80 Books Like Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

A deserved, all-time classic, this book seems to transcend time to capture the spirit of wanderlust. I was young and impressionable when I read it for the first time, and it inspired a sense of profound restlessness to explore, grow, and hit the road to see for myself. 

Neal Cassidy and Jack Kerouac are wild, occasionally unhinged protagonists, and their journey consists of hustling, romance, and drinking their way to a good time. Kerouac’s writing made me long for similar misadventures, where life is simple and finding the road is all that matters. Subversively, the novel promotes a full life and whole human experience, which makes working 9 to 5 that much more difficult.

In 2006, John Berendt published a true crime caper every bit as serpentine and seductive as his iconic first book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – but this time, he took aim at the quirks and secrets of Venice, Italy.

Exploring the mystery behind a terrible fire that consumed Venice’s historic opera house, Berendt immerses himself in the tale.

Reading it felt like settling into the iconic city and getting to know the wonderful characters who call it home.

A savage, icepick of a hitman novel that will bury itself in your cerebellum. It’s a slippery, sexy book about the making and subsequent unmaking of a contract killer, complete with all the usual trappings and a few resolutely unusual ones. halfway through this novel, I realized that there weren't any rules to this. That you just built humans from scratch and turned them loose in your world and whatever they did, they did.  A guy stabs someone with his own fibula in this book. Eat that Macgyver. 

Senseless is the embellished account of Nick Prince, a jaded census worker, who is required to prowl rural backwoods in search of the folks who, for one reason or another, didn’t return their completed census questionnaires as required by law. Bannon, who actually worked for over a decade in this role, explains that Title 13 of the U.S. Code forbids census employees from revealing anything they learn about the individuals they visit, under penalty of hefty fines and prison time. This conceit makes for some hysterical maneuverings that, according to Bannon, are based on some actual events he’s forbidden to relate in non-fiction prose. It’s hard to tell where fiction and non-fiction diverge as Nick encounters a sequestered polygamist compound far off the grid. Hilarity ensues when a desperate wife decides he’s her ticket out of captivity and she convinces him to help her rescue the rest of the clan… show more.

Patrick Dennis’s “hyperbolized” version of his life with his aunt and legal guardian, Mame Dennis, has a history both on Broadway (“Mame” portrayed by Lucille Ball) and on the silver screen (“Auntie Mame” portrayed by Rosalind Russell). It was the film that led me to the book, which Dennis admits is filled with hyperbole and imaginary details. It is, however, based on the sometimes outlandish and often controversial life of his “progressive” aunt, who believed “life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving.”

It’s hard to tell where reality ends and fiction begins, but in truth you won’t want to. Auntie Mame manages to be both touching and hysterical as it follows Mame’s swinging New York lifestyle through the Great Depression into the workforce (a first for the heretofore wealthy heiress) and beyond into marriage into a “proper” Southern family, whose scrutiny Mame does not always survive intact.… show more.

The Telling Room combines several of my greatest joys: Spain, artisanal cheese, and the unparalleled wordsmithing of writer Michael Paterniti.

To track the creation one of the world’s greatest cheeses and the betrayal and sabotage that led to its downfall, Paterniti moves his family into a quiet Spanish village – and thanks to his vibrant, evocative writing, brings readers along for the ride.

As someone who’s spent time in the picturesque, history-rich environs of central Spain, I can attest that The Telling Room is the next best thing to travelling yourself to the lands of El Cid and Don Quixote. 

Harr is best known for his blockbuster legal thriller A Civil Action, but the work that has stuck with me is his 2005 follow-up about a high-stakes quest to find a lost masterpiece by the Renaissance master Caravaggio.

Stretching from a hilltop village on the Adriatic Sea to the alleyways of Rome to an unexpected discovery in a dusty old house in Ireland, The Lost Painting taught me that a single incredible object—in this case, Caraggio’s extraordinary The Taking of Christ – can be the central character of a book, taking readers across centuries and from one exotic locale to another.

I loved this book and couldn’t recommend it highly enough. It reads like a modern-day thriller, made all the better as it's based on true-events. It’s a well-told story involving Thomas Jefferson, Chateau Lafite Wine, Christie's Auction House, Masters of Wine, and Billionaires that had me turning the pages as fast as possible. I loved all the historical details and the well-researched nature of this gripping tale.

What I enjoyed most about the book was its exploration of the perceived value we place on wine and how we reconcile that perceived value with how far we would go to obtain such items at any cost. As this recounting demonstrates, there are at least two sides to every story and sometimes many more. I hope to read more by this author and hope he explores other famous stories of theft, fraud, and betrayal in the world of wine.

Josef Roth is now recognized as one of the greatest German writers of the twentieth century. As a historian myself, I was entranced by reading it by the way in which the book catches the vast temporal arc of the transformation and then fall of a society that had for centuries been a major force in European history, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now forgotten, this was the world of Vienna’s great resplendence, then fall.

The story is told through the generational story of one family, the von Trottas. Impending loss is conveyed alongside great affection as a whole world is lost in the disasters of the First World War. The book was first published in English in 1933. In the words of another of Josef Roth’s books, “I was there,” which he was.

This is a comfort read I come back to again and again. It’s a historical fantasy filled with political intrigue and with multiple overlapping storylines, and I revel in the rich historical detail of 18th-century Austria. But the heart of the novel is the romance between timid young widow Charlotte von Steinbeck and charismatic castrato Carlo Morelli. Both outsiders in their own ways, they’re brought together by a shared appreciation of music, and their relationship gives both of them the courage to push back against the narrow expectations imposed on them by society.