Here are 88 books that Lie Down in Darkness fans have personally recommended if you like
Lie Down in Darkness.
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I am Lecturer in US Foreign Policy at Queen Mary University of London, and I work on issues of national security and identity, political rhetoric and the role of the everyday in shaping politics, especially media and popular culture. I have written extensively on American politics and US foreign policy over these past years with two published monographs and more than a dozen articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, plus a couple of op-eds and multiple TV and radio appearances. My most recent research project explores the role of populism under the Trump presidency and its political impact in the United States.
This book is maybe my favorite novel ever written about politics and the lengths that some men are willing to go in the pursuit of power.
It features a memorable cast of characters, most importantly, of course, the figure of Governor Willie Stark, the quintessential populist politician, who manipulates others for his own gain and demonstrates a total lack of morals. Set in the 1930s, the story of Stark’s rise to power and eventual downfall always strikes me for how contemporary it feels and how many parallels it offers with the populist politics of our own time.
This is a novel about choices. How would you have chosen to act during the Second World War if your country had been invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy determined to isolate and murder a whole community?
That’s the situation facing an ordinary family man with two children, a…
It took a career as a librarian to help me understand my need for order, instead of the emotional chaos I grew up with in a large family. Being the child of an alcoholic father and a codependent mother gave me little personal value. After gaining some sense of worth in college, I wanted to give my kids the stability and support every child deserves, but I had to learn how to do this. I used my resources: education, self-scrutiny, honesty, art, nature, and the good Lord of the universe.
As a leader in autobiographical fiction, Wolfe writes of a large family dominated by an alcoholic, authoritarian father who is highly dramatic in words and behavior.
His wife’s determination to survive by running a boarding house and investing in real estate leaves little time for parental attention to the needs of their children.
While most grow to repeat the dysfunctional family habits that hinder healthy development, the youngest child, with the help of his teachers, struggles enough to finally take steps away from the pain, and out of the cycle, as I did with my own life.
The spectacular, history-making first novel about a young man’s coming of age by literary legend Thomas Wolfe, first published in 1929 and long considered a classic of twentieth century literature.
A legendary author on par with William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Wolfe published Look Homeward, Angel, his first novel, about a young man’s burning desire to leave his small town and tumultuous family in search of a better life, in 1929. It gave the world proof of his genius and launched a powerful legacy.
The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man…
I grew up in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., and have since lived in Arkansas and Virginia. My two novels are historical, set in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Virginia and North Carolina, and are heavily influenced by the great Southern writers. My books feature family dramas, how the land interacts with characters, questions of fate and personal action, and the decisions that change people’s lives. I love Faulkner, but you’ll find him on every list. He influenced every writer who came later, but there are plenty of other heavy hitters to choose from. Here are a few favorites.
Has to be one of the funniest novels ever written: a road-trip story with weird characters, small-time conmen, and twisting dialogue that could’ve been assembled by Beckett. It’s impossible to predict where the story’s heading. There’s nothing like it out there, and it’s as different from Portis’s brilliant True Grit as Mark Twain from Cormac McCarthy (both of whom Portis resembles), and probably his best.
Ray Midge is waiting for his credit card bill to arrive. His wife, Norma, has run off with her ex-husband, taking Ray's cards, shotgun and car. But from the receipts, Ray can track where they've gone. He takes off after them, as does an irritatingly tenacious bail bondsman, both following the romantic couple's spending as far as Mexico. There Ray meets Dr Reo Symes, the seemingly down-on-his-luck and rather eccentric owner of a beaten up and broken down bus, who needs a ride to Belize. The further they drive, in a car held together by coat-hangers and excesses of oil,…
This is a novel about choices. How would you have chosen to act during the Second World War if your country had been invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy determined to isolate and murder a whole community?
That’s the situation facing an ordinary family man with two children, a…
I grew up in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., and have since lived in Arkansas and Virginia. My two novels are historical, set in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Virginia and North Carolina, and are heavily influenced by the great Southern writers. My books feature family dramas, how the land interacts with characters, questions of fate and personal action, and the decisions that change people’s lives. I love Faulkner, but you’ll find him on every list. He influenced every writer who came later, but there are plenty of other heavy hitters to choose from. Here are a few favorites.
Taylor is one of the authors who made me want to be a writer. He’s a magician of the short story, compressing events and characters from the upper South into luminous stories that can seem more real than life. He wrote longhand in poetic lines, usually drafting about a hundred pages for every ten he kept. The result is a rich reduction of scenes that move us to laughter and tears. Taylor holds the mirror up to life, and you can’t help but be drawn in.
From the grand master of the American short story, these fourteen tales of domestic life in the South during the thirties and forties explore that extraordinary world of manners, expectations and unspoken understanding. The reader is drawn as if by magnetic force into a world rendered in breathtaking, painterly detail. These stories are marvelous entertainments, rich with amusement, yet Taylor renders his characters truly and understands them in a profoundly meaningful way.
CDC statistics say that more teens and young adults die from suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, flu, and chronic lung disease COMBINED. Each day in the US, there are an average of 5,400 suicide attempts by teens in grades 7-12. These statistics are frightening, and yet, as a high school teacher, I knew lecturing my students that suicide is NEVER the answer to problems wouldn't work. They'd have to see it for themselves. So that's what I tried to do as a writer. The poems in ANNA are short but penetrating, and combined with Anna's note at the book's end, I hope the point is made.
This book will break your heart as you become totally engrossed in Brent’s recovery after an attempted suicide that leaves him with severe burns. When teenagers think about “ending it all,” they may not think about the consequences for those who love them; they don’t think about what if later it would have been better if they had lived.
Though this is not always an easy read, I think it is an important one.
Brent Runyon was fourteen years old when he set himself on fire. In The Burn Journals, Runyon describes that devastating suicide attempt and his recovery, both physical and psychological, over the following year. He shares his story with such unflinching honesty that we understand - with a terrible clarity - what it means to want to kill yourself and how it feels to struggle back towards normality. Intense, exposed, insightful, The Burn Journals is a deeply personal story with universal reach. It is impossible to look away. Impossible to remain unmoved.
I've been searching for spiritual freedom since the age of four when I was sent to school. Soon I recognised books as an escape from the limitations of the physical world and into the dream world. Each of the five books below have made serious contributions to this psycho-spiritual escape plan, and have lifted my spirit to that higher dimension of freedom. I live in the Scottish Highlands, as my ancestors did, in a misted swirl of ghostly archetypes, mountains, deer, lochs, and brooding skies. Even here though, an escape tunnel is needed into the deepest realm of mind, where the stories and mystery hide away until the moment needed.
Impossible to fathom how Carson McCullers could have distilled such wisdom into her soul by age twenty-three, and then produced this book. The passions and losses, violence and ambition, guilts and loves, of her cast of small-town 1930s Americana characters, wander across the pages like spectres disrupted by a shifting wind.
The lost, struggling to hear each other's songs above their own pain, but continuing to try through the long night, no matter the chance of success.
I first bought a copy of this in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1993, on a day off from working at Cedar Point Amusement Park, entranced as I read the first pages standing up in a mall bookshop, the after-echoes of rumbling roller-coasters pummelling my ears and spirit.
The beloved classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation and one of the Modern Library's top 20 novels of the 20th century.
"A remarkable book...From the opening page, brilliant in its establishment of mood, character, and suspense, the book takes hold of the reader."
In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed cafe owner, and a young girl. Each yearns for escape from small town life, but the young girl, Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (loosely based on McCullers),…
CDC statistics say that more teens and young adults die from suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, flu, and chronic lung disease COMBINED. Each day in the US, there are an average of 5,400 suicide attempts by teens in grades 7-12. These statistics are frightening, and yet, as a high school teacher, I knew lecturing my students that suicide is NEVER the answer to problems wouldn't work. They'd have to see it for themselves. So that's what I tried to do as a writer. The poems in ANNA are short but penetrating, and combined with Anna's note at the book's end, I hope the point is made.
I think that every teen in school today has experienced a lockdown, hopefully just as a drill, but as school shootings continue, it’s a worry for every day of school. That’s why I think teens are so horrified as Emily Bean, the main character, sees her boyfriend bring a gun to school and kill himself.
I believe that reading about the depths of Emily’s agony reveals how devasting suicide can be for those who have had to live through its aftermath. In my author visits, I have met a number of those left behind by suicide, and I think it’s so important that this book ends with some hope for them.
A Michael L. Printz Honor Award Winner in the vein of This is Where It Ends
“A gentle, lyrical story of incomprehensible sorrow faced with quiet courage.”—ELIZABETH WEIN, New York Times bestselling author
“Hubbard treats tragedy and new beginnings with a skilled, delicate hand.”—JOHN COREY WHALEY, author of Where Things Come Back, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award
Senior Paul Wagoner walks into his school with a stolen gun, threatens his girlfriend, Emily Beam, and then takes his own life. Soon after, angry and guilt-ridden Emily is sent to a boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where two quirky fellow…
I'm an enrolled member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. I grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation. In 2010, I was diagnosed with Bipolar 2 Disorder but I now believe that I’ve struggled with the disorder since childhood. I'm a novelist, poet, short fiction writer, and filmmaker. I've won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction.
After years of being misdiagnosed and wrongly medicated, and after years of living in denial about my bipolar disorder, I began Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT) in 2017. And it saved my life. Linehan has created an evidence-based treatment program that has taught me mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation, and distress tolerance. Frankly speaking, I think DBT should be taught in elementary and high schools.
From Marsha M. Linehan--the developer of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)--this comprehensive resource provides vital tools for implementing DBT skills training. The reproducible teaching notes, handouts, and worksheets used for over two decades by hundreds of thousands of practitioners have been significantly revised and expanded to reflect important research and clinical advances. The book gives complete instructions for orienting clients to DBT, plus teaching notes for the full range of mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance skills. Handouts and worksheets are not included in the book; purchasers get access to a Web page where they can download and print…
I’ve been teaching in prep schools for twenty-five years, and I also attended one. As both student and teacher, I’ve been fascinated by student social dynamics—how groups form, fracture, and define what they value or reject. I’m equally interested in how teachers’ experiences mirror yet differ from students’. Though I always looked forward to summer breaks, I was drawn to literature—especially mysteries—set in prep schools. These stories helped me better understand the complexity of these relationships while offering a lens to reflect on my own experiences, often with far more drama than real life.
I loved the storyline of an adult returning to teach at the school where she’d gone and how this return surfaces a host of memories that she hasn’t fully come to terms with yet.
I connected so deeply with the care the teacher has for the place as it is, the confusion she has about the place as it was, and how she struggles to not repeat the mistakes of the past. Plus, the mystery is so well-paced.
Jane Hudson never thought she would return to Heart Lake. Her years there as a scholarship girl ended in a fatal and mysterious double tragedy.
Now she is back, struggling to adjust to her new life teaching Latin and as a single mother. But the events that haunted her memories for so many years begin to recur in front of her eyes. It seems she alone can see what is happening, and only she will be able to prevent a second catastrophe...
Surrounded by the lake that gives the school its name, steeped in history and overflowing with the emotions…
I love Catholic historical romance novels for what they do and don’t include. They feature history, multiple characters, community and faith that together set a rich stage for love stories. The novels don’t include graphic violence or sex scenes. A former journalist, I started writing in the genre because I couldn’t find what I wanted to read. I’m both traditionally and indie published. I’m a member of the Catholic Writers Guild, as are the authors whose books are listed here. Family and community play important roles in my books. They show how a couple is never an isolated pair but always part of a multilayered world. Just like real life.
In Pieces is the first of a two-book series. The romance develops in this book while subplots thicken. I was quickly drawn to the characters and early American setting. I felt immersed in the ambience of the Boston waterfront during the Federalist years. Themes of redemption, forgiveness and understanding weave through the novel and affect more than the hero and heroine. For example, the hero’s family grapples with his growing interest in Catholicism. As the love story reaches resolution, another subplot deepens: a need for American spies to help protect the young country. I ended the book feeling as though the characters had become friends. In Pieces is subtitled Molly Chase Book 1 and fits the Christian historical fiction genre as well as Catholic historical romance.
Certain things ruin a girl’s reputation, and madness is one.
BOSTON, 1793—Beautiful and artistic, the only daughter of a prominent merchant, Molly Chase cannot help but attract the notice of Federalist Boston—especially its men. But she carries a painful secret: her father committed suicide and she found his body. Now nightmares plague her day and night, addling her mind and rendering her senseless. Molly needs a home, a nurse, and time to grieve and to find new purpose in life. But when she moves in with her friends, the Robbs, spiteful society gossips assume the worst. And when an imprudent…
