Books like Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont — picked by fans

Yes, another novel set largely in a hotel. This time it’s in Switzerland and overlooks Lake Geneva, spreading, in the wonderful words of Anita Brookner, "like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further shore." Edith Hope is a writer of romantic fiction. She arrives at the "stolid and dignified" Hotel du Lac in late autumn. This is not a holiday for Edith. Her friends and family have insisted she go away for a few weeks to ponder a ‘social indiscretion’. She was due to marry Geoffrey, a boring man she didn’t love, and deserted him on the day of the wedding. Her heart had gone out to David, a married man.

Brookner had an enviable gift for describing people and their peculiarities. Those whom Edith Hope meets at the hotel are largely from the aristocracy, and each and every one is eccentric in the extreme. Edith describes her fellow guests to… show more.

I was so moved when I read The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne that it inspired me to write my novel with my protagonist Laurence J Benbo as a male equivalent of Judith Hearne, an innocent exploited by an uncaring world. The quotidian details of Judith’s life are delineated brilliantly by Moore in all her wretchedness reminiscent of some of the characters in Joyce’s Dubliners which Moore would have read and which possibly influenced him. The dark surroundings of Judith’s life lead her into a fantasy world aided by her one necessary weakness—alcohol. But, as Moore points out, it doesn’t have to end tragically. There is a glimmer of hope with life going on, but nothing as before.

Tara Doherty has come to live in Connemara following the death of her husband. She’s distraught and lonely here in "the back of beyond." Until a mysterious stranger rents a little cottage close to Tara’s. James Dunford, she learns, is Irish-born but lived in the USA. He spends his days fixing up his cottage and walking the beach with a stray dog. As time goes by, Tara learns from a local villager that James is not what he seems and that his motive for renting the cottage is far from conventional. She confronts him, and their two lives intertwine in an unexpected way, in a tale told with exceptional erudition.

Highly atmospheric, engaging and perceptive, Sunsets Never Wait plunges the reader into a bleak Connemara landscape and the tortured lives of two lost souls. It’s a page-turning exploration of the weight of secrets and the courage it sometimes takes to… show more.

I felt like I was transported to Newfoundland. It is now on my bucket list. The personal growth of the main character, Quoyle, is profound. At first you almost despise him for his failings, but the reader ends up loving him. The cast of characters is quirky but extremely entertaining. When the house was dragged across the ice and cabled to the rocks, I could tangibly feel the cables quiver. Beautifully written.

At last, a book about Elizabeth Taylor that takes her acting skills seriously, analyses her prodigious output, and is neither sensational nor trivial. I was entranced. Like Sybil Thorndike, Taylor’s career lasted 65 years. Kennedy puts it in context, refreshingly focusing on her professional rather than personal life.

Commenting on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he remarks: ‘At some point we have to reject the idea we’re watching the Burtons air their dirty laundry and embrace the possibility we’re watching them act. Brilliantly’. This readable, thoughtful book examines Taylor’s 56 movies and includes television, theatre, and special appearances such as a play reading in 2007, part of her remarkable fund-raising for AIDS.

Love, desire, falling too passionately for a married man, the world may be different from when this book was published in 1936, but the angst, the joy, the terror, and the hard choices remain the same.

An intelligent, capable, charismatic woman falls for a handsome, upper-class man, tantalizingly just out of her social and emotional reach. Will he leave his wife and the easy security of a stable relationship? Will love trump duty? Life-changing decisions reach a climax in the office of a back-street abortionist, where the snare of passion and its potentially destructive consequences are laid bare.

Written in lyrical and episodic prose, this is a truly timeless and memorable read.

I fell in love with designer Vicky Tiel’s 2011 memoir because of what I’ll call its “sex-positive” rompiness, which reads like a Swinging Sixties female version of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. (I stumbled upon it during research because it includes some of my characters, primarily Mia Fonssagrives, daughter of supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives and stepdaughter of Irving Penn.) 

In the book, Tiel, who made her name designing catsuits, hotpants, and miniskirts, explains how she and Mia went from being design students in New York to “It” fashion designers in Paris pretty much overnight. They have many adventures, bed many men, and pick up practical life advice from models and movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor while growing up. It’s a total period piece but also, it hasn’t aged. With pictures and recipes!  

As a lifelong reader of travel literature, this collection of essays was a real eye-opener.

Each chapter features a different writer, whether it’s about how Thoreau truly felt about living in the wilderness or Summerset Maugham’s traveling companion, Theroux delves deep into what made these people tick—what drove them to travel as much as why they wrote.

The collection made their work more understandable and made the writers seem more human.

Anton, a former columnist for The Japan Times, grew up in New York City, one of three children raised solely by an African American father. (Her mother was institutionalized due to mental illness.) She studied dance with Martha Graham, modeled for the pages of LOOK magazine at a time when African American models were few and far between, and copy-edited for Joseph Heller. Later, she traveled to Europe where she met Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton when she interviewed to be their house-sitter in Gstaad, fell in love and gave birth in Denmark, then later journeyed overland from Europe to Asia with her childhood friend and future husband, Billy. Any one chapter of her life could have been the basis for an entire book. Anton is an engaging storyteller with an exceptional story -- an unbeatable combination. I highly recommend this memoir to anyone interested in Japan, multicultural families,… show more.

Time and again, history repeats itself.

Just as Clara Bow, Idina Sackville, and Rebekah Harkness lived wildly glamour lives in the public eye continually shamed for any behavior not fitting for a young woman’s reputation, this book gave me a unique perspective into the bold, brave strength of Elizabeth Taylor – whose parents were from Kansas of all places (although from a time before the Kansas City Chiefs reign). I could not put this book down because the continual shifts in Liz Taylor’s personal and professional life were jarring, inspiring, and mesmerizing.

I started this book to understand better what Taylor Swift saw in Elizabeth Taylor, using her for inspiration in a song titled “Elizabeth Taylor” on The Life of a Showgirl album. I stayed because I needed to know how it ended.