far removed from most women of their generation. Seductive and deceitful, Rebecca cajoles Eileen into joining her act of crime–a violent, underhanded plan to restore her idea of justice.
Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour.
So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes-a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to…
Ever had anyone say something about you with utter conviction that isn’t true? Have you ever looked at someone famous and thought their life looked perfect? Ever felt not enough because of the way you look? As a former Miss Universe, international model, fashion editor, and entertainment journalist with a degree in psychology, I’ve lived these truths vicariously. I’m fascinated with image, perception, and truth. What’s behind the smile? What happens when the lights dim? Who are you when no one is watching? What secrets do you hide, how do they damage you, and what will you do to keep them hidden? I’ve been the target. I know the cost.
Illusion. Women’s framing. Adrift in a world everyone thinks is perfect. Living the glamorous life others want. Being the thing men desire to have, to own, as long as the veneer holds. Dealing with mental illness that people explain away because all the tinsel is just dressing and sparkles, but if you lean on it, it parts, and you find yourself falling through the space.
Although ‘they’ say they care, they don’t, and no one wants to hear the truth, they only want pretend. Within the first five pages, we understand what’s going on inside her, that she has something to hide, and that she’s willing to lie about who she really is. In chapter one, we discover that her best friend, Doreen, doesn’t really know her name. We see the world through her eyes, interspaced with an actual conversation that calls the world a lie and her own framing…
When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously.
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, was originally published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
I am a writer who loves writing about women. All sorts of women. Strong, witty, complicated, unlikeable, and intelligent. It is important for me to understand the lived experience of women both inside and outside my own time and cultural context. So many women live with intersecting social characteristics, norms, expectations, nearly all of which hinder or harm. Yet so many women resist and rebel to change life for others. It is this sense of solidarity through history, one group of women paving the way for others, that I find especially fascinating and hopeful. And it is why rebellious women are so crucial. They cannot, and will not, be ignored.
This book about the ultimate rebel woman Patricia Highsmith explores in depth the many ways Highsmith rejected social expectations of her time in terms of her gender, sexuality, and writing material. The biography does not shy away from presenting Highsmith in all her glorious complexity – equal parts humorous, wry, loathsome, disturbing. This was one of the first biographies that I read where I realized the power of archives, what they can reveal, and how enlightening they can be when used so brilliantly, as Andrew Wilson does here.
Patricia Highsmith - author of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY - had more than her fair share of secrets. During her life, she felt uncomfortable about discussing the source of her fiction and refused to answer questions about her private life. Yet after her death in February 1995, Highsmith left behind a vast archive of personal documents - diaries, notebooks and letters - which detail the links between her life and her work. Drawing on these intimate papers, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, Andrew Wilson has written the first biography of…
I am a writer who loves writing about women. All sorts of women. Strong, witty, complicated, unlikeable, and intelligent. It is important for me to understand the lived experience of women both inside and outside my own time and cultural context. So many women live with intersecting social characteristics, norms, expectations, nearly all of which hinder or harm. Yet so many women resist and rebel to change life for others. It is this sense of solidarity through history, one group of women paving the way for others, that I find especially fascinating and hopeful. And it is why rebellious women are so crucial. They cannot, and will not, be ignored.
The protagonist of this novel, Mia Fredricksen, experiences love, loss, and emotional breakdown. But what I love about this book is when Mia starts to rebuild herself and her sense of identity (her doctor tells her “tolerating cracks is part of being alive”) we move into a joyful narrative of female strength, power, and the solidarity of female friendship. And, as the title suggests, a summer without men. What I love about this novel is the message that even if you are badly betrayed, healing is possible.
Out of the blue, your husband of thirty years asks you for a pause in your marriage to indulge his infatuation with a young Frenchwoman. Do you:
a) assume it's a passing affair and play along b) angrily declare the marriage over c) crack up d) retreat to a safe haven and regroup? Mia Fredricksen cracks up first, then decamps for the summer to the prairie town of her childhood, where she rages, fumes, and bemoans her sorry fate as abandoned spouse. But little by little, she is drawn into the lives of those around her: her mother and her…
“I didn’t like the characters.” “I couldn’t relate.” Whenever I hear someone bring up the matter of “likability” a single thought roars through my head: How ‘likable’ do you really think you are? A main purpose of fiction is to illuminate those nasty thoughts we all have but are rarely willing to admit. A book should be intimate, uncomfortably so, just as to actually occupy another person’s mind and body would be. It also seems to me “the characters” referenced by these kinds of critiques are always women. We expect fictional men to shock us and to struggle with their own desires; why should we expect women to only charm?
I was working as a nanny in New York City when I discovered this wild novel, and I consumed it in short order. Marie, fresh from prison, is hired out of pity to watch a high school friend’s daughter. “The situation would’ve been humiliating had Marie any ambition in life. Fortunately, Marie was not in any way ambitious.” Marie is instead selfish, culpable, hungry, and smitten—first with her friend’s life, then her friend’s husband, and most dangerously, her friend’s daughter. Dermansky’s novel could easily slip into thriller territory, and while it is as fast-paced and compulsively readable, instead we discover unpredictably that Bad Marie is really a love story.
"Bad Marie" is the story of Marie, tall, voluptuous, beautiful, thirty years old, and fresh from six years in prison for being an accessory to murder and armed robbery. The only job Marie can get on the outside is as a nanny for her childhood friend Ellen Kendall, an upwardly mobile Manhattan executive whose mother employed Marie's mother as a housekeeper. After Marie moves in with Ellen, Ellen's angelic baby Caitlin, and Ellen's husband, a very attractive French novelist named Benoit Doniel, things get complicated, and almost before she knows what she's doing, Marie has absconded to Paris with both…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
I am a multi-published author of mainly Gothic, haunted house, and ghostly novels, novellas, and short stories. I love nothing more than exploring historic houses, ancient stone circles and places that are noted for having a certain atmosphere that hints – or, in some cases, screams – a macabre and interesting past. I am the person you will spot, hunched over an old gravestone peering at the much-degraded carving, searching for the name of its owner and a hint to their story. Why? I blame a childhood spent reading M.R. James.
Whenever people think of Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House springs to mind, and, for many years, I stopped right there. I was wrong.
In my opinion, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is actually a much better book – better in terms of plot and characterization. In telling the story of the decidedly disturbed and disturbing Blackwood family and their sinister home, Shirley Jackson explores small-town prejudice as well as the creeping impression that, while something awful has already happened, there is much worse to follow.
Merricat is a character I identified with. She is strong, determined, and a fighter. With the odds stacked so firmly against her, she needs to be. Jackson’s last novel is, for me at least, her greatest.
Living in the Blackwood family home with only her sister, Constance, and her Uncle Julian for company, Merricat just wants to preserve their delicate way of life. But ever since Constance was acquitted of murdering the rest of the family, the world isn't leaving the Blackwoods alone. And when Cousin Charles arrives, armed with overtures of friendship and a desperate need to get into the safe, Merricat must do everything in her power to protect the remaining family.
I fell in love with opera history as an undergraduate exchange student in Vienna and went on to pursue my passion in graduate school. Rather than writing about opera composers and their music, I chose the unusual path of studying famous singers from the nineteenth century, especially the prima donnas who exerted extraordinary authority over composers, theater directors, and spectators. In my books and articles, I focus on the power of divas to thrill audiences and to shape the musical culture of which they are an integral part. The books I am recommending explore the lives and careers of some of the most fascinating prima donnas of the nineteenth century.
Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) was one of the most celebrated prima donnas of the nineteenth century, but she was much more than a typical diva. She was also one of the most versatile artists of the era, a talented composer, arranger, teacher, autograph collector, entrepreneur, salonnière, and promoter of early music. While fictionalized, this novel sticks closely to historical events of her life, focusing on her marriage to Louis Viardot, her long-lasting affair with Russian author Ivan Turgenev, and the unconventional and loving bonds that formed between these three extraordinary artists. If you’re looking for historical fiction about one of the most fascinating divas of the nineteenth century, An Unofficial Marriage is a great choice.
For Fans of Alexander Chee's best-selling novel, The Queen of the Night and opera fans everywhere.
Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of 19th century Europe, An Unofficial Marriage dramatizes the equally tumultuous real-life love affair of two great artists—the famous Russian author, Ivan Turgenev, and the celebrated French opera singer, Pauline Viardot. From the moment he encounters her on the St. Petersburg stage, Ivan falls completely for Pauline. Though Pauline returns his feelings, she is bound by her singular passion for her art and her devotion to her gentle, older husband, Louis. Nevertheless, Ivan pursues Pauline across…
From early adolescence through my career as an English professor, I was deeply drawn to romance and romantic fiction as a form of pleasure, comfort, and hope. My new book is personal and intimate, not scholarly. Weaving together my expertise in the subject of romance fiction with the story of passionate love in my own life, my book Loveland: A Memoir of Romance and Fiction is about the experiences I've had, inside the culture of romance in which women are immersed. I have a view of passion that is not a conventional one as I trace a way forward for myself, and perhaps others as well.
A male author describing the adulterous passions of an unhappy woman, Flaubert tears into Madame Bovary as superficial and ridiculously narcissistic. Yet Flaubert was a terrific writer and also shows how empty and purposeless the restricted life of a middle-class woman was in his time–not poor enough to be preoccupied with surviving, but not rich enough to lead a glamorous life. It’s not like Emma Bovary can go to law school!
Flaubert’s dissection of Emma’s forbidden love life is brilliant. It’s downright painful to see Emma’s hopes and fantasies when the men in her life take what they want from her, and she pours all she has into them. I can relate.
Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of a married woman's affair caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. Its heroine, Emma Bovary, is stifled by provincial life as the wife of a doctor. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and when real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations, the consequences are devastating. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I grew up reading murder mysteries and watching old black-and-white films on television. As a teenager, I couldn’t get enough of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I loved challenging myself to solve the mystery before the end of the book, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
One thing I noticed in reading the classics is that LGBTQ+ people were either completely absent or used for comic relief or tragic effect. I wanted to change that with my stories, showing that they can be compelling protagonists, solving murders and sometimes finding love.
I was intrigued to discover an Agatha Christie book I had not previously read. I found it instantly intriguing and puzzling, with Hercule Poirot in the center of things.
The way Agatha Christie described the settings with such wonderful detail, I was instantly transported aboard the train, seeing myself as a fellow passenger, watching the mystery unfold.
Agatha Christie's classic Hercule Poirot railway mystery, reissued in a beautiful new classic hardcover edition designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers.
'You could, perhaps, love a thief, mademoiselle, but not a murderer!'
When the luxurious Blue Train arrives at Nice, a guard attempts to wake serene Ruth Kettering from her slumbers. But she will never wake again - for a heavy blow has killed her, disfiguring her features almost beyond recognition. What is more, her precious rubies are missing.
The prime suspect is Ruth's estranged husband, Derek. Yet Poirot…
