Here are 100 books that How Much of These Hills Is Gold fans have personally recommended if you like
How Much of These Hills Is Gold.
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I began gathering stories about pregnancy and its avoidance in Mexican archives twenty-five years ago when I was working on my dissertation on religious history. This topic fascinated me because it was central to the preoccupations of so many women I knew, and it seemed to present a link to past generations. But as I researched, I also realized that radical differences existed between the experiences and attitudes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexican women and the concerns, practices, and understandings of my own period that I had assumed were timeless and unchanging. For me, this was a liberating discovery.
This book is one of the reasons why I became a historian.
Ulrich uncovered the nearly illegible diary of an eighteenth-century midwife in Maine and included excerpts of the original at the start of each chapter. When I read the excerpts, I thought: How could these possibly be significant and what do they mean, anyway?
And then, like a detective, a gifted mind-reader, and a learned botanist all rolled into one, Ulrich unpacked each entry, weaving each snippet into the fabric of a wide textile of social history that includes reproductive history, gender and marital relations, local economies, political conflicts, and religion.
Abortion and abortifacients play a marginal role in the story Ulrich tells, but the history of midwifery and reproductive health are central to it.
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • Drawing on the diaries of one woman in eighteenth-century Maine, "A truly talented historian unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own" (The New York Times Book Review).
Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine. On the basis of that diary, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich gives us an intimate and densely imagined portrait, not only of the industrious and…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
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 first loved Rebecca for its atmosphere, but what stayed with me was something more unsettling: how completely another person’s version of the past can shape the present.
I remember finishing it and thinking about how easily we accept a story when everyone around us seems to believe it. As a writer, I keep returning to that idea.
Du Maurier showed me that an absence can dominate a novel as powerfully as a living character, and that what people refuse to say can matter as much as what they reveal. That has stayed with me in my own writing about memory, silence, and family secrets.
* 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY * 'One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century' SARAH WATERS * 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .'
Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory…
I’ve always been fascinated by how we remember the past and why some things get written into histories and other things don’t. I realized that Nothing happens all the time but no one has thought to ask how we remember it. Once I started looking for how Nothing was being remembered, I found it all around me. Books I read as a kid, movies I’d seen, songs I’d heard – these were my sources. So when I started working, Nothing got done (yes, I love puns!).
I haven’t recovered yet from the way Hartman recovers the lives of young Black women through historical photographs. The images were made to rob these women of their individuality, make them fit “types,” letting them say Nothing about themselves.
But Hartman writes like she’s talking to them, and they’re wonderful. She messes with categories used by authorities who thought they “knew” these women by their transgressions. I was utterly transfixed by how she imagined these women’s lives and loves in the ordinary stairways and back alleys they called home.
The photos are gorgeous. You could talk about them for days and still have more to think about—like how when it comes to women being framed for doing something wrong, maybe Nothing has changed.
Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
My second novel, Snakes of St. Augustine, describes an unconventional love story served up with a large side of Florida weirdness. My first novel, City in a Forest, received a Gold Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association in 2020. My short fiction and essays have appeared in Pangyrus, Eckerd Review, Northern Virginia Review, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. I earned my bachelor’s degree in English from Eckerd College and the M.F.A. in Fiction from Queens University of Charlotte. Currently, I’m a writer for a university in Daytona Beach, Florida. A resident of Ponce Inlet, I began volunteering with the Volusia-Flagler Sea Turtle Patrol in 2018.
The devastating story of two boys unjustly sentenced to serve time in a nightmarish juvenile reform school, The Nickel Boys won a Pulitzer Prize and became a New York Times bestseller.
It is a must-read for anyone sampling literary works featuring Florida. The boys in the story, Elwood and Turner, endure and witness hellish abuse at the Nickel Academy. The boys’ haunting story, exquisitely told by Colson Whitehead, is based on Florida’s real-life Dozier school where thousands of children were tortured, raped, and murdered for more than a century.
Whitehead’s unflinching descriptions of terror and abuse can be tough to take, but they serve an important purpose, by forcing the reader to confront the hellish reality that was America under Jim Crow laws. Long after the last page is turned, if ever, this novel won’t leave you.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this Pulitzer Prize-winning follow-up to The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.
When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only…
I came to America from Iran when I was five years old. There's something about immigration that's taught me to be a "first-class noticer," which was Saul Bellow's requirement for a writer. Because I always feel a little (or more) outside of things, people, places, and languages hold a wonderful strangeness for me. Writing is where I try to make sense of all that. As an immigrant, I’ve been especially drawn to stories about people whose lives haven’t always been included in literature. For a novelist, history can be an invitation or a provocation. For me, it’s both. Reading about the past pulls me into its mysteries; the mysteries inspire me to invent.
The Buddha in the Attic is a novel about early 20th century Japanese “picture brides,” women who came to the United States to be united with husbands they’d never met. Otsuka writes their story in the first-person plural, which you couldn’t imagine would work, but it does—and beautifully. There’s a choral quality here, a sense of a shared history that transcends any one life. Like her (also extraordinary) first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, it’s written with an almost pointillist perfection. Every word feels chosen, radiant, radical.
Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic, the follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine was shortlisted for the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the Pen Faulkner Award for Fiction 2012.
Between the first and second world wars a group of young, non-English-speaking Japanese women travelled by boat to America. They were picture brides, clutching photos of husbands-to-be whom they had yet to meet. Julie Otsuka tells their extraordinary, heartbreaking story in this spellbinding and poetic account of strangers lost and alone in a new and deeply foreign…
I came to America from Iran when I was five years old. There's something about immigration that's taught me to be a "first-class noticer," which was Saul Bellow's requirement for a writer. Because I always feel a little (or more) outside of things, people, places, and languages hold a wonderful strangeness for me. Writing is where I try to make sense of all that. As an immigrant, I’ve been especially drawn to stories about people whose lives haven’t always been included in literature. For a novelist, history can be an invitation or a provocation. For me, it’s both. Reading about the past pulls me into its mysteries; the mysteries inspire me to invent.
I love novels that pluck figures from the sidelines of history and place them up-front-and-center. In this case, the figure is the real-life Vietnamese-born man who served as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ cook in Paris. Full of atmospheric detail, the writing in this novel is absolutely exquisite. I felt immersed in 1930s Paris, a world that’s long entranced me, but I was seeing it from an entirely new perspective. Truong offers tantalizing glimpses of Bihn’s life in the Stein-Toklas household, but the most memorable scenes happen when he’s alone, walking through the streets of Paris, on his way to meeting a lover, or regaling us with stories of his childhood in Vietnam and his fraught but tender love for his father. It’s a beautiful tale of exile and homecoming.
A novel of Paris in the 1930s from the eyes of the Vietnamese cook employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, by the author of The Sweetest Fruits.
Viewing his famous mesdames and their entourage from the kitchen of their rue de Fleurus home, Binh observes their domestic entanglements while seeking his own place in the world. In a mesmerizing tale of yearning and betrayal, Monique Truong explores Paris from the salons of its artists to the dark nightlife of its outsiders and exiles. She takes us back to Binh's youthful servitude in Saigon under colonial rule, to his…
Almost Home is a fictional retelling of the last great tragedy of the Civil War.
In late April 1865, almost 2,000 newly freed Union prisoners of war are packed onto the steamer Sultana, in poor repair and with a listed capacity of 376 passengers. Among them are four Indiana soldiers…
Growing up very pale in a sun-washed Australian coastal town, I often found myself retreating to the cool shadows. It was in the darkness that I felt most at home—which may be why I’ve always been drawn to stories with a darker edge. My fascination with creatures in those frightening tales—immortal, dark, and possessed of terrible appetites—led to Winter’s Shadow, my debut YA novel, and the reason I still write today. I love books that blur the line between horror and the mundane—tales that feel like nightmares recalled in the comforting light of day. These are the stories that linger, and this list is a love letter to them.
When I first read Interview with the Vampire (I was 12), I was struck by how Anne Rice made darkness beautiful. The mood, the grief, the sensuality—it all felt so rich and strange and alive.
I didn’t just want to read about Louis and Lestat; I wanted to live inside that shadowed world, however painful. The power of her vampires was alluring, even as their sadness confused me. How could being immortal be such a torment?
This book taught me that supernatural fiction could be poetic, philosophical, even transcendent. There’s a reason this novel endures.
It made me want to write stories where beauty and horror dance together in candlelight.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Anne Rice, this sensuously written spellbinding classic remains 'the most successful vampire story since Bram Stoker's Dracula' (The Times)
In a darkened room a young man sits telling the macabre and eerie story of his life - the story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed with an exquisite craving for human blood.
When Interview with the Vampire was published the Washington Post said it was a 'thrilling, strikingly original work of the imagination . . . sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful, always unforgettable'. Now, more than forty years since its release, Anne…
I came to genderqueer histories searching for a reflection of myself that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment (the rural American South). Early on, I thought I’d found it—historical figures, both real and fictional, who shared my gender identity. But as I’ve continued to research, I’ve realized that the reflections of history are less a mirror image, more a reflection in water—fluid and distorting. Genderqueer people throughout history use different language for their identities, navigate different social and family systems, and express their gender in different ways. In the space created by this difference, I’ve begun to understand my gender as a thing that changes, too, across space and time.
An Unkindness of Ghosts opens with the dedication, “To my mother and her mother all the way back to Eve.” While the other four books on this list emphasize the queer and genderqueer people we might choose to recognize as ancestors, this book focuses on Aster’s relationship with her mother, revealing the way that biological family can, in certain instances, support and affirm genderqueer identity.
"Harrowing and beautiful, this is SF at its best: showing the possible future but warning of the danger of bringing old prejudices and cruelties to that new world. While a story about enslaved people in space could be a one-note polemic, the fully rounded characters bring nuance and genuine pathos to this amazing debut." --Library Journal, Starred Review
"Solomon debuts with a raw distillation of slavery, feudalism, prison, and religion that kicks like rotgut moonshine...Stunning." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Infused with the spirit of Octavia Butler and loaded with meaning for the present day, An Unkindness of Ghosts will appeal…
In today’s world, where negativity and dire situations can easily bombard us, I need to consistently ground myself in hope and light. Real stories about transformation and unconditional love are not only uplifting and hopeful, they are also around every corner. Every one of us is capable of transformation and the giving and receiving of unconditional love. It’s through transformation and unconditional love that we may better understand what it means to be human and, thus, build our capacity for compassion for one another. Through compassion, we can create a better world.
What does it mean to be human, and what happens to us when we don’t receive unconditional love?
The two main characters in this Gothic novel, a human and a "monster," are presented in such a way that I questioned which main character was more human. There’s a warning of what can happen when we deny the basic human need for unconditional love.
Shelly’s use of a frame story pulled me in from the first page.
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…
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
by
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted repartee…
I’m chronically ill. Whether I’m swept up, terrified, swooning, or trying to solve a mystery, I love my fiction to take me elsewhere. The dichotomy of wanting to share my experiences, discuss disability, open up the conversation around the topic, and have others lose themselves in story has been a fine line I’ve walked with all of my work. With Joyce, I wanted to bring grief and disability to life in a more resonate way. The words pain and fatigue mean drastically different things to different people. When magic is involved, it transcends your definition or mine, allowing us to focus on the experience with less personal context.
Like some other powerhouse books I’ve read, it would take hours to fully discuss the brilliant storytelling, the compelling characters, the descriptions that have you smelling the damp earth, and to truly explain the awe I felt when reading this book.
When I say, “I’ve never read anything like this,” I usually mean that wowed me this much or that one aspect was unique or clingy. In this case, I mean it in every sense. It was chewy and raw and rare, unique and visceral, sumptuous and dark, devastating and lyrical.
Dealing with illness in magical realism is something I’m familiar with, clearly. To see it being handled in the way Sue Rainsford does is spine-tingling and refreshing, if one can call a book so guttural as this one such.
'A tangled, gnarled, wonderfully original, strange, beautiful beast of a book' DAISY JOHNSON, author of Everything Under
'Beautiful and terrifying' SUNDAY TIMES
'Seethingly assured debut fuses magical realism with critical and feminist theory' GUARDIAN
In house in a wood, Ada and her father live peacefully, tending to their garden and the wildlife in it. They are not human though. Ada was made by her father from the Ground, a unique patch of earth with birthing and healing properties. Though perhaps he didn't get her quite right. They spend their days healing the local human folk - named Cures - who…
