Here are 100 books that Blindspot fans have personally recommended if you like
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Whenever in Oxford, I feel I’ve come “home.” It’s a magical city steeped in beauty, history, literature, culture, and fascinating people. I’ve been blessed to have taken graduate courses at the University, participated in numerous conferences, brought tour groups, lived “in college,” and conducted walking tours of the town. My familiarity with the city enabled me to write the original chapter on Oxford for Rick Steves’ England guidebook, and it’s where I set my fictional series, The Oxford Chronicles. When I can’t be there in person, I love to visit vicariously through good books. I hope these novels will enable you to experience some of the magic of Oxford too.
I’ve always been fascinated by the “dreaming spires” of Oxford University and enjoy Gaudy Night because it immerses me in the world of a (fictional) women’s college set in 1930s Oxford.
As a former professor, I’m intrigued by the internecine political and personal battles in the Senior Common Room (SCR), or college faculty lounge, as well as the friction between those professors devoted entirely to an academic career versus those trying to maintain the challenging balance of work and family, the same issues women struggle with today, nearly one hundred years later.
Sayers weaves together these tensions with a mysterious “poltergeist” who torments the college with poison-pen letters, pranks, vandalism, and violence into a compelling mystery under the dreaming spires.
The twelfth book in Dorothy L Sayers' classic Lord Peter Wimsey series, introduced by actress Dame Harriet Mary Walter, DBE - a must-read for fans of Agatha Christie's Poirot and Margery Allingham's Campion Mysteries.
'D. L. Sayers is one of the best detective story writers' Daily Telegraph
Harriet Vane has never dared to return to her old Oxford college. Now, despite her scandalous life, she has been summoned back . . .
At first she thinks her worst fears have been fulfilled, as she encounters obscene graffiti, poison pen letters and a disgusting effigy when she arrives at sedate Shrewsbury…
In 1964, the FBI found smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were driving before they disappeared at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Shortly after, Julie Kabat’s beloved brother Luke arrived in Mississippi as a volunteer to assist Black civil rights…
I have lived in Gettysburg, PA, all of my life, so I’m drawn to historical fiction, especially the Civil War era. The 1860s is the perfect setting for the enemies-to-lovers trope, and I am lucky enough to be surrounded by history all of the time. In doing lots of research, I have found that enemies fell in love more often than you might think during the Civil War. I hope you enjoy this list of books that got me interested in reading and continue to keep my attention to this day.
My grandmother had this novel on her bookshelf, which is why I read it the first time, but I’ve read it over and over. This is my favorite classic love story that is not really enemies to lovers, but still has lots of emotion and conflict.
I love it because of the conflict and for its educational value in teaching about the French Revolution.
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"Vaguely she began to wonder ... which of these worldly men round her was the mysterious 'Scarlet Pimpernel,' who held the threads of such daring plots, and the fate of valuable lives in his hands."
In the early days of the bloody French Revolution, fleeing aristocrats are being captured and sent to the guillotine. But the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel - along with his band of English gentlemen - is outwitting the revolutionaries. Known only by his calling card, he arrives in disguise and smuggles the nobles out of…
I started the Edge of Empire series which includes Beside Turning Water when I was a Park Guide at Boston’s National Historical Park. As a guide I gave tours on the Freedom Trail which preserves the buildings and stories from the era of the American Revolution. I wanted to create a book like the ones I love full of romance a bit of sex, and with historical accuracy. Books that would help readers fall in love with the characters and understand the history of the events in the Revolution without that dry history-class feeling.
I began to write my own series in response to Jo Beverley’s Mallorens. These novels are set in Georgian England with its Barons, Dukes and their gambling, their rakes, and their strict inheritance laws and traditions. I invented those same rakish sons of dukes, but made them the third and fourth sons – the ones barely mentioned in classic British historical romances. I put these adventurous men on merchant vessels, and in the red uniform of the British army. Then I sent them across the Atlantic to fight a war for the King and have their adventures in America. I regret that Ms. Beverley died before I had a chance to talk to her about our connection, but her books have been a great inspiration.
Many writers use dramatic openings to bring you into a book, and Ms. Beverely gets behind you and kicks you in. It has been very…
The New York Times bestselling author brings back the most beloved family in romance!
Damaris Myddleton never expected to inherit a vast fortune-but she's ready to use it to buy the most eligible title in England. In comes Mr. Fitzroger, the dashing but penniless adventurer who first saves her from social disaster, and then saves her life. Now, trapped in mystery, danger, and forbidden intimacy, Damaris fights not to surrender her freedom and her heart to a most unsuitable man.
This is the story of New York City, told through the prism of one block. It’s a story of forest and cement, bird cries and taxi horns, theaters and brothels, hotels and factories, gambling dens and gourmet foods.
It’s also the story of high life and low life, immigrants and…
I started the Edge of Empire series which includes Beside Turning Water when I was a Park Guide at Boston’s National Historical Park. As a guide I gave tours on the Freedom Trail which preserves the buildings and stories from the era of the American Revolution. I wanted to create a book like the ones I love full of romance a bit of sex, and with historical accuracy. Books that would help readers fall in love with the characters and understand the history of the events in the Revolution without that dry history-class feeling.
Detectives Sarah Kelling and her much-loved husband Max Bittersohn live in her inherited house on Beacon Hill, Boston. These are detective novels of the cozy and charming sort, and because of the relationship between Sarah and Max are adventure romances as well.
Sarah has a large extended family and they enter into all the books as friends. This makes each one a friend and fun to read. MacCleod knows Boston and her descriptions of the habits and haunts of classic Beacon Brahmins/Yankees are as charming and rich as her plots. I recommend this and her other books for the fun of reading and the great plots.
A “funny and exciting” mystery in the series featuring a husband-and-wife sleuthing team in Boston (Publishers Weekly).
Boston and its suburbs are stuffed with Kellings, and the city is about to get one more. Sarah Kelling and her husband Max Bittersohn—a pair of amateur sleuths equally at home in back alleys as they are at black-tie balls—are about to have a baby. And if the child takes after his parents, he will be one of the cleverest infants in New England. But while Sarah is a month away from giving birth, she cannot let pregnancy slow her down—she has a…
I was born in Quebec, have lived in eleven countries, and speak four languages. In my 20+ years as an author and journalist, my goal has always been to create bridges between cultures and to tell stories that enable individuals to better understand each other. For me, a trip to a new country, no matter how short or long, is incomplete unless I’ve had the chance to meet locals.
I wish I’d read this book before visiting Lebanese friends there.
The story of a man who returns to his native Lebanon years after the civil war, it portrays the complexity of their society through the impact the war had on a group of university friends.
It gives a wonderfully accurate feel of the sights, sounds, and tastes of the country, and an astute description of the psyche of the Lebanese people from the point of view of a returnee.
“A thoughtful, philosophically rich story that probes a still-open wound.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Maalouf is a thoughtful, humane and passionate interlocutor.” ―The New York Times Book Review One night, a phone rings in Paris. Adam learns that Mourad, once his closest friend, is dying. He quickly throws some clothes in a suitcase and takes the first flight out, to the homeland he fled twenty-five years ago. Exiled in France, Adam has been leading a peaceful life as a respected historian, but back among the milk-white mountains of the East his past soon catches up with him. His childhood friends have all…
I worked for the last 25 years teaching literature classes and creative writing workshops—most of that time at the University of California at Davis. The students in my classes were mainly English majors and/or young writers. They tended to be serious about the potential of a text. To be serious, today, in America, about the potential of a text is to dwell in an inherently counter-cultural position. It is to conceive of the value of a text as something surpassing entertainment, i.e., use. Such a surpassing is a blasphemous notion… still tolerated in the context of the University. Its proliferation beyond those boundaries seems unworkable.
How is a person like a novel? Both, at their core, are made of stories. Both, at their core, are the way in which various stories are imagined to hang together. But the nexus of stories at the core of a person is written in the brain (wordlessness), which is always in flux, changeable, and incomplete, forever before words and on the verge of being totally lost.
The nexus of stories at the core of a novel, on the other hand, is written in nothing other than words; as such, it makes manifest a disembodied, complete (i.e., fictive) person—a person invulnerable to death. A novel is what a person is forever wanting to turn into.
The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be the straightforward biographies of four Germans in exile. Sebald reconstructs the lives of a painter, a doctor, an elementary-school teacher, and Great Uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes of exile which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Along with memories, documents, and diaries of the Holocaust, he collects photographs-the enigmatic snapshots which stud The Emigrants and bring to mind family photo albums. Sebald combines precise documentary with…
American Panic explores questions unanswered in other books about political panics from our nation’s past and turbulent present. The overall question being: Why do some people panic when others don’t? Political panic has traditionally been associated with lack of education, lack of wealth, or other demographics – none of which…
I’m Lindsay, and I never stop falling in love with human creativity. From the moment I first cracked open a library-borrowed copy of The Wizard of Ozas a child, I’ve been asking “What if…?” and I’ve delighted in how other authors imaginatively tackle that question. My interests are eclectic, ranging from history and politics to baking and sparkly things. I read to be swept away and to take a peek inside the storyteller’s mind and heart.
Easily one of my favorite epic fantasies I’ve read in recent years. The complexity of Gillian’s world is a highlight, yet she still makes the story and those within it accessible for her readers. It felt deep, not cluttered. She writes distinctly and with heart from three different points of view. I couldn’t flip pages fast enough, anxious for the moment these three story threads would intersect. It was more than worth the wait.
She rides a fireborn, a steed of fire and ash, trained for destruction.
Ceridwen tal Desmond dreams of ruling like her father over the nation of Soldonia, where warriors ride to battle on magical steeds—soaring on storm winds, vanishing in shadow, quaking the earth, and summoning the sea. After a tragic accident claims her twin brother, she is exiled and sworn to atonement by spending her life—or death—for her people.
But when invaders spill onto Soldonia’s shores and traitors seize upon the chaos to murder her father, Ceridwen claims the crown to keep the nation from splintering. Combatting overwhelming odds…
My mother’s family is descended from both Afrikaner and English South Africans, and the inherent tension between those two groups has always fascinated me. From Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm to Andre Brink’s Devil’s Valley, books that examine the reclusive, defensive, and toughened attitudes of white settlers make for the kind of discomforting reading that I find immensely compelling.
This book is almost a response to, or continuation of, Marq de Villiers’ historical account: one young man’s reflections on returning from exile to a country that had only recently rejected Apartheid.
It’s a deeply personal work in which the author grapples with his conscience as well as the wider culture in which he grew up.
A relative of the architect of apartheid who left the country offers his observations on his return, discussing the extremists that continue to divide the country
Maybe it’s something about my training as a newspaper journalist, but I have a real affinity for the untold story and the wrongly accused. I wrote many stories as a cops and courts reporter, and profiled both saints and sinners. I learned that it’s easy for the outsider to be made into the villain. (Cue: “When You’re Strange” by The Doors.) I’m particularly interested in historical fiction where we can reconsider people who’ve been turned into monsters. When I learned that the Macbeth play that I loved was far from the truth, I was launched into a decades-long writing project.
I had the great pleasure of studying with Jane Alison during my MFA at Queens University of Charlotte, and so as a diligent student, I, of course, read her books. As a poet as well as a novelist, I was captivated by the lyricism in this depiction of the Roman poet who gave us the Metamorphoses.
A different twist on historical retelling, this book is based on Ovid’s banishment to a miserable backwater far from his beloved Rome and his encounter with a fictional Black Sea enchantress. Alison built an incredible character in Xenia, a woman of power, a muse, and maybe Ovid’s match.
A darkly brilliant first novel imagines a missing chapter in the life of Ovid. Why was Ovid, the most popular author of his day, banished to the edges of the Roman Empire? Why do only two lines survive of his play Medea, reputedly his most passionate work, and perhaps his most accomplished? Between the known details of the poets life and these enigmas, Jane Alison has interpolated a haunting drama of passion and psychological manipulation. On holiday in the Black Sea, on the fringes of the Empire, Ovid encounters an almost otherworldly woman who seems to embody the fictitious creations…
I grew up in the United States, completed my undergraduate degree there, and then pursued a doctorate in Modern History at the University of Cambridge. Now, I teach European history at Oxford Brookes University and publish research on Russia and the Soviet Union. I have always been fascinated by revolutions and civil conflicts, especially how people navigate the disruption of stability and normality. How they process fragmentary information, protect themselves, and embrace new ideas to give meaning to their threatened lives is central to my work as a historian. The Russian Revolution and Civil War offer a rich tapestry for exploring these dilemmas.
This book narrowly focuses on one of the most famous moments that putatively determined the course of Russian and world history in the 20th century—Lenin’s journey from exile in Zurich, through enemy territory, to Petrograd in April 1917. The journey acquired infamy because it was facilitated by the German Army and government.
Leaving to one side consideration of counterfactuals or “what-ifs,” I loved Merridale’s book because it manages to capture so many worlds—the world of Russian revolutionary politics and exile, of espionage during WWI, and the early weeks of the Revolution of 1917—all while maintaining a focus on the human level of a train journey.
'The superb, funny, fascinating story of Lenin's trans-European rail journey and how it shook the world' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Evening Standard, Books of the Year
'Splendid ... a jewel among histories, taking a single episode from the penultimate year of the Great War, illuminating a continent, a revolution and a series of psychologies in a moment of cataclysm and doing it with wit, judgment and an eye for telling detail' David Aaronovitch, The Times
By 1917 the European war seemed to be endless. Both sides in the fighting looked to new weapons, tactics and ideas to break a stalemate that…
