85 Books Like Gigi, Listening

I was absolutely riveted by this huge doorstop of a biography exploring the life of Sylvia Plath. I’m not a diehard Plath fan per se, but I am always drawn to books about writers’ lives.

The intersection of Plath’s death with her experiences of motherhood, her writing life, and the failure of her marriage also brings this story firmly into my wheelhouse. (While Plath might not technically have been in midlife, I would argue that she was already precociously facing many of its common pitfalls when she died.)

This book is meticulously researched and includes new archival evidence. I loved it so much that after I finished its 600-something pages, I wanted to start over immediately.

This novel perfectly captures the frenetic pleasure-seeking ethos of the youth of the English upper classes after the horrors of WW1- unsurpsingly, as it is written by one of them.

Evelyn Waugh was one of the Bright Young People, as they became known, who tore round London in sports cars, snatching at policemen’s helmets for the treasure hunts they loved.

This one’s a story of obsessive love, with a heroine who is undoubtedly flawed, but who you can’t help cheering on, even when she’s doing very bad things.

You wouldn’t want her to be your brother’s girlfriend, but she’d be hilarious company on a night out. The story is darkly funny, but ultimately uplifting, which I think is a great combination in a book.

Ruckley manages to strike a rare balance between high fantasy prose and Grimdark’s dirt-under-the-nails realism, and combines it all with thoughtful character development and an oftentimes sombre tone. On the one hand it’s about a boy’s coming of age journey and the tragedy of loss, and on the other a bitter and ultimately futile conflict of a people riven by the dogma of an emergent religion. There are visceral and superbly paced clashes between these opposing sides, which are both blinded by the all-encompassing madness of a magic user who is rapidly losing control of his own power. The fact that all of the suffering and slaughter in this story could easily be avoided is what makes it hit deepest. If everyone had just been nice to the poor boy, maybe he wouldn’t have turned into a narcissistic half-corpse hell-bent on psychic slavery and death. But hey, then there would… show more.

Dominic wrote two very good crime books in a short series before publishing Vine Street.

I am including Vine Street on my list because, although it’s set in London and is therefore not ‘regional’, it was one of the great crime novels of 2021-22 and deserves to become a classic. I read this book before it was published, and I knew, like everyone else, that it was something special.

The story spans almost a century, from the seedy streets of London’s Soho in the 1930s, until the present day. There are some really well-researched and vividly depicted descriptions of police investigations in the 30s, and just for that it’s worth a read. But there’s also a twisting, mesmerizing plot that takes us all the way to the present.

What really distinguishes Vine Street, though, is the writing itself, which seems to echo the rhythms of the 1930s jazz clubs, and… show more.

I had a ‘property tycoons’ itch that I needed to scratch, and this book by Rosa Lucas was exactly what I needed.

I adored this enemies to lovers high stakes romance, and the witty heroine was someone I was rooting for from the very instant I met her. With a dash of CEO/employee and a whole host of fire, this book needs to be on your ereader.

When researching the newspaper angle of my book, I was already aware of the exploits of Nellie Bly, the New York-based pioneer of investigative, undercover journalism. But I wanted to try and track down a journalist who had achieved similar feats in late Victorian and Edwardian London. Enter Elizabeth Banks, an American journalist who emigrated to London at the turn of the century, and plied her trade as a freelancer, selling exposes on the lives of parlour maids, laundry workers, and flower sellers to the likes of The Illustrated London News. Pluck doesn’t even come close to covering her bravery and bravado – some memorable details from her book include her smuggling a camping stove into a London hotel because she couldn’t afford the dining room food, and pestering editors up and down Fleet Street to publish her words. She was a true entrepreneurial London woman, at a… show more.

If you adore a second chance romance, then this is the steamy billionaire romance with a trip to London for you.

I adored how Rebecca Castle weaves together hints for the second standalone in this series, and a few of the scenes made me pant! So sizzling. Make sure you grab it now.

Before settling into the chronicle of the title character, this first entry in the Undertaker series (from the author of the much longer-running Edge books as well) follows a circuitous course involving an unfaithful wife and a vengeful husband. I won’t spoil the surprises along the way, but the Undertaker himself pushes the Western antihero to its limit. He’s all but emotionless, very nearly a sociopath, but with a certain competence and honor that gives him an appeal. (Even though he’s further saddled by the lame catchphrase ‘Bye-bye.’) I actually find his semi-autistic callousness more bearable than Steele’s more willful nastiness, since it seems the Undertaker was simply born the way he is, rather than choosing it.

You’ll recognize certain plot points from these books remixed into my book, though I found the Undertaker’s continued lack of character development a bit grating from one book to the next. That’s the… show more.

Much like Italian filmmakers managed to create the spaghetti western by riffing on the genre from an ocean away, English pulp writers created the Piccadilly Western: violent, cynical, sometimes even too edgy for its own good. The Adam Steele books often verge on tastelessness with their violence and insensitivity, but that’s relieved by a sort of dark humor—often groan-inducing. It can be a lot to take, but for those who prefer too much to too little… Adam Steele is definitely not too little. The first book has Civil War hero Steele going outlaw to avenge his murdered father, with his best friend as the lawman hot on his trail.