Here are 91 books that Fowlers End fans have personally recommended if you like
Fowlers End.
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I am a Pulitzer-nominated writer who began as a poet, then shifted to prose during a period of aesthetic and personal crisis in my life. I am interested in how the novelist can gather and curate fascinating facts for the reader and incorporate them into the text. I see writing as a great adventure and investigation into issues of empathy, power, and powerlessness, and the individual in an increasingly technological world.
When I wrote my first novel, I began investigating modern-day technology—robotics, bioengineering, AI, and information technology—and have read and worked in this area for over 15 years. It is a pleasure to share some of the books that have informed my own journey.
Truly a book for the ages, how could I not recommend this? It is THE iconic book about a constructed being and his consequent travails.
Made by Victor Frankenstein from all sorts of collected detritus, when the monster opens his “yellow, watery eyes,” the scientist flees from him and never looks back. The monster is left to negotiate the world on his own, but much like a newborn baby, he is ignorant and unequipped to do so.
I love how, unlike the popular concept of the monster, he is, in fact, a vegetarian, and at the start, very vulnerable and peaceful. He learns to read by sitting outside a cottage where he can hear the cottagers teaching a foreigner to read.
I wrote a whole novel about him, A Monster’s Notes, which transports him into the 21st century.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third…
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…
Requesting that I justify my credentials as a misfit, eh? Okay, then. I personally differ from almost everyone around me in many ways, but most notably with respect to faith, sexual arousal, and use of the intellect. I’ve always sought to cultivate and nourish my spiritual side, but faith-based Western religions never resonated with me—I instead cobbled together a discipline encompassing yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, and Ahimsa—which has served me for over half a century. From the earliest age, sexual arousal has involved scenarios where one person cedes power and the other wields it. And I have always obsessed about any bit of minutia my brain happened to seize upon.
In this classic, heart-wrenching novella, the misfit character is Lenny—a gigantic, strong, but intellectually challenged migrant worker in California in the 1930s. Despite being faithfully chaperoned by his lifelong friend George, who tries his best to keep Lenny out of trouble, it seems fated that trouble will inevitably find Lenny. And when it does, Lenny—who is in truth a huge, confused child in a world of rough, unforgiving men—pays the ultimate price.
This story resonates especially strongly with me because I had a younger brother, now deceased, who was severely intellectually challenged.
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.
Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie have nothing in the world except…
Requesting that I justify my credentials as a misfit, eh? Okay, then. I personally differ from almost everyone around me in many ways, but most notably with respect to faith, sexual arousal, and use of the intellect. I’ve always sought to cultivate and nourish my spiritual side, but faith-based Western religions never resonated with me—I instead cobbled together a discipline encompassing yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, and Ahimsa—which has served me for over half a century. From the earliest age, sexual arousal has involved scenarios where one person cedes power and the other wields it. And I have always obsessed about any bit of minutia my brain happened to seize upon.
This is the darkest of Hermann Hesse’s well-known spiritual journey novels. Unlike works such as Siddhartha, and Demian, Harry Haller in Steppenwolf is a despondent, surly, and suicidal misfit, incapable of coming to grips with the bourgeois culture around him, which seems to him irreparably antithetical to the classical art and literature he worships.
Haller’s eventual spiritual awakening is far more subtle and less dazzling than those Hesse portrayed in other works, and for me, therefore, in many ways more relatable. Deeply ingrained in my mind is Hesse’s image of the gramophone playing tinny, distorted works by master classical composers—which Haller at first despises— but then comes to see that it is much like his trying to decipher mystical truth, which manifests to him in a sort of abridged and imperfect form—because that is all that we, as corporeal humans, are able to discern.
Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine. The tale of the Steppenwolf culminates in the surreal Magic Theater—for mad men only.
Steppenwolf is Hesse's best-known and most autobiographical work. With its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, it is one of literature's most poetic evocations of the soul's journey…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Requesting that I justify my credentials as a misfit, eh? Okay, then. I personally differ from almost everyone around me in many ways, but most notably with respect to faith, sexual arousal, and use of the intellect. I’ve always sought to cultivate and nourish my spiritual side, but faith-based Western religions never resonated with me—I instead cobbled together a discipline encompassing yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, and Ahimsa—which has served me for over half a century. From the earliest age, sexual arousal has involved scenarios where one person cedes power and the other wields it. And I have always obsessed about any bit of minutia my brain happened to seize upon.
This is a hugely ambitious and moving novel and one of my all-time favorite reads. The character, Owen Meany, is a tiny man with a shrill, piercing voice who believes he is God’s instrument.
For me as an author, one of the most striking and memorable aspects of this novel was the ingenious and perfectly executed plotting of the story’s grand finale—absolutely mind-boggling the way John Irving pulled it off.
'Marvellously funny . . . What better entertainment is there than a serious book which makes you laugh?' Spectator
'If you care about something you have to protect it. If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.'
Summer, 1953. In the small town of Gravesend, New Hampshire, eleven-year-old John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany are playing in a Little League baseball game. When Owen hits a foul ball which kills John's mother, their lives are changed in an instant.
I am the author of five books, including the New Angles Prize shortlisted, Low Country, London’s Lost Rivers and Camden Town: Dreams of Another London. I write about forgotten history, lost places, and strange landscapes in London and on the coast. I have appeared on television (including PBS) and radio and have written for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, among others. I also write about music and theatre.
Iris Murdoch’s first novel makes the pubs of 1950s London key characters as a down-at-heel writer roams the city from a shabby Earl’s Court base, trying to square philosophy, political ideas, and reality.
It brings to life a London where people without money could live in the center, and social life was all about who you ran into. This was a place that was still as much a village as a global city.
Iris Murdoch's debut-a comic novel about work and love, wealth and fame
Jake Donaghue, garrulous artist, meets Hugo Bellfounder, silent philosopher.
Jake, hack writer and sponger, now penniless flat-hunter, seeks out an old girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her glamorous actress sister, Sadie. He resumes acquaintance with the formidable Hugo, whose 'philosophy' he once presumptuously dared to interpret. These meetings involve Jake and his eccentric servant-companion, Finn, in a series of adventures that include the kidnapping of a film-star dog and a political riot on a film set of ancient Rome. Jake, fascinated, longs to learn Hugo's secret. Perhaps Hugo's secret…
I am the author of five books, including the New Angles Prize shortlisted, Low Country, London’s Lost Rivers and Camden Town: Dreams of Another London. I write about forgotten history, lost places, and strange landscapes in London and on the coast. I have appeared on television (including PBS) and radio and have written for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, among others. I also write about music and theatre.
BS Johnson was a brilliant London writer who broke conventional writing apart. Albert Angelo is a powerful account of teaching in a hard Islington school in the mid-1960s.
It is also an audacious experiment in form, as narrative voices break apart and unravel, but always anchored in a London that feels both very close and very different.
Why don't you take a permanent job, Albert? You're twenty-eight now, you know," his mother remarks when he goes on his weekend duty visit home. Albert Angelo is by vocation an architect and only by economic necessity working as a substitute teacher. He had thought he was, if not dedicated, at least competent. But now, on temporary assignments in schools located in the tough neighborhoods of London, Albert feels ineffectual. He is failing as a teacher and failing to fulfill himself as an architect. And then, too, he is pained by the memory of a failed love affair. "I'm trying…
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 am the author of five books, including the New Angles Prize shortlisted, Low Country, London’s Lost Rivers and Camden Town: Dreams of Another London. I write about forgotten history, lost places, and strange landscapes in London and on the coast. I have appeared on television (including PBS) and radio and have written for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, among others. I also write about music and theatre.
In the early 1990s Soho, Robinson is a charming, possibly Satanic character who leads film editor Christo into a world of sleazy bars, drink, drugs, and general depravity.
It is the last gasp of Soho that died with the old century—the mysterious, legendary neighbourhood that London somehow revolved around. Petit makes it gleam darkly.
I am the author of five books, including the New Angles Prize shortlisted, Low Country, London’s Lost Rivers and Camden Town: Dreams of Another London. I write about forgotten history, lost places, and strange landscapes in London and on the coast. I have appeared on television (including PBS) and radio and have written for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, among others. I also write about music and theatre.
A tale of West London in the 1930s, Westerby brings to life a lost world of gamblers looking for mugs at the long-gone White City dog track.
Local teenager Jim teeters on the edge of the criminal underworld in a thriller woven into a London you can almost taste—teeming with life and the inevitability of death in the shadow of the coming war.
First published in 1937, Wide Boys Never Work brings the streets of pre-war London alive in the tradition of other great low-life novelists such as Gerald Kersh and James Curtis, and is a forgotten gem rich in both its snappy dialogue and vibrant prose style. This new edition from London Books comes with an introduction by the respected chronicler of the capital, Iain Sinclair, who cites Wide Boys Never Work as one of his favourite London novels.
Although I currently write romantic women’s fiction, because I came up in the Literary Fiction community, I frequently have writer friends ask me to recommend well-written Romance. Leaving aside the subjectivity of well-written and the snobbery inherent in the suggestion that Romance—a category they’ve admitted to never having read—isn’t generally well-written, I first have to explain that Romance has rules: While we often associate Romance with sex on the page, technically, it’s not a requirement. There are only two requirements, according to the Romance Writers of America: the love story has to be the central storyline of the book; and there has to be a happily ever after (HEA).
You like your small, introspective, architecture-of-a-marriage stories? Well, here’s the Romance version. Nothing really happens, plot-wise. It is simply a masterclass of two characters matched in every way that matters, ready to destroy everything they could potentially have because they’re scared of getting hurt. Humorous. Hot. Nerdy. Incisive. Affecting. This will introduce you to the basic foundation of Historical Romance—essentially, “the marriage plot”—in the quiet way you’re looking for.
From the superbly gifted Sherry Thomas comes this beautifully written romance about a marriage of convenience that turns inconveniently passionate...
Felix Rivendale, the Marquess of Wrenworth, is The Ideal Gentleman, a man all men want to be and all women want to possess. Even Felix himself almost believes this golden image. But underneath is a damaged soul soothed only by public adulation.
Louisa Cantwell needs to marry well to support her sisters. She does not, however, want Lord Wrenworth—though he seems inexplicably interested in her. She mistrusts his outward perfection, and the praise he garners everywhere he goes. Still, when…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Even as a child, I wanted to escape from current times and visit bygone or future eras. History and literature were favourites and I gleaned most of what I know of the past by reading. Then I found Georgette Heyer, prompting a lifetime love affair with all things Georgian and Regency. Agatha Christie got me into mystery. I loved both the puzzle of whodunit and being whirled away into Poirot, Marple, or Cadfael territory. A good mystery and a deep dive into history as well? Heaven! Best of all is the author who draws me so completely into their imaginary world that the real one fades away.
With Charles Dickens investigating, I had to check this out. The author’s imaginative use of Dickens as a sleuth is rooted in facts new to me. I didn’t know he had set up a sanctuary for fallen women, for example. Having read much Dickens, I found the voice authentic. His Victorian world, so intense in his novels, was equally immersive here – the poverty, the dirt, the inequality – and I became thoroughly involved in the story and the unfolding investigation. If an author can draw me into their world and hold me… this did, due to impressive detailed research. I was particularly struck by the compassion visible in this Dickens which made me realise how much his books also demonstrate this aspect of his character.
An intriguing detective series featuring Charles Dickens! Perfect for fans of Sherlock Holmes, Victorian crime mysteries, A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield…
A brutal murder in Victorian London forces a famous writer to solve the mystery…
London, 1849Charles Dickens has set up Urania Cottage as a sanctuary for fallen women.
But he is shocked when the matron’s assistant – Patience Brooke – is found hanging outside the property, covered in blood.
Desperate to protect the reputation of the Home and to stop a scandal from spreading, Dickens takes the investigation into his own hands.
