Here are 79 books that Shadow Ticket fans have personally recommended if you like
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Grounded in one famous oratorio by Handel, "The Messiah," this book draws in an astonishing range of historical characters and events, many of which have never been connected before. The research is impeccable but the author wears his learning lightly. Masterful history-telling, as compelling as any novel.
Every Valley is a glittering narrative history of intertwined lives that tells the story behind one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, Handel's Messiah.
'A delicious history of music, power, love, genius, royalty and adventure. Unforgettable.' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
London - Dublin, 1741-42. An actress mired in scandal plans her escape from an abusive husband. A penniless sea captain sets out to rescue the city's abandoned infants. An African Muslim and former captive in the colonies becomes a celebrity. A grieving political dissident seeks release from his torment. And a great composer to kings - George Frideric Handel…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
A great book can supplant your consciousness and bring you into a new headspace of altered mood and perception. Good writing about elevated human experiences can elevate the reader, as the words on the page inspire the release of "feel-good" neurochemicals like endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine. These are the effects I seek to produce in my readers’ experience – I want them to feel the buzzes and the highs and lows my characters feel. In Death By Cannabis, by focusing on the legalization of weed in Canada, I sought to tap into the passionate subculture and complex emotions the emancipation of pot brought to the surface after simmering so long underground.
Early in this book, a character uses his kitchen oven to dry out some psychedelic mushrooms harvested from the rooftop garden at his flat in World War II London. Dosing the characters (and somehow the reader) with Amanita Muscaria is an appropriate way to set the tone of this book.
Mushroom experiences are fun and giggly and clever, at times, but they can also open the mind to the evils mankind is capable of and the intricate conspiracies seemingly hiding in plain sight. Which is what I love about Gravity’s Rainbow – Pynchon’s writing is hilarious, but then he’ll hit you with a gut punch so poignant it will linger in your mind for decades.
Hailed by many as the major experimental nov el of the post-war period, Gravity''s Rainbow is a bizarre co mic masterpiece in which linguistic virtuosity creates a who le other world. '
Given the state of the world today, laughter truly is the best coping mechanism. The best satire is all about excess in design, intention, characterization, and deployment of attitude. The more extreme, the better; leave restraint to the prudish moralists!
Really hard to pick just one Pynchon for this list, as he is an all-around master of satire. But Inherent Vice is probably his LOL funniest, a stoner take on the detective genre set in the hippie world of 1970s southern California. The cinematic adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson ain’t half bad, either.
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon-Private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there.
It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex- girlfriend. Suddenly she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. It's the tail…
One terrible lie, a desperate measure to save her past, just might destroy her future…
Magnolia Merryweather, a horse breeder, is eager to celebrate Christmas for the first time after the Civil War ended, even as she grows her business. She envisions a calm, prosperous life ahead after the terror…
When I was eighteen, I had an experience I call religious: I was sitting outside of an ivy-covered building at my undergraduate school and reading the opening words of Vergil’s Roman epic, The Aeneid (in Latin, but I didn’t know Latin yet). The sky became clearer; it shone with different light. It became clear to me at that moment that I was supposed to be a poet. So, yeah, I went on to learn lots of stuff, including languages, so that I could read poetry in them. I did all that to serve the greater goal of being a poet.
This book taught me that you can surf the line between realism and the incredible (even the ridiculous). The main character, Oedipa Maas, is my favorite heroine because of her openness to every tantalizing possibility (and the possibilities keep ramifying infinitely).
Everything in this book is both fully a symbol and fully itself.
By far the shortest of Pynchon's great, dazzling novels - and one of the best.
Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting The Crying of Lot 49.
While I love many novels about individuals, there’s something about weird groups of people—for example, cults—that I’ve always been drawn to. The Book of Fred plays with this dynamic by showing the intersection between a doomsday cult, the Fredians, and the quirky liberal community that foster child Mary Fred Anderson finds herself in. What I find fascinating about cults is how appealing they are, how being part of a group has a seductive quality that can so easily go horribly wrong. I love novels and memoirs that show that seductive side while zeroing in on the complications groups pose to individual identity.
This novel has been with me all my life. I encountered it when I was fifteen (it was on the shelf where I was babysitting) and have continued to return to it.
Last year, I began reading it again because I was in Valetta, Malta, one of the many nouns that begin with the letter V in this inscrutable story. In Valetta, I was able to track down the street where Benny Profane, the novel’s sometime protagonist and eternal “schlemiel,” searches for mysterious characters. Strait Street’s walls still bear faded signage from old bars like ghosts of Pynchon’s past (he apparently docked in Valetta while serving in the Navy).
Every setting in this novel, from Florence to Manhattan, teems with weird groups of people, but I especially love “The Whole Sick Crew,” whose jazzy Manhattan party establishes some of the novel’s main threads—if “threads” is the right word for something…
The first novel from the great, incomparable Thomas Pynchon.
The quest for V. sweeps us through sixty years and a panorama of Alexandria, Paris, Malta, Florence, Africa and New York. But who, where or what is V.? Bawdy, sometimes sad and frequently hilarious, V. as become a modern classic.
'The greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation' Ian Rankin, Guardian
'To read V. today is to experience Pynchon anew' New Yorker
Herman Melville's MOBY DICK is a story with a deep and rhythmic flow that swallows the reader into the depths of a man verses beast saga. The beauty of his words transfixes the story into one that emphasizes the confusing emotions of love and hate. Can one exist without the other? The novel takes a person into emotional turmoil as the quest to conquer rises above any common sense as Ahab throws his crew into an ill-fated adventure.
Melville's tale of the whaling industry, and one captain's obsession with revenge against the Great White Whale that took his leg. Classics Illustrated tells this wonderful tale in colourful comic strip form, offering an excellent introduction for younger readers. This edition also includes a biography of Herman Melville and study questions, which can be used both in the classroom or at home to further engage the reader in the work at hand.
Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.
This sweeping epic of the relationship between ourselves and the natural world is not only amazing, it is breathtaking in its breadth and ambition. Weaving together the story threads of nine character whose lives have been deeply affected by trees and forests, the non-linear narratives join the nine from their initial captivations with nature to their political empowerment as they eventually join forces as activists. The writing is in turns beautiful, suspensful, and fascinating, as when two of the characters live on a tree stand an ancient redwood to protect it from loggers. Those passages are nothing less than revelatory. A must read for anyone who has enjoyed a walk in the woods and who would like to do so agin.
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…
Born to a Tibetan mother and an American father, I was raised in the U.S. As a girl, I wondered why things were always changing: the seasons, people, and places I loved. Growing older, I became fascinated with how to find happiness in a world where nothing lasts forever. After college, I lived in India with my Tibetan grandmother, learning about Buddhist “bardo” perspectives on life’s ephemerality. I realized that though we resist change, accepting impermanence allows us to live happier lives. I publish widely on impermanence and host a Tricycle interview series about bardo, with guests including David Sedaris, Elizabeth Gilbert, Malcolm Gladwell, Ann Patchett, and Dani Shapiro.
We often feel alone when we experience change and transitions, but Saunders’s book reminds me that we’re all on the journey of life together.
President Lincoln can’t let go of his young son, Willie, when the boy dies of typhoid fever. Willie, too, is holding on: lingering in the after-death world, he’s convinced his parents are going to come get him. He’s surrounded by people who are also in bardo (the state between death and rebirth), trapped in denial and attachment. When they accept the reality of their situation, the characters are liberated from their suffering.
This book has deepened my understanding of how—both individually and collectively—we struggle against loss, but it’s possible to let go and move forward.
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 A STORY OF LOVE AFTER DEATH 'A masterpiece' Zadie Smith 'Extraordinary' Daily Mail 'Breathtaking' Observer 'A tour de force' The Sunday Times The extraordinary first novel by the bestselling, Folio Prize-winning, National Book Award-shortlisted George Saunders, about Abraham Lincoln and the death of his eleven year old son, Willie, at the dawn of the Civil War The American Civil War rages while President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns…
I write thrillers full-time these days, but for many years, I was a writer and editor at publications that take reporting and fact-checking seriously. I still strive for accuracy in my novels—which always involve violence. As a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt, the mechanics and psychology of close-quarters combat are things I think about daily. This is not to say that you need to rob banks to write a heist scene. And while technical knowledge is helpful, there’s no substitute for close noticing of what happens to our bodies and minds in extreme situations. Here are some books (and one screenplay) which do that incredibly well.
This is the book that made me want to be a novelist. I stole it off my dad’s shelf when I was 11—way too young to be reading about the seedy, violent, sex-fueled underbelly of 1970s counterculture. It’s the story of the an American journalist covering the war in Vietnam who gets the bright idea to smuggle heroin to California. I read it at least once a year, and it gets better every time.
Near the end of the book, an ex-Marine named Ray Hicks flees into the desert with the heroin on his back, gut-shot and bleeding out. The scene, masterfully intercut with hallucinations and memories from Hicks’s childhood, was clearly the inspiration for Frank Semyon’s death in Season Two of True Detective. My advice? Read this book instead.
In Saigon during the last stages of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong. His courier disappears, probably with his wife, and a corrupt Fed wants Converse to find him the drugs, or else.
Dog Soldiers is a frightening, powerful, intense novel that perfectly captures the underground mood of the United States in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered the violent world of cops on the make and professional killers.
Given the state of the world today, laughter truly is the best coping mechanism. The best satire is all about excess in design, intention, characterization, and deployment of attitude. The more extreme, the better; leave restraint to the prudish moralists!
If American Psycho is too bloody an evocation of hyper-capitalism for your stomach, try this tragically under-appreciated door-stopper of a novel, in which an eleven-year-old becomes a millionaire by playing the stock market. Written almost wholly in unattributed dialogue! As with Pynchon, everything written by Gaddis deserves to be on this list; alas, alas.
A National Book Award-winning satire about the unchecked power of American capitalism, written more than three decades before the 2008 financial crisis.
At the center of J R is J R Vansant, a very average sixth grader from Long Island with torn sneakers, a runny nose, and a juvenile fascination with junk-mail get-rich-quick offers. Responding to one, he sees a small return; soon, he is running a paper empire out of a phone booth in the school hallway. Everyone from the school staff to the municipal government to the squabbling heirs of a player-piano company to the titans of Wall…
