Books like Perspective(s) — picked by fans

I love a book that gives me a fresh, lively perspective on a subject I care a lot about. Donna Russo does that here, with this multi-p.o.v. portrait of the artist over the years – as a young-old-middle aged genius. Van Gogh! What is it about this guy that makes him so fascinating? It’s more than the brilliant, revolutionary artwork. It’s more than the partially severed ear, the madness that drove him. It’s his relentless work ethic, fearless creativity and stormy relationships – with his brother Theo and artist-sometimes friend, Paul Gaugin. Each of the sections is narrated by a woman in his life: his mother, a nurse, a prostitute, and his brother’s wife. It’s partially founded on Van Gogh’s eloquent correspondence with his brother.

I’m a big fan of mysteries, and one reason is that the “mystery” genre can take in so many different approaches. You got your gumshoe, your locked door mystery, your police-team investigation. Then there’s mysteries that don’t fit any category neatly. This is one, and it’s so fun. An assistant to a famous novelist is called to Italy after he dies…mysteriously, gruesomely. Once there, she does fall into a fever while trying to uncover various puzzles regarding the artist’s life, work and demise while also falling feverishly in love with a local hottie. Valerie Martin is a supremely skilled writer – how she spins such an alluring tale? A mystery. Somehow, through the fever, Italy itself becomes tantalizingly alive.

Laurent Binet’s debut novel of “metafiction” draws its title from the chilling Nazi saying, “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich” (Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich), a reference to Reinhard Heydrich, an architect of the Holocaust and one of the most terrifying figures in the Third Reich.

Known as “The Blond Beast,” Heydrich governed occupied Prague through terror, executions, and mass repression. His assassination by Czech resistance fighters in 1942 forms the heart of the novel.

Binet approaches this story in an entirely original way. Rather than hiding behind an omniscient narrator, he constantly steps into the narrative himself, revealing his anxieties, obsessions, research struggles, and doubts about how we write historical fiction. The result is a daring blend of thriller, memoir, history, and philosophical inquiry. The novel is gripping, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, not only exploring the past but also how we write about it.

This novel focusses on the murder of two children by a nanny. Based on a true case, in NYC of a nanny who kills two young children, Slimani weaves themes of racial and social injustice into her story, told through the eyes of the narrator. Despite the horror of the crimes, readers will gain a understanding of how and why the nanny, Louise, ends up taking such extreme action. Though fictionalised, it offers an accurate psychological portrait of profound disturbance and the internal logic that drives fatal assaults.

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.

“I ask for freedom for my book.” This was the plea the Ukrainian-Jewish writer and war correspondent Vassily Grossman sent to Premier Nikita Khrushchev after the manuscript of his novel, Life and Fate, was confiscated by the KGB.

Set during the Battle of Stalingrad, Life and Fate (in the tradition of Tolstoy) follows an enormous cast of soldiers, scientists, prisoners, bureaucrats, mothers, and children whose lives intersect as Grossman moves seamlessly from freezing trenches and shattered apartment blocks to extermination camps, interrogation rooms, and laboratories haunted by political fear.

What made the book unforgivable to Soviet censors was Grossman’s daring choice to portray Stalinism and Nazism not as ideological opposites, but as terrifying reflections of one another. Both are regimes built upon fear, conformity, and the crushing of individual freedom. Few books convey so powerfully both the scale of historical horror and the stubborn endurance of human dignity.

Life… show more.

Almost all the survivors of the Holocaust have now died, which makes it more important than ever that we pass on knowledge about this incomparably brutal crime against humanity – and do our best to prevent future genocides.

Survival in Auschwitz is a highly detailed, profoundly disturbing, and, in the end, intensely moving account of Italian chemist Primo Levi’s eleven months in the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, Auschwitz.

If you wish to understand what the Holocaust meant to its victims – and how the prisoners did their heroic best to resist dehumanization, hopelessness, and death – you would do well to start with this important work.  

Decades had passed since I last read Beloved and I felt compelled to revisit this rich, powerful, provocative masterpiece. Morrison's writing is exquisite.

Forget the show, read the books.

This fantasy series reads like a medieval history lesson come to life. They live in a world where power is dispensed with decrees, armies, and combat. But the real battles are fought among the kingdoms with verbal confrontations.

Tyrion is the jewel of the series as the despised dwarf of one of the great noble houses who must use his wit and words as both weapons and armor to overcome his lack of stature. He doesn't compete where he is weak, but rather redefines the game where his opponent's strength is irrelevant.

"I have to be careful. Everything I say is a lie."

Bloodlands is a story about the dead. Using archives made available after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Mr. Snyder sheds light on both Stalin’s and Hitler’s brutality.

In a confined area that includes just eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries, 14 million civilians died from the 1930s to the end of the war. Most were either starved or shot. Even more startling were the plans to kill millions more.

Stalin said, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” Mr. Snyder reminds us of the tragedy.