Here are 30 books that Our Evenings fans have personally recommended if you like
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A rarity in literature at present,, a book that really engages the reader about the eco struggle without being too preachy (not sure what's wrong with preaching on this particular topic, though) and without shying away from some of the less palatable aspects of human-too-animal exploitation and abuse
A literary thriller about endangered species in the world's most remote areas, and those who put their lives on the line to protect them.
Biologist Angela Haynes is accustomed to dark, lonely nights as one of the few humans at a penguin research station in Patagonia. She has grown used to the cries of penguins before dawn, to meager supplies and housing, to spending most of her days in one of the most remote regions on earth. What she isn't used to is strange men washing ashore, which happens one day on her watch.
Lerner's memoir of approaching adulthood in the mid-sixties is deliciously readable, but deceptively breezy. His family is affluent, his school engaging, his friends smart and fun. He has his first car, and drives with abandon. The American moment promises unlimited possibility. But political and cultural upheavals are emerging, and irresistible.…
Known for meticulously researched and brilliantly detailed accounts of horrific true crime legends, Harold Schechter takes readers inside the very heart and mind of true evil. Here is the grisly truth of Ed Gein, the killer whose fiendish fantasies inspired Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' - the mild mannered farmhand bound to his dominating mother, driven into a series of gruesome and bizarre acts beyond all imagining. In chilling detail, DEVIANT explores the incredible career of one of the most twisted madmen in the annals of crime - and how he turned a small Wisconsin farmhouse into his own private playground of…
I’ve read a lot of books that feature gay characters. These characters often partition into two main groups: angsty men who are victims of oppression or illness, or camp stereotypes who provide the light relief. I prefer to read about heroes who happen to be gay. That’s why I started writing novels. My recent books are historical novels inspired by real gay heroes. The feedback I get from readers indicates that there are a lot of people who want the same as I do.
This book affected me very deeply because it’s set in the 80s and 90s when I was in my twenties and thirties. It describes with astonishing accuracy the political cruelty that abounded at that time. For me, the real hero of the book is Leo. He’s not only gay but also Black which makes him a double target for the prejudice of the time. The way he tackles it head on in the book is breathtaking.
In the summer of 1983, 20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Tory MP Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby - whom Nick had idolized at Oxford - and Catherine, always standing at a critical angle to the family and its assumptions and ambitions.
As the Thatcher boom-years unfold, Nick, an innocent in the worlds of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of the glamorous family he is entangled with. Two vividly contrasting love-affairs, with a young black clerk and a Lebanese…
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’ve read a lot of books that feature gay characters. These characters often partition into two main groups: angsty men who are victims of oppression or illness, or camp stereotypes who provide the light relief. I prefer to read about heroes who happen to be gay. That’s why I started writing novels. My recent books are historical novels inspired by real gay heroes. The feedback I get from readers indicates that there are a lot of people who want the same as I do.
The untold true story of how a group of gay MPs lobbied the British government to stop its policy of appeasing Hitler in the run up to WWII. It’s a book about patriotic heroes who are criminals in their own land because of their sexuality. It moved me deeply and inspired my own fictional thriller set in Berlin in 1933.
A STORY OF UNSUNG BRAVERY AT A DEFINING MOMENT IN BRITAIN'S HISTORY
'Superb' Stephen Fry 'Thrillingly told' Dan Jones 'Fascinating' Neil MacGregor 'Astonishing' Peter Frankopan
We like to think we know the story of how Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, but there is one chapter that has never been told. In the early 1930s, a group of young, queer British MPs visited Berlin on a series of trips that would change the course of the Second World War.
Having witnessed the Nazis' brutality first-hand, these men were some of the first to warn Britain about Hitler, repeatedly…
I grew up in farm country of central Indiana. But spent my summers on an island in northern Ontario with my grandparents. My grandfather was a self-taught naturalist and shared his love and fascination of the world around us with me. I went on to become a geologist and traveled the globe exploring for natural resources. My love of nature and science is the foundation for the science fiction I write. Whether a proven theory, a fantastical hypothesis, or true science fiction, it’s all based on science fact. It allows everyone to learn about a world built in science fiction which one day may exist in science fact.
This is a book that is at once a biography, a testament to human genius in the face of imminent danger, and a story of human injustice. Alan Turing had an idea about a ‘universal machine’. A machine, when built at Bletchley Park, allowed the Allies in World War II to crack the German Enigma ciphers. This universal machine laid the foundations for modern computing and all the amazing advances we enjoy today. But at a price for Turing, he fought inner demons about his homosexuality and eventually paid the ultimate price.
I marveled at his genius, cheered his cryptographic successes with each cipher cracked, shouted against the tragedy of his arrest, cried at his untimely death. A death at his own hand at the age of 41. The world lost a genius due to a society’s labelling of homosexuality as a crime.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades--all before his suicide at age forty-one. This New York Times-bestselling biography of the founder of computer science, with a new preface by the author that addresses Turing's royal pardon in 2013, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life. Capturing both the inner…
This is a novel that plays with time, rewriting events of Ursula's life over and over again in a way that left me puzzled at first, then entertained and, finally, awestruck at Kate Atkinson's cleverness and lightness of touch in handling such a complex structure. I always feel in good hands with her gorgeous writing and wit. Life After Life is fiction but the characters transported me to the horror and domesticity of World War II in a way that no history book has ever achieved. I thorough recommend its companion novel, A God In Ruins, too.
What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
Beginning with a chance encounter in 1985, an unnamed narrator embarks on a physical and spiritual sojourn over four decades.
From a one-night stand in Paris with the troubled and enigmatic Louis, to Montreal, through a divided Europe, and into the Iranian desert with the sick yet determined Yuri, and…
Ever since I was a child, I’ve been dismayed by the humdrum monotony of everyday life. Of course, that is why one is drawn to books. The books on this list are historical fiction with otherworldly wonder. The world of the imagination is not an escape; it’s a portal to a new view of life. I’ve written four books set in the Italian Renaissance and two set in ancient Britain. Because of the depth of research, each one has taken about eight years. I’m constantly astonished at how imagination can fill the gaps history leaves. Striving always for plausibility, it is encouraging to count historians and archaeologists amongst my readers, cheering me on.
I love the way Miller treats mythic figures as sharing reality with humans.
Who can forget blue-green Thetis coming out dripping from the sea to meet her son, the hero Achilles? This is how the ancients wrote about the gods, and it's terrific to see it making a comeback after a hundred years or so when myth was treated as a source for psychoanalysis.
I was not so much inspired by this book (it came late) as encouraged and confirmed in my own treatment of otherworldly figures. They are there, for those with the eyes or imagination to see.
**OVER 1.5 MILLION COPIES SOLD** **A 10th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL EDITION, FEATURING A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR**
WINNER OF THE ORANGE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION THE INTERNATIONAL SENSATION A SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'Captivating' DONNA TARTT 'I loved it' J K ROWLING 'Ravishingly vivid' EMMA DONOGHUE
Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms…
I am a romantic who believes in love and loves poetry, yet is also fascinated by WWI. I remember watching the movie All Quiet on the Western Front on television with my grandmother on a Saturday afternoon and being completely mesmerized. Over the years since then, I’ve even traveled to Sarajevo, where the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand set the war in motion, and to Gallipoli in Turkey, where a disastrous trench battle took place for almost a year. When I read about WWI Trench Art–art made by the soldiers awaiting battle in the trenches–my fiction writer's imagination was struck by the idea for my book below.
I love this book because it is a war novel without a single battlefield or battle, except the one for Siegfried Sassoon’s sanity. I became fascinated by WWI as a teenager. I can’t say why this war caught my imagination, but it did, and that fascination has continued for my whole life.
I gobbled up books, movies, and history about the war, and I especially loved the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, a noted poet and war hero who publicly refused to continue fighting in 1917. When I re-read his poetry fifty years later, I found a kinship with that refusal and the boys around me who were conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War.
I was a dreamy, romantic teenager, which is why Sassoon’s words pierced my heart: “Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin they think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.” Oh! How I cried over his poems…
"Calls to mind such early moderns as Hemingway and Fitzgerald...Some of the most powerful antiwar literature in modern English fiction."-The Boston Globe
The first book of the Regeneration Trilogy-a Booker Prize nominee and one of Entertainment Weekly's 100 All-Time Greatest Novels.
In 1917 Siegfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in World War I. His reason: the war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon's "sanity" and sending him back…
I started to write poetry because I loved the poetry my father recited. I've kept writing poems because poems brought me closest to the mystery my father and mother were to me. Both my parents lived through the Depression in England and the Second World War that followed. Both of them suffered, one as a civilian casualty, the other as a soldier, and both carried to their deathbeds the things they did and the things that were done to them. The books that move me most offer me the words that lift the weight of sorrow and the understanding that replaces grief and anger with compassion.
In this book, Alison Bechdel is obsessed with the triangular relationship between one’s parents, oneself, and literature, and, in my poetry, so am I.
Our parents are either puzzles we can solve or mysteries we cannot, but still we have to try. And in this book, again and again, Bechdel takes those insights and moments of beauty that literature offers, investigates her father’s life and death, and in this book (as well as the follow-up, Are You My Mother?), the meaning of her mother’s choices as well.
Now that I think of it, Fun Home is the story of how literature is always the child of what an author experiences in their life and what they read, the two brimming over into the impulse to make more words, understand more life.
DISCOVER the BESTSELLING GRAPHIC MEMOIR behind the Olivier Award nominated musical.
'A sapphic graphic treat' The Times
A moving and darkly humorous family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Alison Bechdel's gothic drawings. If you liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis you'll love this.
Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high-school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and the family babysitter. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is…
A quiet, unsettling literary fiction novel about damaged outsiders finding each other. Ideal for fans of Never Let Me Go, Atonement, or The Virgin Suicides. From a BAFTA-winning screenwriter, now returning to novel writing.
In 1986, with Chernobyl smouldering on the news and the Cold War casting a…
Growing up gay in Missouri in the 1970s, it was LGBTQ novels that opened the door to the unraveling and discovery of my best self, my true queer identity. Initially potboilers with side gay characters (I hid my copy of Valley of the Dolls from the nuns in grade school) I soon discovered writers that unlocked worlds I did not know existed representing choices, loves, and adventures I would later make my own. As a writer, it was risk-taking, gorgeous LGBTQ novels that urged me along in my literary journey and helped me find and define my voice.
The fact that this queer masterpiece was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell is only the first of many awe-inspiring truths about the book and its author. The drag queen Divine, a pimp named Darling Daintyfoot and Our Lady populate the book (published in 1943) offering a glimpse into a voluptuous Parisian fringe world. It was the thrilling—at times disturbing—story that first drew me in as a budding writer, but ultimately it was my realization that a book can be at once highly artful and literary as well as deeply erotic. It opened up a new freedom that I draw on every day as a novelist.
Jean Genet's masterpiece, composed entirely in the solitude of his prison cell. With an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Jean Genet's first, and arguably greatest, novel was written while he was in prison. As Sartre recounts in his introduction, Genet penned this work on the brown paper which inmates were supposed to use to fold bags as a form of occupational therapy. The masterpiece he managed to produce under those difficult conditions is a lyrical portrait of the criminal underground of Paris and the thieves, murderers and pimps who occupied it. Genet approached this world through his protagonist, Divine, a male…
