Books like Gone Girl

I'm an author, broadcaster and public historian specialising in women’s experiences during the Second World War. While courage and sacrifice are often recognised, the effectiveness of the women who served is less frequently acknowledged. Popular culture tends to focus on glamour, yet these women were motivated by the same patriotism and sense of duty as men, while facing sexism, unequal pay, and fewer protections. Through my books and public history work, I aim to restore recognition of their achievements. This has included securing portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, public sculptures, and an English Heritage Blue Plaque. I regularly contribute to BBC television and radio, and my books have won or been shortlisted for major literary, historical, and biography prizes.

I‘m primarily a poet, and it seems natural to love prose that gets the most out of every word. I also deeply admire the great works of—say, Theodore Dreiser, who seems, to me, to splash words all over the page. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s precision I love and admire most. It’s what I’ve striven for. It’s what appeals to me in the books I’ve chosen. The phrase “the style is the man” simply iterates the notion that the writer who comes closest to his (or her, of course) innermost passions, deepest held convictions, and writes with clarity in expressing them, is, in fact, the author himself.

Fiction has a way of capturing people, places, and phenomena that often elude source-bound historians. As I say in my book, you feel the weight of all the terrible things Colonel Kurtz has done in central Africa far more by his whispering “the horror, the horror” than I, as a historian, could possibly convey by listing them out and analyzing them. That feel–especially what contingency feels like–is something historians should seek out and try to pull into their craft of writing. Getting used to and using fiction to help historians see and feel the past is a worthwhile endeavor. 

In 2018, my wife and I walked the Pacific Crest Trail southbound with our four children—Canada to Mexico, 142 days, 2,650 miles. Aiden was sixteen, Georgie eleven. You cannot walk that far with your kids without thinking hard about what you are handing them, because you are handing it to them in real time, in front of you, all day. The books I keep returning to are the ones that take that seriously: inheritance that isn't money. A father's temper. A father's schemes. A way of staying put, or not. These are five that ask those questions, and the trail sharpened them for me.

I like fiction which makes a character confront what the poet Thom Gunn called ‘the blackmail of his circumstances’: where you are born, the expectations of you. I like to think I am very much a self-created individual, but I can never escape what I was born into; the self is a prison that the will is trying to break out of. I like literature which reflects that challenge.

I was born and grew up in Seoul. My bestselling debut novel has been longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize and shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. My book is inspired by my great-aunt, one of the oldest women who had escaped alone from North Korea. It is available from Harper Perennial in the U.S. and Virago in the UK. The novel’s translations continue to meet readers worldwide, including in Italy, Romania, Greece, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, and South Korea.

Ever since I read the work of Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, and Georgette Heyer at an impressionable age, nineteenth-century England has fascinated me. My mother, a lifelong reader, is responsible for sparking this obsession. She never cared that I wanted to read “grown-up books” or later tried to discourage me from majoring in English. After college, I went on to teach British literature to high school students and to write two mystery series, one set during the Regency period, the other taking place half a century later. This new Victorian series introduces a bored spinster who finds her purpose in life as a detective.

I am drawn to books in which family history is never as simple as it first appears. I have always loved fiction about memory, silence, and the choices people make when they discover that something they believed about their past was not entirely true. As a novelist, I keep returning to these themes because I am fascinated by the way family stories shape who we become. I am especially interested in women who have to rebuild their sense of themselves when old explanations stop making sense. The books on this list stay with me because they do more than reveal secrets; they show what happens after the truth is known.

I am a historian of science who just completed a book on the role of perfume in the quest for the secret of life and vitality. While writing it, I became fascinated with the challenge of translating scent into language. While our nose can recognize a virtually infinite number of odors, there are only a few basic categories of description (“floral,” “woody,” “citrus,” etc.). To fully describe them often requires a poet’s touch – invoking a tapestry of memories, associations, and feelings to create the experience in the reader’s mind. These are some of the best books I’ve encountered for talking about the complex world of scent, and the importance of perfume in human history.

I've enjoyed being frightened my whole life. From childhood, when I watched old monster movies on TV and read forbidden comic books by flashlight, I have always been a fan of scary films and books. To me, horror is one of the essential human emotions by which we interact with the world. The vampire has always been my favorite monster to fear. But over the years, I have watched bloodsuckers shift from monster to anti-hero and, finally, to sexy companion. Personally, I still prefer the old-school vampires of literature—nasty, mean, with blood-covered fangs and a cold, dead heart. Luckily, the scary OG vamps can still be found. Here are some of my favorites.