Books like I Who Have Never Known Men — picked by fans

A generation or so after The Calamitous Event (TCE), our hero’s dog is stolen by an unexpected visitor to their remote home in the Outer Hebrides. This book is my definition of a cracking good read. It has adventure, surprises, and insights into the human condition that led to TCE in the first place. Above all, it features a boy and his overwhelming mission - to get his dog back. If, like me, you love dogs you are going to love this book.

TCE here is a virus that leaves just one woman alive. I found this quite irritating at first because the law of averages would say there HAD to be at least a handful of other survivors. The story features a woman who would take to her bed for the day if she broke a fingernail. I enjoyed seeing a female character in this role although she has a tendency to be a bit wet. She spends the first few weeks post-TCE breaking into nightclubs, drug dens, and museums and getting smashed. Set in London, it’s a great travelogue for this brilliant city.  I started to warm towards her when she finally pulls herself together and we watch as she learns the skills needed to survive. 

In Zone One, the frantic oh-*expletive* bloodbath phase of a zombie apocalypse has clicked over into something like a new normal. In lower Manhattan, our hero “Mark Spitz” mops up straggler zombies seemingly stuck in mindless loops from their past lives and reflects on the transformed yet familiar landscape. Zone One made me realize how specific streets are encoded in my own memories, and made me want to be more present in my own life, to move through the world less like a zombie.

What happens when you take the meritocracy to extremes and you can only access the best of food and housing etc when your Q is the highest? Dalcher creates an interesting future world, damning of social engineering and genetic manipulation, and reminds us that it was less than a hundred years ago that certain war-hungry fellas (and a few women) salivated over thoughts of a perfect Aryan race. A great page-turner but with a few ‘Deus ex Machina' plot twists with which I’m still struggling. Nevertheless a very worthy read.

After tasting many beers in my research quest, I honed in on Belgium beers, which are my favorites. I like strong blondes, lol. Blue Moon types, golden with a hint of oranges, or other types of citrus fruits. This book is a guide to all things Belgium brewing. A guide to traveling to Belgium, to the beers Belgium brewers produce and where you can find them. This is a guidebook for brewery tours, pubs, and cafes. If you find yourself in the country and in need of a guide, this is the book for you.

This is a bit of a cheat, I’m afraid, as it’s the first book in a two-book story (which concludes in Explorers on the Moon) but once you’ve read this one you’ll be dying to find out what happens next.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a Tintin nut. I love all Hergé’s comic books about the intrepid boy reporter and have read them countless times. They’re pacy – certainly as zippy and exciting as any modern action movie – and the choice of angles and framing is worthy of a master of cinema.

In this one, Tintin and his friends are reunited with the eccentric Professor Calculus, who is working on a mission to the moon. But there are spies, saboteurs, and stowaways around, so there’s plenty of mystery and peril – as well as humor – when Tintin and the gang embark on an adventure… show more.

I love Anita Shreve’s writing style, which is spare and yet conveys so much emotion. Resistance is set during World War 2 in occupied Belgium and tells the story of a downed US air force pilot who is found by a young boy, the son of a Nazi collaborator, before being taken in by a couple who hides him in the attic before he can be discovered by the Germans. This atmospheric story is about love and betrayal, but so powerfully portrays the atrocities of war. 

This is the first book in the breathtaking House of Niccolò series that takes readers across Europe from Flanders to Tuscany, then to Scotland, Cyprus, and Constantinople, among other places, in the mid-fifteenth century. It is the story of a humble but gifted Bruges dye-works apprentice named Claes who turns himself into the wealthy, well-respected, often feared Niccolò, who wreaks havoc on his enemies. Dunnett’s hist-fic is for serious fans of the genre: kings, duchesses, and courtiers, financial machinations with the Medici, international intrigue, and the very best sort of timeless narrative. Not an easy read, but unforgettable, and so worthwhile. Dunnett inspired me to write action-packed but quality historical fiction based on serious research. 

Atkinson’s book tells the story of Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm who were friends and motorcycle enthusiasts. When war broke out they joined a voluntary medical unit heading for France and set up a first aid post near the frontline. They were fearless, sometimes reckless, and always cheerful as they saved the wounded. I loved the way Atkinson’s book captured their youthful exuberance and gung-ho courage.

This book is part of Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Niccolò series, about merchants and trade in the fifteenth century and I love the whole series for its focus on commerce and goods – commodities like sugar, cloth, dyestuffs, and whale oil – and its scope, taking us from Bruges to Italy, Cyprus and Rhodes, Trebizond in the Black Sea, Egypt, Iceland, and beyond.

I chose this particular book in the series because of its unusual focus on the gold trade in Africa, and the cultured Islamic intellectual world of Timbuktu, just before it fell to the Songhai Empire. Written about the world before the Age of Exploration, it made vivid to me the forces that promoted conquest, colonization, and exploitation that led to the voyages of Columbus and others.