Here are 100 books that Apples Never Fall fans have personally recommended if you like
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I grew up without a TV (well, we had a monitor for movies), so we spent a lot of time as a family reading. And the novels that I gravitated more and more towards were ones with psychological themes. It didn’t matter if they were modern or ancient; if they got at something unexplainable (or even explainable) about the human psyche, about what motivates us to behave in the ways that we do—especially if those behaviors are self-destructive—I wanted to read them. And I still do.
I know it’s a bit cliché, but I can never stop myself from talking about my favorite novel of all time—Jane Eyre.
Not only does Jane’s voice sweep me off my feet every time I reopen the novel, but the novel itself always gets me thinking. It’s one of those rare books that somehow contains every genre, and does it well.
I get sucked into the mystery of the noises in Rochester’s house. My heart breaks when Jane’s only friend, Helen, dies. But most of all, I feel the romance, the chemistry between Mr. Rochester and Jane. All of it keeps me coming back for more.
Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue, Canterbury Christ Church University College.
Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage.
She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious, sardonic and attractive Mr Rochester.
Secrets, lies, and second chances are served up beneath the stars in this moving novel by the bestselling author of This Is Not How It Ends. Think White Lotus meets Virgin River set at a picturesque mountain inn.
Seven days in summer. Eight lives forever changed. The stage is…
I was twelve years old when I first read Jane Eyre, the beginning of my love for gothic fiction. Murder mysteries are fine, but add a remote location, a decaying old house, some tormented characters, ancient family secrets, and I’m all in. Traditional Gothic, American Gothic (love this painting), Australian Gothic, Mexican Gothic (perfect title by the way), I love them all. The setting in gothic fiction is like a character in itself, and wherever I travel, I’m drawn to these locations, all food for my own writing.
So much so that I’ve read it several times since I first encountered it as a teenager. (Plus watched both movie versions, twice each.)
The first line, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," drew me in and refused to let go. I wanted to return to Manderley. I wanted to find out what dark secrets would be revealed there. The unnamed, naive young heroine is haunted by the all-pervading presence of her husband’s first wife, Rebecca… and so was I.
And although some of the social attitudes are jarring to a 21st-century reader, and although I know the plot by heart now… I will still return to it.
* 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY * 'One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century' SARAH WATERS * 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .'
Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory…
I have been writing about motherhood, family, love, loss, and finding yourself for over fifteen years. I have been a journalist, wife, mother-of-three-boys (yes, that’s one word), aerobics teacher, puppy wrestler, and novelist. Being a novelist is by far the hardest job but it’s the most rewarding. (OK, boys, no – motherhood is – really.) I enjoy reading stories about family, love, and relationships in all their guises, good, bad, and messy, just like life – and I’m keen to write stories that readers will remember too. My latest book is about two sisters who, after a car crash, are affected differently, yet both are on a journey for the truth.
If there was ever a book that inspired me to write, it’s this!
Pearson captures the push-pull of motherhood and trying to have a career and the fragile relationship with Kate Reddy and her husband so well.
This book ‘talked’ to me as a mother and journalist and was one of the most ‘real’ books I’d ever read about family dynamics and having young children.
Kate Reddy is a fund manager and a mother of two who is trying to survive in a man’s world. Only she’s a woman! Loved it.
Meet Kate Reddy, fund manager and mother of two. Always time-poor, Kate counts seconds like other women count calories. Factor in a manipulative nanny, an Australian boss who looks at Kate's breasts as if they're on special offer, a long-suffering husband, her quietly aghast in-laws, two needy children and an email lover, and you have a woman juggling so many balls that some day something's going to hit the ground.
In an uproariously funny and achingly sad novel, Allison Pearson brilliantly dramatises the dilemma of working motherhood at the…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
Ever since my younger years, I’ve spent many hours dwelling within the realms of my imagination, daydreaming myself into whirlwind romances from slow-burn to forbidden and everything in between. Why? The best answer I can give right now is my love of love, my innate understanding that the invisible string that pulls two people so fiercely together at the right time and place ultimately are the connections and relationships that propel us into up-leveling ourselves, evolving into our next best versions. So when I read, watch, or write romance, it’s beyond the physical–it’s emotional, mental, and truly spiritual.
This book gave me a reminder of faith that neither time nor distance can ever impede upon two individuals destined for each other. Sometimes, what is said–or rather not said at all–doesn’t exactly portray the truth of someone's intentions or feelings.
Even though I know the ending, I’ll pick this book up every year or so and still find myself wondering how Anne and Wentworth will ever reconcile. But alas, Austen knocks it out of the park once more.
'In Persuasion, Jane Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed' Virginia Woolf
Jane Austen's moving late novel of missed opportunities and second chances centres on Anne Elliot, no longer young and with few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she was persuaded by others to break off her engagement to poor, handsome naval captain Frederick Wentworth. What happens when they meet again is movingly told in Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension,…
As a female grown up in a working-class neighborhood in East Naples (Italy), and as an academic researching political ecologies in Italy, Brazil, and the USA, I am especially interested in how sex/gender, class/work, and race/coloniality are intersected in people’s lives, and especially in how this shapes their perceptions and experiences of environmental problems. This approach has led me to look for the connections between labor and the environment both within and beyond waged/industrial work and formal trade unions, including the unpaid housework and subsistence production done in working-class, peasant, Black, and Indigenous communities and the social movements that represent them.
I read this book as a fictional rendition of 'intersectionality' theory, i.e. the idea that Black women's lives are conditioned by different power dynamics operating at once. However, this idea is beautifully interwoven in real-life events and conversations that make the book's characters alive.
I simply loved each one of them and very much enjoyed the plot as a whole. With a simple and direct, but also poetic and captivating language, the author takes you through unforeseen turns in the experience and feelings of these characters, and unexpected connections with one another.
“A must-read about modern Britain and womanhood . . . An impressive, fierce novel about the lives of black British families, their struggles, pains, laughter, longings and loves . . . Her style is passionate, razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humor. There is never a single moment of dullness in this book and the pace does not allow you to turn away from its momentum.” —Booker Prize Judges
Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and the first black woman to receive this highest literary honor in the English language.…
As a writer, I’m fascinated by relationships, what makes them work and what might make them fail. And I’ve always been gripped by the power of two people who try to love each other, no matter how different they may be or what obstacles they face. I honestly believe that two people in love are far more than the sum of their parts and can create something magical that wouldn’t have been there without them. So, yes, I’m a romantic at heart but, even in these cynical times, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I hope you love the books on this list as much as I do.
I love this book because, even though it’s a crime story, it’s also a rollercoaster ride through the story of the marriage of Louise and Niall, who are both in various ways involved in the crime.
Each person is lying for different reasons and each of them is terrified to tell the truth to each other for fear of how the other person might react. The plot takes them through moments of dark despair, utter dishonesty, anger, and even hatred, all of which is somehow part and parcel of the marriage they have created.
There is hope, however, and they come to realise a deeper truth about themselves and their relationship which, for me, was incredibly moving in an unexpected way.
A HUSBAND. A LIAR. A KILLER . . . The gripping new thriller from the Sunday Times bestseller
'Utterly gripping and unpredictable' 5***** Reader Review 'Suspenseful and compulsive with twists galore' 5***** Reader Review 'You won't be able to put it down' 5***** Reader Review 'Absolutely brilliant' Claire Douglas, bestselling author of The Couple at No 9 _______
Louise wakes up. Her head aches, her mouth is dry, her memory's fuzzy. But she knows she's done something bad.
She rolls over towards her husband, Niall.
But it's not Niall lying beside her. In fact, she's never seen this man before.…
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.
When I was pregnant for the first time, I knew exactly the sort of mother I was going to be. I had read all the articles, bookmarked all the tastefully filtered Instagram posts. But then I had my son, and I realized almost immediately how little I knew. It turns out that while those tender Instagram moments do happen (and they truly are magic), there are just as many moments that can only be described as: WTF? My novel, The Perfect Ones, goes deep behind the screens of two Instagram influencers and their messy, conflicting, and fundamentally human feelings on motherhood. Here are five more books about the parts that don’t make the Instagram grid.
The Husbands is not marketed as a “mom book,” but as a mother of young children, I saw so much of my own life on the pages.
The story follows Nora Spangler, an overworked attorney who is pregnant with her second child, as she digs into a wrongful-death lawsuit centered on a fatal house fire. The story teems with drama between the mystery of the fire and the motives for its potential coverup, but my favorite part of the book is how Baker gives voice to the things we as mothers “aren’t supposed” to say.
'A howl of feminist rage, but also one that is pure fun' Stylist
The wives here are different. They are living proof that women can have it all: successful careers, loving families, beautiful homes. Their husbands are different too. They are living proof that men can do just as much as women. They can remember the kids' schedules, use an iron and notice when the house needs dusting. Nora thinks she's found the perfect new home for her family. But when she agrees to get involved in a wrongful death case in the neighbourhood, Nora becomes convinced that there's a…
I've always been a person intrigued by relationships—why some last and others break up. From my perspective, distance in relationships arrives when two people have different expectations. I wanted to look at different kinds of distances in relationships—emotional, sexual, and geographical. As I was beginning to write my first stories, I read a line from my journal: explore the tension between the demands of relationships and the demand in myself to keep growing. I knew that tension was what I needed to write about. As an introvert, one of my deepest struggles has been to feel comfortable with my own boundaries in relationships, and I think that's true for most of us.
Peter Orner creates a startling intimacy with his characters. In these short, pithy vignettes, we see estranged siblings, dying spouses, missing fathers, and a marriage that is ending. Orner’s gift is to drop us right into the conflict and emotional action of his characters. Every protagonist feels like someone we know and maybe even loved. His writing is breathtaking. Spanning America of the 80s, his stories take place across the country from California to Chicago to the East Coast.
In this powerful and virtuosic collection of interlocking stories, each one "a marvel of concision and compassion" (Washington Post), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and "master of his form" (New York Times) takes the short story to new heights.
Through forty-four compressed gems, Peter Orner, a writer who "doesn't simply bring his characters to life, he gives them souls" (NYT Book Review), chronicles people whose lives are at inflection points, gripping us with a series of defining moments.
Whether it's a first date that turns into a late-night road trip to a séance in an abandoned airplane hangar,…
I am fascinated by the idea of good people, moral people, people you know and like and love, who make terrible choices, wrong decisions, and mistakes that can’t be undone. And when the person who makes the mistake is a mother—my God! How the world turns on them. We live in a society where mothers are judged so harshly, where they are not allowed mistakes, where they are barely allowed to have a life or a want or a desire or a longing not connected to mothering. And so I write about this, and I read about this.
This one I loved for the style as much as the character. I love the use of fragments to weave together a life and it felt true to the life of a mother—that a mother only gets snippets of time to piece together her story and her thoughts. I also loved that Offil was wrestling with such a big issue—how to hold onto oneself while giving so much of your self to a child.
They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation.
They used to be young, brave, and giddy with hopes for their future. They got married, had a child, and skated through all the small calamities of family life. But then, slowly, quietly something changes. As the years rush by, fears creep in and doubts accumulate until finally their life as they know it cracks apart and they find themselves forced to reassess what they have lost, what is left, and what they want now.
Written with the dazzling lucidity of poetry, Dept.…
I’ve long been intrigued by what makes a woman a hero in her own life. My three novels feature characters who are not obvious heroes—they are trying to shed a difficult past, they may run towards risky second chances, and they eventually stand up to their history and heal it and themselves. A lot of my inspiration for my stories comes from my mother, who was a pilot in World War II. I grew up with the legacy of women as heroic; it fostered an intense curiosity about female ambition and morality, women who would risk personal freedom and safety to find something greater than they expected.
Olive is not a likable character, yet so many readers related to her in the first book, as I did. Strout took a completely different approach in this sequel, which appealed to me even more. We see the larger community in Olive’s life, looking at her through her interactions with friends, neighbors, and a lover who becomes her second husband.
Strout weaves present and past using these different perspectives, showing the rare kindnesses that Olive allows herself. By the end, she was a hero to me because of her changes as a person—the increased compassion tempered her frankness. A brilliant and realistic exploration of aging, illness, and death.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Number One New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton
'A terrific writer' Zadie Smith
'A superbly gifted storyteller and a craftswoman in a league of her own' Hilary Mantel
'A novel to treasure' Sunday Times
Olive, Again follows the blunt, contradictory yet deeply loveable Olive Kitteridge as she grows older, navigating the second half of her life as she comes to terms with the changes - sometimes welcome, sometimes not - in her own existence and in those around her.
