Here are 100 books that Outline fans have personally recommended if you like
Outline.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I'm a fourth-generation “Mainer” and the mother of two boy “wolves,” and I have a deep well of respect for boys and their imaginations in the masculinized culture we swim in. I've seen how much rich thinking is going on in the inner lives of boys. The teenage boy rendered in literature can be a stock character, and I was determined to give them more respect on the page and to explore what’s not said between boy moms and their sons that deeply connects them. I teach widely and write non-fiction as well as fiction and am a founder of a creative writing center in Portland, Maine for kids called the Telling Room.
This is the Mother of all boy mom books. It’s required reading for anyone learning to speak boy. Equal parts despair—Lamott is a single mom who sometimes wants to leave her crying boy outside on the stoop—and equal parts gut punches of hilarious wisdom and ardor about boy life and mom devotion.
This is the journal of the birth of Anne Lamott's son Sam, and their first year together. Coping with being a recovering alcoholic and a single mother, Anne had to face the fact that her best friend since childhood was dying of cancer.
Ophelia, a professor of Dante, is stricken when she discovers that her husband Andy has been cheating on her with a winsome colleague. What follows is Ophelia’s figurative descent into hell as she obsessively tracks her subjects, performs surveillance in her beat-up Volvo, and moves into the property next door…
I have been asked for decades to share my story. Who would want to hear my story? When we established the fund in memory of beloved sisters Margie and Jane, the doctor connected to the fund told me to write about my sisters so others would know them. After thirty years of suppressing my grief, writing became a venue to let the walls down and let my feelings out and be compassionate to myself and others in their grief no matter the time. Grief is a difficult subject and I hope in telling my story another individual will not be alone in their grief.
I am recommending this work of fiction selected by The Compassionate Friends Sibling Grief Book Club. Ann, with grace, handles not only the sibling loss of a brother, a boy the sole survivor of a plane crash, but the depth and breadth of grief from the aunt and uncle Edward lives with. Edward’s aunt grieving the loss of an unborn child and her sister, says to Edward, “You’re not okay. We are not okay. This is not okay.” I’m certain other bereaved siblings can relate, “he mourns what his brother has lost.” I related to how in a family we handle grief differently and often are unable to communicate how we are feeling.
A transcendent coming-of-age story about the ways a broken heart learns to love again.
One summer morning, a flight takes off from New York to Los Angeles: there are 192 people aboard. When the plane suddenly crashes, twelve-year-old Edward Adler is the sole survivor.
In the aftermath, Edward struggles to make sense of his grief, sudden fame and find his place in a world without his family. But then Edward and his neighbour Shay make a startling discovery; hidden in his uncle's garage are letters from the relatives of other passengers - all addressed him.
For me, writing fiction is a way of tackling issues of fate and identity through storytelling. I believe we’re each the result of an intersection between personality and history and I’m interested in the way our time and place impacts us and creates a backdrop for our lives. My first novel, The Wayward Moon, is historical fiction set in the 9th-century Middle East. My second novel follows a Jewish family back six generations to Belarus. But no matter what period I’m writing about, the most important thing is always to tell a good story.
Smith is a master at depicting multi-racial families (something she knows all about, as she grew up in one).
Her narratives take up the complex nature of the relationships between parents, children, and siblings, while delving into issues of race, class, politics, infidelity, and self-knowledge. Smith is expert with her use of voice, as she composes character through idiosyncratic styles of language and expression.
Life in this novel is colorful and messy, as it cleverly investigates the impossibility of really knowing those closest to you.
From the acclaimed author of Swing Time, White Teeth and Grand Union, discover a brilliantly funny and deeply moving story about love and family
Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful?
Set between New England and London, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps - and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high…
Ophelia, a professor of Dante, is stricken when she discovers that her husband Andy has been cheating on her with a winsome colleague. What follows is Ophelia’s figurative descent into hell as she obsessively tracks her subjects, performs surveillance in her beat-up Volvo, and moves into the property next door…
As an immigration legal scholar and lawyer, I read about immigration a lot. From laws that seem written to confuse to articles in academic journals written for an audience of experts, I’m lucky to love what I do—and so I enjoy most of what I read. But these books are special. They drew me in and wouldn’t let go until the last page. Whether fiction or non-fiction, they are written by storytellers who bring laws and policies to life.
At times, immigration policies are so ludicrous that only fiction can tell a credible story of what’s happening.
In Luiselli’s novel, modern asylum policies in the United States get the storytelling they deserve through the lens of one New York family struggling with the ordinary challenges of life only to learn, bit by bit, just how close their lives are to the migrants attempting to navigate the extraordinary demands of immigration policies along the US-Mexican border.
NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood ... This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences.” —The Washington Post
In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between…
I studied music as an undergraduate and play the cello or the drums most days. Yet when I set out to write Concert Black, I found that there are surprisingly few novels set in the world of the conservatory and the concert hall. To me, these are ideal settings for drama because they are filled with competition, ego, and high art. Novels that pivot on classical music combine two of my great passions and are among my favorite type of book.
This novel explores what it means to leave music behind.
August Blue follows a concert pianist who walks off the stage, mid-performance, then follows her doppelganger across Europe. As she moves further from her artistic career, music becomes a memory.
I admire the dream-like nature of the story, and the way Deborah Levy manages to capture in prose the idea of a sound heard, remembered, and slowly forgotten, as in this passage: "There were weeks when I played fragments of my score through the night, which is when I felt most in communion with [her]. I projected myself into her and she became music."
The mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home
At the height of her career, concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson - former child prodigy, now in her thirties - walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.
Now she is in Athens, watching as another young woman, a stranger but uncannily familiar - almost her double - purchases a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.
I am the author of three novels that all explore contemporary notions of fidentity. In 2016 I received a scholarship to travel from New Zealand to Berlin for three months and fell in love with the city. I ended up staying there for nearly four years, until the pandemic started. As a writer I liked the way that being detached from your regular life, and living in a country where you are unfamiliar with the language and the rules, makes you alert to the quirks. It helps you to gain a fresh perspective about the place that you came from, and also the place that you are in.
Suffering from writer’s block, a novelist leaves her husband and children in Brooklyn and checks into the Tel Aviv Hilton to be near the pool from her childhood holidays.
Away from her usual domesticity, she considers where her choices have lead her: “What if, I thought, rather than existing in a universal space, each of us is actually born alone into a luminous blankness, and it’s we who snip it into pieces, assembling staircases and gardens and train stations in our own peculiar fashion, until we have pared our space into a world?”
This novel has many strands, but I loved how the writer is drawn into a mystery surrounding Kafka’s estate, with an elderly cat hoarder claiming legal rights to his unpublished papers. All the more alluring because it is based in truth.
CHOSEN AS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE OBSERVER, NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS REVIEW, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT AND THE TIMES 'Lucid and exhilarating ... A great gift' New York Review of Books 'Tantalizes and compels ... A welcome reminder of how a novel can be defiantly and brilliantly novel' Douglas Kennedy, New Statesman Jules Epstein has vanished: first slowly, then all at once. He begins divesting himself of all of his worldly possessions. Now he's fallen off the face of the earth, and all the search parties can find is his empty monogrammed briefcase, abandoned in the Judean…
I am the author of three novels that all explore contemporary notions of fidentity. In 2016 I received a scholarship to travel from New Zealand to Berlin for three months and fell in love with the city. I ended up staying there for nearly four years, until the pandemic started. As a writer I liked the way that being detached from your regular life, and living in a country where you are unfamiliar with the language and the rules, makes you alert to the quirks. It helps you to gain a fresh perspective about the place that you came from, and also the place that you are in.
A Kirkus review aptly described this novel as “mysterious, bizarre, frustrating, weirdly smart and pretty cool”.
It’s mostly a fiercely intelligent exploration of both political and personal crises in 2017, the year of Trump and Brexit. Radical feminist Kathy has also fairly inexplicably agreed to get married. Pre-wedding she travels to a resort in Italy with her fiancé where she tumbles through a range of highly-emotive stances on intimacy and closeness.
After an argument about prosciutto and fig ciabattas with her husband “she hated him, she hated any kind of warmth or dependency, she wanted to take up residence as an ice cube in a long glass of aqua frizzante.” Her fury quickly dissolves “anyway they sorted it out” and the novel travels brilliantly onwards.
"She had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain, she really didn't have a clue."
Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It's the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Fast-paced and frantic, Crudo unfolds in real time from the full-throttle perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.
From a Tuscan hotel for the superrich to a Brexit-paralyzed United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties adjusting to the idea of a lifelong…
I am the author of three novels that all explore contemporary notions of fidentity. In 2016 I received a scholarship to travel from New Zealand to Berlin for three months and fell in love with the city. I ended up staying there for nearly four years, until the pandemic started. As a writer I liked the way that being detached from your regular life, and living in a country where you are unfamiliar with the language and the rules, makes you alert to the quirks. It helps you to gain a fresh perspective about the place that you came from, and also the place that you are in.
For me, Catherine Lacey’s debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing is a kind of reverse exploration of foreignness.
Elyria escapes from a comfortable New York life to New Zealand, where she backpacks down to the South Island towards a half-hearted invitation to stay from a poet she once met. Interesting to see your own country through the eyes of another writer as she observes “a boring little mountain, a plain blue lake, a gas station, the same as ours only slightly not” while she searches for a “small and manageable life”.
As she outwardly drifts through the landscape she also takes us on a very inward journey, interrogating her own thoughts about her adopted sister’s suicide, the mutual grief that drew her to her husband, and her mother’s drinking.
In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Catherine Lacey's Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge.
Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.
In Plato’s Sophist, the main speaker (not Socrates in this case!) mocks those he calls “late-learners," I fall decidedly into that category. When I first read the works of Plato, I was lured into a lifelong attempt to understand and explain the figure of Socrates as he appears in Plato’s dialogues. Lately I have been reading materials by ancient Socratic sources other than Plato and have been wrestling with the uneasy recognition that this “father of Western philosophy” was not seen in the same way even by those who knew him personally. Who was Socrates??? Once upon a time, I thought I knew…
It was exciting for me to read this book because the author is deeply committed to the view that Xenophon—and not Plato—is the most reliable and also most interesting source on the life and thought of Socrates. And what a different picture from Plato is given here!
Plato’s Socrates can be enigmatic, but Johnson’s review of the evidence in Xenophon gives a clear and robust portrait. But does this mean that Plato just lied?
Xenophon's Socratic Works demonstrates that Xenophon, a student of Socrates, military man, and man of letters, is an indispensable source for our understanding of the life and philosophy of Socrates.
David M. Johnson restores Xenophon's most ambitious Socratic work, the Memorabilia (Socratic Recollections), to its original literary context, enabling readers to experience it as Xenophon's original audience would have, rather than as a pale imitation of Platonic dialogue. He shows that the Memorabilia, together with Xenophon's Apology, provides us with our best evidence for the trial of Socrates, and a comprehensive and convincing refutation of the historical charges against Socrates.…
I’m a British scholar – a former university lecturer, many moons ago – now living in rural southern Greece. In fact, I have Greek as well as UK citizenship, which really pleases me because I’ve loved Greece and things Greek since boyhood. I started to learn ancient Greek at the age of ten! I’ve written over fifty books, mostly on ancient Greek history and philosophy, including many volumes of translations from ancient Greek. But I’ve also written children’s fiction in the form of gamebooks, a biography, a book on hypnosis, a retelling of the Greek myths (with my wife Kathryn) ... I’ll stop there!
At the very end of the sixth century BCE, the Athenians took a leap of faith and turned their city into the first democracy – or proto-democracy, anyway: much tweaking went on over subsequent decades. In terms of European history as a whole, this has probably been the most important event to come out of ancient Greece. It has of course been much studied – so it is remarkable that Anderson’s book is filled with fresh insights into the background of the “Athenian experiment,” what actually happened, and why. The results are often surprising. Above all, he demonstrates that it was not a bottom-up spontaneous revolution by the masses, but a deliberate piece of social engineering by members of the Athenian elite.
In barely the space of one generation, Athens was transformed from a conventional city-state into something completely new--a region-state on a scale previously unthinkable. This book sets out to answer a seemingly simple question: How and when did the Athenian state attain the anomalous size that gave it such influence in Greek politics and culture in the classical period? Many scholars argue that Athens's incorporation of Attica was a gradual development, largely completed some two hundred years before the classical era. Anderson, however, suggests that it is not until the late sixth century that we see the first systematic attempts…
