Books like Secrets of the Flesh — picked by fans

Have you ever read a book that grabbed you with a character challenged by circumstances you’d never considered? Imagine being blind and trying to survive WWII! I was intrigued by this essentially two-person novel set during World War II, which had a ‘cast’ of millions.

Again, the characters! Marie-Laure LaBlanc is a young blind French woman hiding in her great-uncle’s house in Saint-Malo after the Nazis invade Paris. I found Doerr’s lyrical sensory descriptions of Marie-Laure’s efforts to make her way around town as she’s pulled into the French resistance thrilling. I loved the depth of characterization when I met the second main character, Werner Pfennig, a radio repair savant, and his journey from a Nazi soldier tracking down illicit resistance radio operators to a young man repulsed by the Nazi brutalization of civilians.

The characters and intrigue pulled me through this book; mixed in with the eventual connection of… show more.

As a writer, each time I read anything by James Baldwin, it´s like I´m getting a master class in how to capture a feeling and translate that into an articulate thought. When a friend told me to read this book over 30 years ago, shortly after I came out, they said this was “the best, and perhaps the most tragic novel about bisexuality ever written.”

Years later, it still kicks me in the gut each time I read it. Baldwin´s detailed examination of David´s desire for Giovanni while simultaneously being engaged to his fiancé, Hella, remains achingly beautiful.

This gripping mystery follows Antoine Rey, a recently divorced man navigating shared custody and raising teenagers who are stuck to their cellphones all day, as he and his sister begin to unravel secrets their mother took to her grave. At the heart of this novel is a mystery surrounding Antoine’s mother’s tragic death as a young woman and a burning question: Who is the woman in the video? Who was his mother, really? As the mystery unfolds Antoine and his sister Melanie learn that even the people we are closest to keep secrets. As revelations about the woman his mother really was, and insights into her untimely death unfold, Antoine is able to make better connections in his own life.

The city of Paris is teeming with life in this story. The novel unfolds with an even hand and we get a peek into what Parisian life is really like,… show more.

Paris in the 1920s and Hemingway—what more could I want?

I'll admit I'm not a devoted fan of Hemingway's prose, but I've always been captivated by the man himself, and this novel more than satisfied that fascination. What unfolds is a love story as beautiful as it is devastating: Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, set against the glittering, restless backdrop of 1920s Paris.

The author's prose is quietly stunning, and her historical rendering of the era feels fully alive. But it's Hadley who stayed with me. Watching her fight to hold her marriage together, to hold him together, is at times almost unbearable. She's drawn with such sympathy and complexity: a woman of real intelligence and grace, loving someone who was always partly beyond reach.

The first time I went to Paris, I found a copy of this book at a bouquiniste on the Quai de la Tournelle. I can honestly say it has never left my bedside. Colette, born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in 1873, was a ferocious talent, a novelist, memoirist, journalist, and colossal French cultural figure until her death in 1954. Earthly Paradise is an autobiography in essays, and hers is an extraordinary story. Born in small-town Burgundy, she was a showgirl at the Moulin Rouge, a traveling performer, was married twice, lived as a lesbian for a decade, had a facelift in the 1920s and at the height of her literary fame, opened a beauty salon in Paris. She was to the core a sensualist and though she claimed to dislike feminism, she was a tower of female strength. But the reason this book—just one of her fifty-five—endures is her achingly gorgeous writing.

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Have you been to Paris? If so, you’ll love this book as I did for the great photography, which is the whole point.

Photographs of the places still surviving where Hemingway himself and the characters in his novels visit. A long time ago in Paris, I tried something of the sort myself, finding and visiting the sites named in The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast, with only moderate success.

Friends of mine last year took this book along on a private tour of Hemingway’s Paris and found the guide followed this book closely. Each powerful photograph (mostly what the book contains) is accompanied by a paragraph or so of the site and its connection to the Hem.

I’d call this a photographic biography of Hemingway in Paris. If you place it in front of you while reading the Paris books, you’ll have a whole new experience, as… show more.

This is an intimate, first-person account of 1920’s Paris, and the life of one of the most central characters of the period—the model, singer, and artist, Kiki of Montparnasse as she was known by all. Born in Burgundy in 1901, christened Alice Prin, and raised by her grandmother in abject poverty, at age twelve she was shipped off to Paris to live with the mother she had never known.

The young Alice’s fierce survival instincts immediately translated into a precocious thirst for experience. At fourteen she had her “first contact with art” when she began posing nude for a sculptor. Thereafter, she assumed the name and embraced life as the irrepressible Kiki. Lover of Man Ray, beloved friend of Soutine, Jean Cocteau, and many other artists of the period, she became the toast of Montparnasse, one of the century’s first truly independent women. Man Ray, Foujita, Kisling, and others immortalized… show more.

You may know this book as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but you probably don’t really know it. Films, most notably the Disney cartoon, have grossly distorted this novel, often having Esmeralda ride off into the sunset with Phoebus. But the novel is really a very dark, Gothic story of love and lust, and one of the first existential novels. Frollo and Quasimodo both love Esmeralda, but she loves Phoebus, and he only loves himself. In the end, everyone dies, allowing their lust to destroy their common sense. Hugo wrote it to help popularize and save Notre-Dame Cathedral from falling into further disrepair. It influenced British author William Harrison Ainsworth to write The Tower of London, thus revitalizing British Gothic in a new way just as it did French Gothic.

I loved this story about a protagonist who is living her worst nightmare, and we’re along for the unpredictable twists and turns of her life.

The story is everything you’d expect for a well-conceived psychological drama where true-to-life characters come alive and live the nightmare you’re glad isn’t your own. It held my attention and wouldn’t let go!

One of the original Aussie literary expats in the 1940s, Kershaw penned this slim but sparkling memoir of his time in Paris and rural France before his death in 1995.

It is superbly written and completely unknown. Grab a copy if you’re lucky enough to find it. It proves that books don’t have to be long to stick in the memory. Sometimes, the shortest ones are the best.