Here are 100 books that I Had a Black Dog fans have personally recommended if you like
I Had a Black Dog.
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I’m a Brighton based writer. I’ve lived with bloody depression and frigging anxiety, since a child. I’m the founder of The Recovery Letters project, which publishes online letters from people recovering from depression, addressed to those experiencing it. It was published as a book in 2017 and Cosmopolitan named it "One of the 12 mental health books everyone should read". I also edited What I Do to Get Through: How to Run, Swim, Cycle, Sew, or Sing Your Way Through Depression. My fourth book, How to Tell Anxiety to Sod Off, is due out in 2022.
This book saved my life. And no, I’m not exaggerating. I read it at the peak of my depression when I’d lost all hope and my emotional pain was at its peak. I spent the whole time going ‘Yes! That’s me, that’s happening to me! Thank god someone understands’.
It is short, so that you can actually finish it. This is SO important when your concentration has evaporated due to depression. It’s written by a psychiatrist who understands what your brain is doing but also, crucially, tells you what to do and emphasises how serious this illness is.
'People affected by depression tell me this is the most powerful and helpful book ever written on the topic. I keep meeting people who say this book changed their lives.' - Jeremy Vine, BBC Radio 2
Do you have depression? Firstly, stop blaming yourself. Secondly, don't struggle on alone - read this book instead. It has helped thousands of people just like you.
Dr Tim Cantopher knows two essential truths about depression and depressive illness.
One: it's strong people who are most vulnerable to it; people whose standards are high, whose ethics are powerful, who want their lives to be…
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’m a Brighton based writer. I’ve lived with bloody depression and frigging anxiety, since a child. I’m the founder of The Recovery Letters project, which publishes online letters from people recovering from depression, addressed to those experiencing it. It was published as a book in 2017 and Cosmopolitan named it "One of the 12 mental health books everyone should read". I also edited What I Do to Get Through: How to Run, Swim, Cycle, Sew, or Sing Your Way Through Depression. My fourth book, How to Tell Anxiety to Sod Off, is due out in 2022.
What I love about this book is the journey it takes you on, from despair to hope. At the start of the book, Mark is at the height of anguish with his depression. You read about what he did to start his recovery process; what worked and what didn’t, what he did wrong and what he got right. It gives you hope that you can make a similar journey and hope is the antidote to depression because it’s the main thing it takes from you, so it’s the main thing you need to find and cling on to; even the smallest amount of hope helps.
On paper, things looked good for Mark Rice-Oxley: wife, children, fulfilling job. But then, at his 40th birthday party, his whole world crumbled as he succumbed to depression...
How many men do you know who have been through periods when their lives haven't seemed right? How badly askew were things for them? Many men suffer from depression yet it is still a subject that is taboo. Men often don't visit the doctor, or they don't want to face up to feelings of weakness and vulnerability. By telling his story, Mark Rice-Oxley hopes it will enable others to tell theirs. In…
I’m a Brighton based writer. I’ve lived with bloody depression and frigging anxiety, since a child. I’m the founder of The Recovery Letters project, which publishes online letters from people recovering from depression, addressed to those experiencing it. It was published as a book in 2017 and Cosmopolitan named it "One of the 12 mental health books everyone should read". I also edited What I Do to Get Through: How to Run, Swim, Cycle, Sew, or Sing Your Way Through Depression. My fourth book, How to Tell Anxiety to Sod Off, is due out in 2022.
This book is a beautiful, inspiring weaving tale of a psychiatrist who has recurrent depression and has worked with people with depression. She doesn’t disguise how hard depression is, she doesn’t patronise, she explains depression from her personal point of view, explores what happened in her childhood, and explains a clinician’s point of view of depression.
It’s embedded with bucket loads of empathy, compassion, and hope. You hear about the patients she’s helped and you come out feeling humbled and grateful for her telling her story. Very useful for professionals working in psychiatry and mental health but equally useful for those of us with this terrible illness.
'If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.'
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Having spent her life trying to patch up the souls of others, psychiatrist Linda Gask came to realise that being an expert in depression didn't confer any immunity from it - she had to learn take care of herself, too. Artfully crafted and told with warmth and honesty, this is the story of Linda's journey, interwoven…
Stealing technology from parallel Earths was supposed to make Declan rich. Instead, it might destroy everything.
Declan is a self-proclaimed interdimensional interloper, travelling to parallel Earths to retrieve futuristic cutting-edge technology for his employer. It's profitable work, and he doesn't ask questions. But when he befriends an amazing humanoid robot,…
I’m a Brighton based writer. I’ve lived with bloody depression and frigging anxiety, since a child. I’m the founder of The Recovery Letters project, which publishes online letters from people recovering from depression, addressed to those experiencing it. It was published as a book in 2017 and Cosmopolitan named it "One of the 12 mental health books everyone should read". I also edited What I Do to Get Through: How to Run, Swim, Cycle, Sew, or Sing Your Way Through Depression. My fourth book, How to Tell Anxiety to Sod Off, is due out in 2022.
This isn’t a traditional travel book and not a traditional memoir about depression, but a combination of both. Her journey to Antarctica becomes a metaphor for her mental health struggles throughout her life, starting from childhood.
What I love about this book, and her writing in general, is the dark humour, her acerbic observations and true understanding of how paralysing and perilous depression can be. She understands how painful depression is, the depths it can take you to and seeing your own darkness reflected by someone else is both comforting and validating.
'I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal . . . I find myself hungry to find the next morsel of who Jenny was and what her life was like' EMILIA CLARKE (on Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?)
This strange and brilliant book recounts Jenny Diski's journey to Antarctica, intercut with another journey into her own heart and soul . . . a book of dazzling variety, which weaves disquisitions on indolence, truth, inconsistency, ambiguousness, the elephant seal, Shackleton, boredom and over and over again memory, into a sparse narrative, caustic observation and vivid…
Since my high school days, I’ve considered Winston Churchill the most intriguing figure in world history. He told someone who admired his paintings, “Genius has many outlets.” In his case, he was not only a talented artist but also a politician, statesman, author, and orator. While doing research for my last book, I came across references to Churchill’s visits to the White House to meet with Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. No one had ever closely investigated these sojourns at critical times of WW II and the Cold War. A book was born.
Named Churchill’s official biographer in 1968, Gilbert draws on his vast library of research to focus on Churchill’s abiding interest in the native land of his mother, the former Jennie Jerome of New York. The chronological account reflects Churchill's growing attachment to what he called “the great Republic.”
Over time and on a personal basis, the U.S. became significant financially to the statesman and author. He saw the rising power of America and wanted to have the United Kingdom and British Commonwealth closely allied with the emerging superpower.
An account of the former British prime minister's seventy-year relationship with the United States describes how his work during the First and Second World Wars laid a foundation of a century-long alliance between the countries and established a key policy of cooperation that continues to this day. 75,000 first printing.
Anthony Tucker-Jones, a former intelligence officer, is an author, commentator, and writer who specializes in military history, with well over 60 books to his name. His work has also been published in an array of magazines and online. He regularly appears on television and radio commenting on current and historical military matters.
Churchill is perhaps best remembered for his bulldog premiership during the Second World War. Max Hasting’s excellent study graphically portrays the enormous political and strategic stresses and strains endured by Churchill. Coalition warfare was one of vigorously competing interests and Hastings shows how Churchill achieved a quite remarkable juggling act.
'I would choose this account over and above the rest. It is a fabulous book: full of perceptive insight that conveys all the tragedy, triumph, humour and intense drama of Churchill's time as wartime leader; and it is incredibly moving as a result' James Holland, Literary Review
In this vivid biography, #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings tells the story of how Churchill led a nation through its darkest hour.
A moving, dramatic narrative of crisis and fortitude, Hastings offers one of the finest biographies of one of Britain's finest men.
When Churchill took power as Prime Minister in 1940, it…
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
My father was a pilot in WW2 and I learned to fly in Africa when I was 17. Subsequently I flew biplanes, some of them like the ones in these books, made of wood, glue, and fabric. Since childhood, I've been fascinated by flying in WW1. It was a time of incredible change. The dawn of aviation, when designers and pilots barely understood what they were doing. Biographies written at the time are typically laconic, “emotionally repressed” might be modern. So these novels help us understand today some of those stresses and joys of these remarkable adventurers who dared to undertake what mankind had never done before; fight in the heavens.
The first in the Bandy Papers series, and the best. Jack was a Canadian who served in the air force and managed the difficult task of providing a comedy about flying in WW1 with, once again, realistic, and well-researched flying scenes. This book is a comedic tour de force, wringing belly laughs from war without belittling the surrounding terror and angst. It won several Canadian comedy awards, and you can understand why. It made me laugh so hard in places, that it hurt. But I repeat, the flying scenes are first-rate, and the characters are a hoot as they blunder through the war.
"I enjoyed every word . . . terrifically funny." P.G. Wodehouse
With his disturbingly horse-like face and a pious distaste for strong drink and bad language, young Bartholomew Bandy doesn't seem cut out for life in the armed services, as we meet him at the start of the First World War.
Yet he not only survives the dangers and squalor of the infantry trenches, he positively thrives in the Royal Flying Corps, revealing a surprising aptitude for splitarsing Sopwith Camels and shooting down the Hun. He even manages to get the girl.
I’m a journalist and writer by profession, one who has a passion for history and historical fiction. Eventually these things came together when I came up with the idea for Drabble and Harris and wrote my first historical thriller – Rule Britannia. Before going into journalism I studied history at university, a bedrock that continues to support and feed my writing. I’ve also written broadly on various historical topics throughout my career, including for National Geographic. In my protagonists, Drabble and Harris, I have the perfect vehicle to travel back in time to the recent past and revisit it through modern eyes – and more than that, to challenge our perceptions of it.
Famous for his crookbacked sleuth Shardlake series, CJ Sansom sets this standalone counter-factual historical thriller in 1950s Britain – one where the United Kingdom had capitulated to Nazi Germany in 1940 (with Lord Halifax and not Winston Churchill becoming prime minister) and has become a German client state. It conjures up the 1950s – the smog, the coal smoke, the tea shops – while sketching out an alternate reality, one which is highly plausible, thereby doing one of the things I love best about historical fiction – showing us how different things could easily have been and shaking us from any complacency. More than this, Dominion is a highly effective thriller, as civil servant David Fitzgerald becomes the man in the middle of a politico-spy page-turner that keeps you guessing till the end.
At once a vivid, haunting reimagining of 1950s Britain, a gripping, humane spy thriller and a poignant love story, with Dominion C. J. Sansom once again asserts himself as the master of the historical novel.
1952. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the appeasers and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany after Dunkirk. As the long German war against Russia rages on in the east, the British people find themselves under dark authoritarian rule: the press, radio and television are controlled; the streets patrolled by violent auxiliary police and British Jews face ever greater constraints. There are terrible rumours…
I’ve read more than a hundred biographies over the years, mostly because I want to know what makes great people great. In doing so, I have sifted through some real crap along the way. I don’t typically read many stories about losers. Sad to say, and most people don’t want to hear it, but losers are a dime a dozen and unmotivating downers. My book list gives others the benefits of my 40-plus years of work in identifying books about brilliant, accomplished people written by first-rate historians and narrated by the ”cream of the crop.”
This one’s easy. The writing in this book is so tight, thorough, clever, and subtly funny that I wanted to copy the author's style, but I wasn’t born an English aristocrat.
From the perspective of prose, it is the finest written book I have ever read. The author is clearly brilliant, and I’m in awe and envious of his mastery and usage of the English language and his seemingly unlabored way of phrasing the essence of situations, events, characteristics, and motivations of the people involved.
Then Jenkins chose Simon Vance to narrate with his voice impressions that are so eerily accurate I could feel Churchill in my very own presence.
The entire book is so thoroughly researched and documented that it clearly has become the go-to resource for all things “Churchill,” a man who may have more written about him than any man who ever lived except Jesus Christ.
From the admiralty to the miner's strike, from the Battle of Britain to eventual victory over Nazi Germany, Churchill oversaw some of the most important events the world has ever seen. Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for his personal writing and cautioning against a powerful Soviet Russia in his later years in office, his larger-than-life and complex personality has continued to fascinate writers and historians.
In this comprehensive biography, Roy Jenkins faithfully presents these events, while also managing to convey the contradictions and quirks in Churchill's character. Weaving together in-depth analysis and brilliant historical research, Jenkins has succeeded in…
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circular…
Churchill was a great leader and lawyer and showed how to overcome difficult times.
No leader in world history has exemplified overcoming great odds to lead a country to beat the Nazis and instill a morale within its people when none existed. Almost every chapter in the book is a lesson on how to be a better leader.
This edition of the highly acclaimed one-volume Churchill: A Life, is the story of adventure. It follows Winston Churchill from his earliest days to his moments of triumph. Here, the drama and excitement of his story are ever-present, as are his tremendous qualities in peace and war, not least as an orator and as a man of vision. Martin Gilbert gives us a vivid portrait, using Churchill's most personal letters and the recollections of his contemporaries, both friends and enemies, to go behind the scenes of some of the stormiest and most fascinating political events of our time, dominated by…
