Here are 100 books that Home before Dark fans have personally recommended if you like
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When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.
I read this book long before Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize. It was the first of her books that I read, and I was so seized by her style of narration that I proceeded to read with devotion everything she had written.
In one of the early pages of this book, Ernaux declares that in writing about her father, she didn’t want falsity or an overblown style, no artsy attempt to produce something “’ moving’ or ‘gripping.’” The style she followed was true to the life she was describing as a working-class man with minimum education. Here is a book that pays tribute to life but also enacts a credo for what Ernaux calls a “neutral way of writing”: “no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony.”
Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection.
Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
As an editor, I worked with many authors before deciding to become one myself. Most of my twenty-five published books cover theatre and film, but I was especially excited to work on biographies of actors and try to get to the truth behind the public figures.
I wrote three books about my father, who became a star of the silent films during the 1920s and eventually appeared in 172 films over nearly six decades. In researching his life and work, I was astonished to find a very different man from the one I had lived with and known during my childhood and youth.
The writer and poet Blake Morrison had a lifelong struggle to come to terms with his overbearing father.
Arthur Morrison, a Yorkshire doctor, was a smooth talker, a small-time cheat, who took pleasure in outwitting the authorities, living out his motto "I may not be right but I’m never wrong."
He was forever invading his children’s space, a habit which his son found painfully hard to resist, leading him to take up writing to escape this domineering influence. But when his father contracted cancer and lay dying, he was overwhelmed with grief and guilt.
It’s a moving, angry, and sometimes harrowing account of a dysfunctional relationship, which yet manages to be funny, and is written with poetic and humane grace.
The critically-acclaimed memoir and the basis for the 2007 motion picture, directed by Anand Tucker and starring Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent
And when did you last see your father? Was it last weekend or last Christmas? Was it before or after he exhaled his last breath? And was it him really, or was it a version of him, shaped by your own expectations and disappointments?
Blake Morrison's subject is universal: the life and death of a parent, a father at once beloved and exasperating, charming and infuriating, domineering and terribly vulnerable. In reading about Dr. Arthur Morrison, we come…
When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.
A writer’s book about a writer-father. In this remarkable memoir, Amis pays tribute to Kingsley Martin. The book is truthful about the anxiety of influence and about the collision of ambition, the competitiveness between writers, even when they happen to be father and son.
What made the book touching was Martin Amis’s love and sorrow not only for Kingsley Martin, his biological father but also for his literary father, the novelist Saul Bellow. Bonus: Amis’s probing, ruthless, but always burnished sentences: “The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental, and ineluctably trite.”
The author traces his life and career, examining his relationship with his father, comic novelist Kingsley Amis, and the changing literary scene in Great Britain and the United States.
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.
Every Father’s Day, someone or the other on my social media feed will post Robert Hayden’s wonderful poem “Those Winter Sundays.” The poem takes me back not only to the many acts of kindness and unheralded small sacrifices that my father made but also to the ambition and the anxiety of Seepersad Naipaul on behalf of his son away at Oxford and starting in life as a writer, a writer who later in life will win the Nobel Prize.
The poignant part of this drama is the father’s own ambition and anxiety about making it as a writer. It doesn’t happen. Instead, the son receives a telegram with some terrible news. He sends his family a telegram in return: “= HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME = VIDO”
An “extraordinary rich correspondence” (The New York Times Book Review) between a seventeen-year-old aspiring writer at Oxford who would go on to become a Nobel Prize winning author and his sacrificing, beloved father.
At seventeen, V.S. Naipaul wanted to "follow no other profession" but writing. Awarded a scholarship by the Trinidadian government, he set out to attend Oxford, where he encountered a vastly different world from the one he yearned to leave behind. Separated from his family by continents, and grappling with depression, financial strain, loneliness, and dislocation, "Vido" bridged the distance with a faithful correspondence that began shortly before…
I come from a family of “functional” alcoholics, where feelings were never discussed and drinking was the way to solve (or more likely avoid or cause) problems. After 25 years of abusing alcohol (and drugs), I finally got sober. And for the first time ever, I started writing, because all those feelings I pushed down wanted a voice. All that childhood trauma needed more than AA and talk therapy to heal. So I gifted those feelings with written words, as did the writers I mention in my list. Recovery is something to pass on and telling our stories is another healing way to do it.
This is another memoir that pulled me right in. Like Hepola, I loved the excitement of the whole bar scene, and quite often, drank until I blacked out. Trying to blackout things from my childhood that caused me so much anxiety and pain. And then having to remember and heal from it all when I got sober.
A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, Blackout is the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure -- the sober life she never wanted.
For Sarah Hepola, alcohol was "the gasoline of all adventure." She spent her evenings at cocktail parties and dark bars where she proudly stayed till last call. Drinking felt like freedom, part of her birthright as a strong, enlightened twenty-first-century woman.
But there was a price. She often blacked out, waking up with a blank space where four hours should be. Mornings became detective work on her own life. What…
I have been writing and publishing memoirs since I was in my twenties and working at The New York Times, where I learned the power of sharing what it is we know after what we’ve been through. What I now know is that memoir is the single greatest portal to self-discovery. I do not know how I feel about anything until I write it down. Teaching memoir for thirty years has allowed me to witness people reoccupy themselves after they take back the power of their stories from oppressors, abusers, medical trauma, and the other deep influences of life. Getting one’s story in one’s hands is the road to change. Memoir allows for that change, both for the reader and the writer.
This is the only book I put in the hands of new memoir writers who want to understand the difference between memoir and autobiography, who are endeavoring to learn structure and who need to understand how to write a book that takes on one single aspect of their lives at a time.
Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor," a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.
It was love at first sight. The beads of moisture on a chilled bottle. The way the glasses clinked and the conversation flowed. Then it became obsession. The…
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
I took my first hit of marijuana when I was 9. I had my first drink at 12 and my first shot of heroin at 14. My brother and sister were also alcoholics and ended up taking their own lives. I abused drugs and alcohol for over 30 years, and after many failed attempts to turn my life around, I now have 15 years of continuous sobriety. I’ve also read almost ninety books on the topic of substance abuse and have written several myself about my personal struggles to get clean and sober and stay that way. Addiction, sadly, is a subject I know all too well.
This is one of the first books I read when I realized that I had a serious problem with drinking. Not only did it help me better understand my addiction from a genetic, scientific point-of-view, it also helped me diagnose myself as an alcoholic. Written for the lay-reader, it’s short, packed with hard facts and eye-opening studies about alcoholism. It’s a classic. And it’s also inspiring when it comes to recovery and treatment. I’ve recommended it dozens of times to people who’ve asked me where they could find out more about alcoholism, if not for themselves, then for those they love who have a serious drinking problem.
The now-classic guide to alcoholism returns with new, enlightening research that confirms the revolutionary ideas first trailblazed by this book in a time when such theories were unheard of—now featuring a new foreword, new resources, and the same reliable insights and easy-to-read style.
“This book is truly informative, powerful, and an invaluable resource on overcoming alcoholism.”—Angela Diaz, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H.
Ten of millions of Americans suffer from alcoholism, yet most people still wrongly believe that alcoholism is a psychological or moral problem that can be “cured” once the purported underlying psychological problems or moral failings of the alcoholic are…
I’m a husband, father, writer, and recovering addict – and not necessarily in that order. Early in my marriage, I became a full-blown, low-bottom cocaine addict. While it wasn’t surprising that active addiction nearly led to divorce, my wife and I were baffled and discouraged when my newfound sobriety brought its own existential marital issues. Frustratingly, there was a dearth of resources for couples in recovery, especially compared to the ample support available to recovering addicts. As an avid freelance writer, I decided to add to this sparse genre by sharing our struggles, setbacks, and successes en route to a happy, secure marriage.
You can’t stay married if you’re dead. Don’t die. Read this book.
There’s a reason TIME Magazine included the central text of the world’s most prolific recovery organization on its list of Best 100 Nonfiction Books of All Time: the book that gave AA its name likely has saved more lives than any other singular narrative in the past century.
AA not really for you? Reading Alcoholics Anonymous does not mean joining Alcoholics Anonymous. The themes co-authors Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith discuss – and the Twelve Steps of Recovery in particular – have near-universal relevance to anyone attempting to break the grip of alcohol or drugs.
More than eight decades after its publication, the book offers timeless truths that captivate addicts via ironclad identification.
Many thousands have benefited from "The Big Book" and its simple but profound explanation of the doctrines behind Alcoholics Anonymous, which was founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith. This original 1939 edition outlines the famous 12 steps, and offers counsel for those who wish to join the program but doubt the existence of a higher power. It also contains encouraging personal stories, in which AA members relate their experiences with alcohol and how they found the path to sobriety. "The Big Book" has gone through numerous editions and remains the most widely used resource for recovering…
I’m a professor at Northland College (WI) and an American environmental historian with specialties in wine, food, and horticulture. I mostly write on alcohol, garden history, botany, and orchids. The history of alcohol is wild, fraught, and charged with power—I’ll never tire of learning about it.
Rorabaugh argues convincingly that alcohol of several types—but mostly rum and whisky—were part and parcel of, and at times even drove, early national American culture. Solo and group binges increased from 1790 to 1820 as the population tried to adapt to anxious and uncertain changes in their lives. Drinking became aligned with liberty—taverns were the “seedbeds of the revolution” and the “nurseries of freedom.” And although boozing came to be an early element in what was defined as the American character, the temperance movement was not far off.
Recreating America's first fifty intemperate years, when, from 1790 to 1840, Americans drank more alcoholic beverages per capita than at any other time in history, Rorabaugh examines some of the reasons why Americans drank so much
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
I have been writing about motherhood, family, love, loss, and finding yourself for over fifteen years. I have been a journalist, wife, mother-of-three-boys (yes, that’s one word), aerobics teacher, puppy wrestler, and novelist. Being a novelist is by far the hardest job but it’s the most rewarding. (OK, boys, no – motherhood is – really.) I enjoy reading stories about family, love, and relationships in all their guises, good, bad, and messy, just like life – and I’m keen to write stories that readers will remember too. My latest book is about two sisters who, after a car crash, are affected differently, yet both are on a journey for the truth.
Ruth Jones is a new author for me but she packs a punch with this family saga and story of four generations and their relationships.
I particularly identified with the matriarch and grandma (not that I am one!) in this, Grace, who is the all- seeing and all-knowing thread that knits the other family members together.
Told in mainly present day, the novel also time-slips back to the 60s to give another angle on the family dynamic – and dysfunction. One of the most outré of all the characters is Alys, a recovering alcoholic but some of the situations Jones has put her in will have you laughing.
I also love the minor character Soozi. Just read it to see what I mean.
*'Heartfelt, joyful, brave, utterly compelling' RACHEL JOYCE *'I feel bereft now it's over' CLARE POOLEY *'Ruth Jones at her very best' SARAH TURNER
The funny, moving and uplifting new novel from Ruth Jones, co-creator of Gavin & Stacey and author of the Sunday Times bestsellers Never Greener and Us Three.
Grace is about to turn ninety. She doesn't want parties or presents or fuss. She just wants to heal the family rift that's been breaking her heart for decades.
But to do that she must find her daughter Alys - the only person who can help to put things right.
