Here are 100 books that Shirley fans have personally recommended if you like
Shirley.
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As its title implies, this was the most beautiful book I read this year! Besides being a heartfelt memoir, All the Beauty in the World brings to life the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bringley weaves together three diverse elements so that they all make sense: his love and grief for his brother, the solace he finds in art and contemplative thought, and the down-to-earth life of a security guard.
The glimpse into the world of art took me back to my university years when I majored in art history. The varied personalities and global origins of Bringley’s fellow guards delivered additional appeal. But best of all (almost) were the illustrations. Rather than photos of the art in the Met, the author chose exquisite drawings of artworks, all created by the talented artist, Maya McMahon.
A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.
Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then…
After a reclusive childhood within the dank walls of Haggard House, Adam Bolton, at the age of eleven, is finally allowed to attend the village school, providing he obeys his mother, Sarai's, injunction. Against all outward influence, he must: “Keep to the straight and…
Not your typical novel. The slim, spare writing has a quietness that echoes the main character's monastic life in a cloistered Carmelite religious community. Personalities and conflicts are sharply drawn. And the main conflict is sharp indeed, especially for any reader who is a person of faith. This novel will make you think.
Mark Salzman's Lying Awake is a finely wrought gem that plumbs the depths of one woman's soul, and in so doing raises salient questions about the power-and price-of faith.
Sister John's cloistered life of peace and prayer has been electrified by ever more frequent visions of God's radiance, leading her toward a deep religious ecstasy. Her life and writings have become examples of devotion. Yet her visions are accompanied by shattering headaches that compel Sister John to seek medical help. When her doctor tells her an illness may be responsible for her gift, Sister John faces a wrenching choice: to…
As an acupuncturist and die-hard romantic, I did a deep dive into Taoist teachings when the love of my life passed away suddenly. I was looking for comfort, for answers, for reassurance that such intense chemistry can somehow transcend death. What happened is a long-buried desire to be an author started spinning my grief into Atlantis Writhing, a romantasy I hoped would uplift others enduring a dark night of the soul.
I was sixteen when I first read Jane Eyre, and I was thoroughly unprepared for how it would change the course of my life.
My mother died when I was eleven, so I found a kindred spirit in the orphaned main character Jane. By the time she grew up and became a governess for the brooding Mr. Rochester, I cared deeply about her happiness.
As intense chemistry sparked between Jane and her employer, I realized that my true joy in life would be to write “can’t put it down” love stories like this one.
Little treasures, the FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library. Each stunning, gift edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The unabridged text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader.
Perhaps one of the most well-known books in the world, Jane Eyre follows the life of its eponymous orphaned protagonist. From her early life Jane is strong-willed, passionate and kind but comes up against a lot of struggles. She lives with her aunt and uncle during early childhood, where…
Winner of Indies Today’s 2021 Best Contemporary Novel
“A flawless literary gem."
Can anyone have both fame and love? Andrew O’Connell is Hollywood’s next big leading man, and the rakish Irishman is basking in his newfound celebrity while thirsting for both greater fame and for someone to love.
I am a multi-published author of mainly Gothic, haunted house, and ghostly novels, novellas, and short stories. I love nothing more than exploring historic houses, ancient stone circles and places that are noted for having a certain atmosphere that hints – or, in some cases, screams – a macabre and interesting past. I am the person you will spot, hunched over an old gravestone peering at the much-degraded carving, searching for the name of its owner and a hint to their story. Why? I blame a childhood spent reading M.R. James.
It starts with arguably the most famous first line any novelist has ever written, and I certainly couldn’t stop reading once I had absorbed that.
Rebecca is a classic for all sorts of great reasons. For me, the house is a character here. Manderley is as Gothic as I could ever wish for (and I LOVE Gothic).
Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, is one of the most sinister characters ever written. When this novel was first published (1938), certain subjects were pretty much taboo. In the light of today's increased awareness of people’s differing sexualities, I think it’s probably easier to understand her motives – not that it makes her any less scary.
For me, this is a masterpiece of storytelling that defies genre categorization and puts du Maurier firmly in my top favourite authors list.
* 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY * 'One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century' SARAH WATERS * 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .'
Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory…
What's not to love about Jane Austen? She amuses, informs, instructs, and surprises us in her work. I've read her books more than once, and each reading is more delightful and meaningful.
Jane Austen's best-loved novel is an unforgettable story about the inaccuracy of first impressions, the power of reason, and above all the strange dynamics of human relationships and emotions.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is illustrated by Hugh Thomson and features an afterword by author and critic, Henry Hitchings.
A tour de force of wit and sparkling dialogue, Pride and…
Yeah I know, I'm super late to the party. But I wanted to find out what all the hype was about and it turns out it was justified. Amazing book and very topical to current events.
Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. But Katniss has been close to death before - and survival, for her, is second nature. The Hunger Games is a searing novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present. Welcome to the deadliest reality TV show ever...
When the Marquis de Marquette chooses to spend the summer of 1908 in Marquette, Michigan, a city named for his illustrious Jesuit relative, the residents are all astir with excitement. People begin vying to rub shoulders with the marquis, but he remains very private until he hosts a masquerade ball…
I love 19th century novels and strong heroines. I have spent so much of my life reading and living in the worlds of these novels, sometimes I feel as much (or more) a native of that world than our own 21st century. I also love vibrant, intelligent writers who know how to put a sentence together and create an atmosphere and characters who pop off of the page. If you want to get lost in a book, and hang out with incredible women, I warmly recommend these five novels.
I read it for the first time in a Jane Austen class I took in college, because it gave me an excuse to read all her novels. I fell immediately in love with this one.
We all know, in real life, second chances are not a given. This novel so heartbreakingly and beautifully describes what comes after “the end” and a way that ending is able to be changed as the two central characters have grown older and wiser, and then learn more about one another over the course of its pages.
I love the yearning in this novel—it is off the charts! I carry the hope in this novel with me. And the Roger Michell film adaptation is divine!
'In Persuasion, Jane Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed' Virginia Woolf
Jane Austen's moving late novel of missed opportunities and second chances centres on Anne Elliot, no longer young and with few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she was persuaded by others to break off her engagement to poor, handsome naval captain Frederick Wentworth. What happens when they meet again is movingly told in Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension,…
As an acupuncturist and die-hard romantic, I did a deep dive into Taoist teachings when the love of my life passed away suddenly. I was looking for comfort, for answers, for reassurance that such intense chemistry can somehow transcend death. What happened is a long-buried desire to be an author started spinning my grief into Atlantis Writhing, a romantasy I hoped would uplift others enduring a dark night of the soul.
I made the mistake of reading Wuthering Heights right after I finished my favorite romance of all time (Jane Eyre).
I suppose I’d hoped the Brontë sisters, as siblings, would somehow create similar main characters with intense chemistry. But Charlotte’s love story was built on mutual respect and affection; Emily, on the other hand, created the selfish and shameless saga of Heathcliff and Catherine.
Honestly? I had to read a few chapters before I could even begin to appreciate the raw intensity of a connection matched only by the novel’s stormy and violent landscape. Yet I don’t believe there’s ever been a romance novel with more compelling chemistry.
Wuthering Heights is indeed a beautifully – if brutally – written tale about twin flames, and how that type of obsessive craving is a thirst that can never be quenched.
One of the great novels of the nineteenth century, Emily Bronte's haunting tale of passion and greed remains unsurpassed in its depiction of destructive love. Her tragically short life is brilliantly imagined in the major new movie, Emily, starring Emma Mackey in the title role.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition of Wuthering Heights features an afterword by David Pinching.
One wild, snowy night on the Yorkshire moors, a gentleman asks…
I love this novel's timelessness. Seemingly every page has a memorable line such as this: "Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything..."
Reading what Eliot wrote more than 150 years ago endlessly amused me as I matched the follies of her world to the pettiness, mindlessness, and garishness of today's world.
Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury.
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.
Henry James described Middlemarch as a 'treasurehouse of detail' while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot's masterpiece…
It seemed to take me forever to read The Magus, much longer than it took me to read other books by Fowles, even though it's a more exciting novel than any other he wrote. For most of the book's length I felt that the writing was excellent, the story was very good, but the tone of the narrator, Nicholas Urfe, had dated badly. I found the long extracts when Conchis was talking about his past to be vastly more engaging than anything Nicholas had to say. But Nicholas grew more tolerable in the last third of the novel, especially when the action speeded up and he was put on trial by Conchis and his cohorts. The cascading deceptions became stupendous at that juncture, one deceit after another, what we thought we knew flipped suddenly into something new, and so on. Nothing was certain anymore, it is really quite disorienting stuff,…
The Magus is the story of Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching assignment on a remote Greek island. There his friendship with a local millionaire evolves into a deadly game, one in which reality and fantasy are deliberately manipulated, and Nicholas must fight for his sanity and his very survival.
