Here are 100 books that Iron Flame fans have personally recommended if you like
Iron Flame.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
My favorite memoirs are joyful, personal, and uplifting, especially those that tell of travel, intercultural understanding, food, cooking, creating art, and personal growth, all subjects for which I am passionate. Years ago, I taught adults cooking, specializing in the food from places I had traveled (India, China, Iran, Denmark, Spain, Afghanistan). Now, at 82, though I live alone, I still cook every day and collect recipes to try. When I was writing my own travel memoir, I constantly read other memoirs, always searching for the best of the best. I found I especially loved books that included recipes, maps, or illustrations. These recommendations are only a few of my favorites.
As an artist, I simply fell in love with this book about the author’s journey from a stressed advertising executive to a strolling artist. And yes, it is another memoir about falling in love in Paris. This one offers a different bonus: black and white illustrations that only hint at the vibrant, colorful watercolors featured in MacLeod’s next two books
Written with humor and intimacy, it offers a look at simplifying a fast-track life to allow for a year of travel. Besides being an uplifting read, this memoir features practical advice to make the dream of living abroad a reality–plus an additional bonus at the end–a list of tips on how to save/make $100 a day to set aside for a “break year.”
A New York Times bestseller For readers of Eat Pray Love, Under the Tuscan Sun, and The 4-Hour Workweek, comes a funny, romantic, and inspiring travel memoir about a woman who quits her job, moves to Paris, and finds love-and herself. With romantic Paris as the backdrop and beautifully illustrated with the author's own sketches, Paris Letters is for those who dream of a life richer and more fulfilling than the one they are living today. Exhausted and on the verge of burnout, Janice MacLeod cuts back, saves up, and buys herself two years of freedom in Europe. In Paris,…
After losing her brothers, Titania studied and trained to rule Aubren. But she hadn’t planned on becoming Queen at fifteen. Now with her reign challenged from within the castle walls, she must decide what is best for her kingdom. Should another rule in her stead? Or has fate led her…
I’m the author of 26 twisty psychological thrillers, many of which are Amazon bestsellers. I’ve sold over three-quarters of a million books and particularly enjoy writing about dysfunctional families and unpleasant neighbours! I spend a lot of time in the Swiss Alps and love the mountains, so thrillers set in the snow are my absolute favourite. I set one of my own books, Forget Me Not, in the Swiss Alps in a location I know extremely well. I’m a full-time author and I’m also an avid reader of thrillers and enjoy nothing more than reading a book with an ending that makes me gasp!
Set in the Alps, this was always going to be a top book for me.
It features friends, secrets and snow and a ski trip that goes horribly wrong. I enjoyed the suspense, the evocative scenery, and the layers of twists.
It’s a fun whodunnit set against my favourite scenery. What’s not to love?
***Don't miss SOMEONE IN THE WATER, Sarah Clarke's gripping new summer thriller, available now***
'You won't know who to trust' Adele Parks, Platinum
'A fast-paced tale of revenge.' Catherine Cooper, author of The Chalet
'Suspenseful, claustrophobic.' Katy Brent, How to Kill Men and Get Away With It
'A tense and twisty thriller.' Nikki Smith, author of The Beach Party
**********************************************
THE PERFECT TRIP
When four friends embark on a boys' skiing holiday in the Alps, they anticipate a weekend of fun, drinking, and some healthy competition on the slopes. But their trip is cut short when one of them falls…
I was born and raised as both an anglophone Canadian and a diaspora Jew. After living in Montreal, Jerusalem, and New York for a total of about 15 years, I returned to my hometown of Toronto and took up the position of the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry at York University, where I work as a professor of history. I teach undergraduate students, graduate students, fellow academics, community leaders, and the wide public about all sorts of dimensions of this very religiously diverse, culturally diverse, socio-economically diverse, and politically diverse community of 400,000+ souls, with its 260+-year-old history.
I love books written by multiple authors. Some of the greatness of this multi-author work comes from the fact that 28 different scholars have contributed to it, many of them working in pairs to create new insights they might not have been able to achieve alone.
Some chapters compare an aspect of Canadian Jewish life with that of another religious or ethnic minority in Canada (for example, Chinese, Muslims, and Métis). Other chapters compare an aspect of Canadian Jewish life with that of Jewish communities in other countries (including Australia, France, and the Former Soviet Union).
So, I reaped the benefit of learning about Canadian Jews through various comparative perspectives. I found virtually all of the essays in it to be stimulating, approachable, and punchy-short, so I didn’t feel compelled to read the whole thing cover to cover, uninterrupted by another book. I just went back to it, bit…
Demise by assimilation or antisemitism is often held to be the inevitable future of Jews in Canada and other diaspora countries. The Ever-Dying People? shows that the Jewish diaspora, while often held to be in decline, is influenced by a range of identifiable sociological and historical forces, some of which breathe life into Jewish communities, including Canada's.
Bringing together leading Canadian and international scholars, The Ever-Dying People? provides a landmark report on Canadian Jewry based on recent surveys, censuses, and other contemporary data sources from Canada and around the world. This collection compares Canada's Jews with other Canadian ethnic and…
Jason has written over twenty historical novels on topics ranging from the Roman Empire to the Islamic invasion of Spain and to the spread of the Viking Age into North America. His latest series, The Long Fuse, follows a young man as he navigates the deadly conflicts of the French & Indian War and the Revolutionary War in Eighteenth-Century America.
When the deities dedicated to the history of the French and Indian War got together to recommend their own list of the best books on the war that made America, they made Francis Parkman’s multi-volume work required reading. And the good news is that even if they had not, it is worth diving into headfirst.
The French and Indian War is often overshadowed by the American and then French Revolutions that followed on its heels. Yet, neither of them would have ever happened without the completely lopsided British victory in the first. Parkman, writing in the Nineteenth Century, was among the first scholars to shed light on the immense impact wrought by the fight for control over North America in the 1750s. His work is massive as it digs into the very origins of both countries’ humble beginnings and rapid growth in the New World. But fear not! If his…
This Library of America volume, along with its companion, presents, for the first time in compact form, all seven titles of Francis Parkman’s monumental account of France and England’s imperial struggle for dominance on the North American continent. Deservedly compared as a literary achievement to Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Parkman’s accomplishment is hardly less awesome than the explorations and adventures he so vividly describes.
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865) begins with the early and tragic settlement of the French Huguenots in Florida, then shifts to the northern reaches of the continent and…
Am I an expert on transportation? No. But I’m fascinated by movement. Physical movement (how do bike gears actually work?) and metaphorical (how does life actually work?) I did enjoy a brief moment as the kind of unofficial bike traffic reporter when I was on CBC Radio here in Canada. I’d report on my 4 am commute to work. But as a writer and illustrator for kids, I know the freedom transportation represents. We all want to fly. In MINRS I write about spaceships. We all want to see the world. In The Fabulous Zed Watson! I write (with my kid Basil) about epic road trips.
The titular Boundless is a train, and my grandparents were all train people in Canada. One of my most vivid early memories is being in the engine with my grandpa.
At 11 kilometers long, the Boundless is also a living, moving city. Ken makes a journey through the train like a journey through time, space, and history. Each time Will, the main character, leaps from one car to another, the reader also takes a leap into a new world. Why is Will jumping from car to car? Because he’s witnessed a murder, and the culprit is hot on his tail.
After a murder is committed, Will finds himself in possession of a key that has the potential to unlock the train's hidden treasures. Together with Maren, a gifted escape artist, and Mr Dorian, a circus ringmaster with amazing abilities, Will must save the Boundless before someone else winds up dead. With villains fast on his heels and strange creatures lurking outside the windows, the train hurtles across the country as Will flees for his life.
His adventure may have begun without his knowing . . . but how it ends is now entirely up to Will.
Born into a family with friction between parents, I never thought relationships could get much worse. When my parents divorced, father became estranged, then died by apparent suicide, memoirs by diverse voices opened my world and made me feel less alone. When I went through a sexual and gender identity crisis of my own, they helped me navigate the turmoil in my own life. I spent more than twenty-five years writing professionally for corporate and academic employers before writing biography and memoir became a coping skill.
Although we’ve never met in this sprawling metropolis, I feel a kinship with Ivan through their writing and history. We’re both from rural upbringings and have inhabited the gender spectrum in non-binary tomboyhood, and shared what could be called “same-sex attraction,” if we believed that it was as simple as some believe it to be. Ivan’s memoir gave me a mirror to see the struggle with gender from the assigned female-at-birth (AFAB) side as I was working towards the middle from the AMAB side. I hope to write one day with as much honesty and potent imagery.
Ivan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of ten previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every Crowd, a collection for LGBT youth. Tomboy Survival Guide is a funny and moving memoir told in stories, in which Ivan recounts the pleasures and difficulties of growing up a tomboy in Canada’s Yukon, and how they learned to embrace their tomboy past while carving out a space for those of us who don’t fit neatly into boxes or identities or labels.
Ivan writes movingly about many firsts: the first time…
"Witches take on the patriarchy in this epic feminist fantasy." Spirit Sight book 1 volume 1 is an award-winning debut epic fantasy novel written by Ross Hightower, the first in the six-book Spirit Song series. Winner of numerous awards, including the Readers Favorite Fantasy Finalist and the Eric B Hoffer…
As a young person I loved to read history novels, but each book had to be about either British monarchs or American generals. Then I watched the movie Bye Bye Blues, a Canadian prairie story by Anne Wheeler, and realized for the first time that the story was about me, about us. It was such a heady feeling that I decided to study Western Canadian history at university. Three weeks after I got my M.A. from the University of Victoria I was offered the chance to write about Vancouver Island coal miners and the rest, as they say, is quite literally history.
Who would have thought that a novel about a ninety-year-old woman determined to avoid being put into a nursing home would become required reading for high school and university students? And yet this novel has been listed by several sources as one of the greatest Canadian novels ever written. Laurence’s writing style inspired me and gave me the assurance to write about Western Canadian history. It demonstrates one of the reasons why Laurence was named posthumously as “A Person of National Historic Significance” by the Canadian government in 2018.
Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. I wonder if she stands there yet...
Hagar Shipley - an irascible, independent nonagenarian - has lived a quiet life full of rage. As she approaches her death, she retreats from the squabbling of her son and his wife to reflect on her past - her ill-advised marriage, her two sons, the harshness of farm life on the prairie, her own failures and the betrayals and failures of others.
She really gets at the heart of how Brown and Black bodies are seen, and what is fascinating to me is the approach through current “technical art” and a good discussion of architecture. I had a class focus on her discussion—lengthy—about surveillance and race. It’s extremely poignant, and something whites especially just don’t think about. I will never again go through an airport without thinking about her book.
In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the…
I once tried pro wrestling in my 20s. The experiment only lasted 90 days when a bad concussion resulting in vertigo knocked me out of my pro wrestling dreams. That being said, I’ve always appreciated what “sports entertainment” has provided. And as I’ve gotten older, I appreciate more and more what these athletes go through to leave crowds both satisfied and hungry for more.
I loved this book for the author’s strong voice in telling one of pro wrestling’s greatest tragedies.
The book is heavily researched and provides not only a glimpse into the psyche of the central character, Chris Benoit, but reveals the dark side of wrestling and the crazy demands and unfair practices promoters use on pro wrestlers.
In Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit & The Fall of The Pro Wrestling Industry, author Matthew Randazzo V explores the events leading up to the grisly demise of World Wrestling Entertainment superstar Chris Benoit. In an unexpected, although not altogether surprising fit of madness in June, 2007, Benoit strangled his wife, choked his seven-year-old son to death and then hung himself from his own weight machine.
Beyond Benoit's twisted story, Randazzo's shocking expose delves deep into the scandals and cover-ups of the global wrestling industry, where drug addictions, sociopathic superstars and broken families are the norm and…
An Heir of Realms tells the tale of two young heroines—a dragon rider and a portal jumper—who fight dragon-like parasites to save their realms from extinction.
Rhoswen is training as a Realm Rider to work with dragons and burn away the Narxon swarming into her realm. Rhoswen’s dream is to…
I’m the author of 26 twisty psychological thrillers, many of which are Amazon bestsellers. I’ve sold over three-quarters of a million books and particularly enjoy writing about dysfunctional families and unpleasant neighbours! I spend a lot of time in the Swiss Alps and love the mountains, so thrillers set in the snow are my absolute favourite. I set one of my own books, Forget Me Not, in the Swiss Alps in a location I know extremely well. I’m a full-time author and I’m also an avid reader of thrillers and enjoy nothing more than reading a book with an ending that makes me gasp!
This thriller flips between viewpoints and timescales as we follow Bonnie, who struggles to survive not only the elements, but her deceitful husband Steffan and creepy Annalise, who may or may not be the white witch of the Alps.
This gave me feelings of claustrophobia, and, although it requires a bit of stretch of the imagination, it was a quick and easy page-turner.
Bonnie thought she knew her husband. She was wrong.
Bonnie and her husband Steffan are hiking in the beautiful Swiss Alps when they are caught in a freak snowstorm. Fearing they may not survive, the couple are overjoyed when they stumble across an isolated cabin occupied by a lone woman, Annalise.
But their joy soon turns to unease as they realise that Annalise may have a sinister agenda.
And she's not the only one with something to hide. Trapped together in a nightmarish pressure cooker, the cracks in Bonnie's marriage start to show as she discovers that Steffan has been…
